aside —
the magazine diagram (whose new issue 21.5 appeared yesterday) has come up before, in class.
I draw your attention to Significant Objects / 404 Edition 2021, which is described in the editor’s e-mail announcement of diagram thus —
...this semester I’m doing a literary experiment in value and narrative with my undergraduate fiction students. They bought essentially worthless objects (they cost less than $5) at a thrift store and wrote stories about them. We listed each object with the story on ebay for sale. We’re wondering what value, if any, narrative adds to a thing. There are 12 (I wrote one too), and you can read them all by clicking through the website to each individual auction. The winner of the auction gets the object and a signed copy of the story. All auctions will be ending within the week, so if you want to be part of this experiment in literary value, give their stories a read...
design fiction
(thinking of Will’s and Jessica’s projects, in particular)
caught a tweet encouraging attention to
Tony Fry. Writing Design Fiction : Relocating a City in Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2021)
publisher’s website
preview here (some pages)
notemaking
nice example (@the.museum.of.loss.and.renewal)
mentioned in class last week —
ink factory visual storytelling (@inkfactorystudio)
think... can’t... (sequencing, for Melissa) —
the discussion focussed not on individual images, but on movement across the pages, from one spread to the next (and back). It is good to think in terms of music, relatively abstract/emotional passages, punctuated by language (in music, this might not involve words per se, but other signals, e.g., significant drum beats, etc.). I thought: A:B, A:B, A:B, C (where “A” is mainly visual, and “B” is “think” or “can’t” in various legibilities; and “C” is perhaps a coda or conclusion or hint that there is more in another book).
What do you think of this map? (for Henry) —
Develop and try a range of questions; test which elicit the more useful/interesting responses.
Put question next to blank piece of paper. Put question next to something whose map-ness is difficult to understand, that would seem to deny it is a map but, on second thought, might be seen to perform map functions in some way.
lines and (catenary) curves (for Brooke) —
work with diagrammatic (from aeronautics book), photographic (e.g., your own photographs, of power lines) and other clean (and less clean) lines and curves, against chaotic or patterned marks that are not lineal.
see @carolinebagenal’s recent embroideries on photocopies (and postcards), including
this (involving Edward Weston, Clouds over Panamints, Death Valley (1939))
second house (considerations for Will) —
Put this house out in the world, visit it from time to time and record what is going on with it.
And continue to take the first house out to different settings, photographically record these.
we looked at photographs of Gregory Crewdson
language, your own or others’ —
maybe worthwhile to be developing sources of language, for use with your images. the language might come from your own writing of course. or elsewhere: found, for example, four results for the word “ruin” Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).
something else —
“Remembering enacts a disruption upon memory presenting truths’ impossibility. Memory can only ever be re-constructed as a fiction - truth is elsewhere, giving us the slip. Polonius knew that: by indirections we find directions out. He knew that the way to find the carp of truth was via the bait of falsehood.”
— Hephzibah Rendle-Short:
Indirections_1 (2010)
her website
aftermath discussion with Jessica, about indexing —
Index is the central-office switchboard, so to speak, of elements found in (1) walks, (2) “antique store” (actual, as well as Jessica’s photographs and cut out layered artist book version; (3) junk at home (e.g., grandmother’s mixology book).
Index need not be textual only, nor ordered alphabetically. We discussed shape and color indexes (as seen in Tan Lin’s index of Maya Lin’s Topologies (2015) monograph, and the shape index to The Gorgeous Nothings : Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, 2012); we also discussed index rerum, gazeteers, the use of x-y coordinate systems/grids as indexes, etc., etc.
John thought the antique store cut-out book was a kind of model of the mind, or memory; certainly, it was the mind of the antique shop itself, after owner had left for the night. Dreaming itself, lost in itself, rearranging itself. Rather like the human mind.
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