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A Guide to Flyering
By Anshu Asthana

20th October
2007

theLondonUnderground.net threw a few parties in Camden last year. We had no experience, no money really, and lots of other things to do. But you know how it is, you get drunk, wander into a venue, ask to put a regular night on, they say yes, and there you are, wondering what just happened.

S: We needed to make some flyers, on the cheap. For the first week, we decided to try making a lino print, because, we had the lino, some ink and a big roll of paper we'd found on the street. That was the plan. It didn't work. Turns out everything you write on lino comes out backwards when you print it.

S: We ground up some pastels, rubbed the mixture on the lino to highlight the picture and then scanned it into a computer to be printed out.

A:It looked really good. Colourful and tribal.

S: I printed these out at work, but they got a bit p*ssed off about it.

A: So we moved on, decided to blag the printer at Map Music for week two, with a flyer mixing a picture of a leaf mixed with a line drawing of Camden Lock.

S: They didn't really like it either. We only got fifty flyers printed before they threw us out.

A: Week three was a bit of a revelation; we cut up some scrap card and drew little stick figures on them by hand. We took these to the Tate, Modern after a Flash Mobbing event, sat on the forecourt and handed them out by shouting people over.

S: 'We are lazy flyerers, you must come to us!'

A: It worked really well, people loved it. We still felt like we were unnecessarily wasting paper though and not being a creative as we could be.

S: So then, the week after, we were wandering home from a party, down Regents Canal, on a beautiful autumn morning watching all those lazy colourful leaves blowing round our heads.

A: It was so obvious. Free paper! All we needed were felt tip pens and we were away.

S: We'd already had this idea some time in week two. I'm sure of it. Something got lost in translation, though, and we scanned the leaf instead of using it for paper.

A: The leaf flyering concept did take a little while to perfect, though.

S: The first lot got smudged, because we were writing on the front of the leaves, but the next set, using permanent ink on the backs of the leaves, worked fine.

A: People loved the environmentally friendly flyers!

S: Yeah everyone responded really well, I thought that we might get some abuse or funny looks but people seemed to like the fact that the flyers were hand-made.

S: And I'm convinced that we weren't just flyering, we were also making art.

A: Yeah, but what is art? I mean it's all about your boundaries really. Where you are is everywhere, in one sense, and somewhere very particular, in another.

It's just a matter of understanding the complex hyperdimensional nature of our perceptions, and the fact that thought is in itself an abstraction.

Imagine an infinite number of rabbit holes extending in an infinite number of directions from an infinite number of rabbits. But really there's only one rabbit, it's travelling forwards and backwards in time simultaneously and is part of an infinite series of larger and smaller rabbits that are all, in fact, just one rabbit too.