Bound Art Book Fair 2025

Stand by your LAN: merritt k in conversation with Robert Parkinson

Online at the Bound Art Book Fair YouTube Channel

6:00pm

Before high-speed internet connections and online servers, playing a multiplayer PC game meant hauling your bulky monitors and towers to a friend’s place, convention centre or church basement for a LAN (local area network) party. These sweaty, junk-food-enriched glory days represented the origins of real community spirit in computer gaming’s early days. For this exclusive online event, Bound co-organiser Robert Parkinson is joined by merritt k, author of the new book LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution (Thames & Hudson, 2024) to discuss the visual culture of this scene. Many LAN party attendees were early adopters of new tech, so digital cameras abounded at these events. The photos produced by these devices were often low-resolution, blurry and badly lit. In their imperfections and limitations, they represent the messy, ad-hoc approach to computing typical of the LAN party – network cables snaking across recreation centre floors, a monitor perched on a kitchen counter, burned CD copies of games labelled in marker pen. The photographs in this book are unique artefacts of a peculiar cultural and technological moment, when gaming was tipping over from niche hobby to mainstream obsession, and before the internet took shape and we started carrying it around with us in our pockets.

-

Bound X Lewis Khan launch party

Impiety Hour, 70 Oldham Rd, Manchester M4 5EB

8.00pm-late

Join us at Impiety Hour (formerly P3 Annihilation Eve, formerly Peste) for a knees up with Bound DJs and a new multi-projection installation by Lewis Khan based on Leavers, an ongoing body of work begun in 2018. The work amasses and remixes footage produced across years of documenting high school prom nights in South London, capturing young people amid a unique social spectacle where all previous conventions, alliances and disputes are either upended or discarded. With a shared cognition that this is likely the last time a group will share a room together, inhibitions dissipate, risk dissolves into temptation, and senses are heightened.
With sounds from DJ.ME, THEFATCANFLUB and No But Yeh + guests

The Flex archive: Andy Jones in conversation with Sam Hutchinson 

11.30am, the Mezzanine

“Temporary jobs. Broken equipment. 15 hours in a van. A table of cassettes for sale. A network of misfitted acquaintances bound like a hidden knot to cracked up hardcore punk music in a half-full stinking room across the other side of town. How did we get here? Why do we stay? I’m sleeping on someone else’s floor in another continent because we both like the same 7” record made by Swedish teenagers in 1983?”

For over a decade, The Flex bassist Andy Jones has been photographing the hardcore scene, capturing the energy of shows, the people, and the community that connects them, from his home city of Leeds to venues across Europe, the United States, and beyond. Andy will be in conversation with Sam Hutchinson, founder of Boot Mag, discussing their routes into the hardcore community and how they each found belonging through sound, movement, and image. Together, they’ll explore what “community” has meant throughout the history of hardcore, how it continues to evolve, and why documenting it through film, photography, and artefact remains vital for its future.

-

Trawling The Early 90s Ambient Underground with Telepathic Fish 

1.00pm, the Mezzanine

Kevin Foakes, aka Strictly Kev, aka DJ Food, joins us to discuss Telepathic Fish, the influential ambient parties he threw as part of the collective Openmind in early 1990s south London. Alongside Mario Aguero, David Vallade and Chantal Passamonte (aka Mira Calix, RIP) Foakes pioneered a whole new approach to partying: mattresses instead of a dancefloor, immersive environments and visuals, Sunday afternoons instead of Saturday nights, and a soundtrack of what would become known as Chillout: ambient techno, proto-trip-hop, spacey dub, film soundtracks, minimalist classical and krautrock. The scene developed alongside labels such as Ninja Tune and Warp Records, and the rise of acts like Aphex Twin, Autechre and Optimo. A new compilation from Fundamental Frequencies, Trawling the Early 90s Ambient Underground, celebrates both the early experimentalism of Chillout and also its psychedelic visual identity. Kev, who still designs under the name Openmind, will discuss the four issues of the fanzine Mindfood, which celebrated the scene, and there will be original issues on display alongside a brand new fifth issue. Kev will also be selling copies of his new collage comic, the All Colour, High-Fidelity, Radio Cartoon, alongside Wheels of Light, a visual history of projection wheel designs from 70s & 80s light shows.

-

Ghosts in the Machine: Christopher Stead in conversation with Lee Rourke

2.30pm, the Mezzanine

Christopher Stead, artist and documentarian of British counterculture, is joined by writer Lee Rourke to discuss Ghosts in the Machine: The Hauntology of Graffiti and Rave Culture (Alias Press, 2025). The book documents subculture in the wake of a post-Thatcher Britain, as rave's rhetoric of social inclusion resisted the binaries of boredom, race, class, and gender, making it one of the most significant youth movements of its generation. Meanwhile, a disenfranchised youth found identity through the collective act of graffiti, reimagining the trains and railway stock as a transitory gallery. In the context of an oppressive contemporary political climate, Christopher and Lee will discuss the sociopolitical upheaval that fostered the modes of resistance expressed in the book, covering the unwavering impact of Thatcherism and the corrosive influence of neoliberalism, mass unemployment, boredom, working class cultures, race, gender, urban spaces, decay, displacement, and the unifying need to express, resist, and rebuild.

-

Village presents: Black Knights of Tunis by Julien Rubiloni

Village, Oldham Street, M4 1LN

6.00-9.00pm

In collaboration with Bound Art Book Fair, Village is proud to present its latest exhibition, Black Knights of Tunis by Franco-Swiss artist Julien Rubiloni.

Black Knights of Tunis explores the Tunisian techno underground, and a community of young people seeking a more uninhibited culture. Rubiloni immersed himself in the heady nights of this maligned, often extreme scene with an infrared camera in his fist, to capture misunderstood young people relegated to the margins of Tunisian society. In constant confrontation with authority, the music, their relationship with their bodies, and their nocturnal rituals bear witness to an uncontainable need for freedom. 

villagebooks.co 

-

BOUND X DJ Food After Party

Yes Manchester, 38 Charles Street, M1 7DB

8.00pm-12.00am

Join us on the Terrace at Yes for a very special set from Strictly Kev aka DJ Food, with Doug Shipton (Finders Keepers, Fundamental Frequencies) + guests 
 

Banner Workshop with the Sensible Behaviour Unit 

11am-4pm, Learning Studio

The Sensible Behaviour Unit (SBU) are a fan group of south Manchester’s West Didsbury & Chorlton FC known for their creative contributions to the club, from producing flags, banners, and stickers to designing a one-off kit that raised £3,500 for The Christie. With a strong DIY ethos, the SBU focuses on bringing colour, atmosphere, and community spirit to matches, while also supporting charitable causes and showing solidarity with the marginalised. For this workshop, the SBU invites others to experience DIY football fan culture by painting banners and flags for future games, including a large collaborative banner for everyone to fill in. We’ll also have some blank flags for those who want a little more freedom than staying inside the lines. This workshop involves paint, so don’t come in your Sunday best.

-

New voices at Bound

12.30pm, the Mezzanine

An opportunity to listen to readings from a range of artists with books available at Bound. Featuring Fatema Abdoolcarim, Sean Roy Parker, Joshua Hester, KC Nwakalor, Jessie Tam, Lydia Davies, Hamish Rush, Georgia Spanos, and Borough Inc.

-

Third Spaces: A Roundtable with SEEN and Crop Radio

2.00pm, the Mezzanine

In this open roundtable event, SEEN co-founder Balraj Samrai and Gloss co-founder Tyron Webster will lead a conversation on sober parties, community gatherings and third spaces. They will discuss the pros and cons of dry events, gatherings centred around food, better health advocacy and performances not tied solely to alcohol sales. As more venues close down and gentrification envelopes our cities, the demand for creative space is high. Can third spaces such as community centres, studios, arts spaces, libraries, cafes and homes provide accessible places to gather? Join us for an open conversation exploring the impact of this shift in club culture and beyond. SEEN and Crop will also have a shared stall selling recent issues of their magazines for the duration of the fair.

-

An Invitation, A Gateway: Todmorden UFO meet

3.30pm, the Mezzanine

Todmorden, West Yorkshire, is a well-established centre of UFO activity. Most famously, PC Alan Godfrey alleged he was abducted by aliens after encountering a white, spinning dome-shaped spacecraft in the early hours of November 28th, 1980. After seeing a flash of bright light, he came round 20 minutes later with unexplained burns. Today, Todmorden is the home of a well-established UFO meet, attracting participants from across Europe. Established by artist and bookseller Colin Lyall in 2017, the ethos is one of positive regard and respectful acceptance–essential conditions for people to feel safe to talk about their often deeply profound experiences. The flavour and direction of the meet comes from its participants and their experiences, encounters that often challenge belief systems, core values, identity and sense of self. For this event, Colin will be in conversation with youth worker and UFO enthusiast Tom Clarke, discussing the history of the UFO meet, its inspirations, associated artwork and zines, and the people that attend. As Colin says: “Being in the circle, real time, real people, is most definitely not a line of text on an online forum. An unspoken understanding permeates the space. For a brief period, a sense of oneness binds us all together. Something somehow bigger, greater than an assortment of individuals, surrenders to a deeper connection. A connection without language. The connection of being… An invitation, a gateway!”