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It’s a snow day!
Following up on recommended references by Craig and David:
Craig linked me to the book created alongside this exhibition (catalog here), through which I found the artist Jes Fan whose work I love.
I love the gridded structures and/in contrast with the organic forms, whose revealed layers remind me of plane tree bark. Am I in a season of loving sculpture? Maybe I am.
David had mentioned the philosopher Gregory Ulmer, who has an ebook that sounds interesting, “Illogic of Sense”. He also has an old blog, where I found this:
The question pursued here is: what are the electrate equivalents of the literate institutional practices and identity formations? … much of the best theorizing of new media and digital technology in general today neglects the insights of “apparatus”: that the Internet is an emerging institution that is to electracy what school was to literacy; that the categorial, logical, and rhetorical practices needed to function natively in this institution have to be invented, and moreover that the invention of an image metaphysics (the equivalent of what Aristotle accomplished for the written word) has its own invention stream, independent of the features of modern recording equipment. … Literacy = School / Concept / Self :: Electracy = Internet / Emblem / Brand
Another David rec. was to check out Kieth Tyson’s work. Watched this interview, in particular liked this bit:
This afternoon Charlit and I walked through the snow to get her coffee, and she told me about this Pinterest game she would play:
You’d choose a destination, like VRChat cat boys. Starting on someone’s homepage Pinterest feed, you’d click through from image to image until you got to your destination. Sometimes it was quick, other times it took a while. “All the information’s connected”. It reminded me of Tyson in the video.
It’s interesting to think about this format, beginning by choosing your endpoint, in terms of Internet searches. Usually there’s the rabbit-holing, the tangents and sidetrails that pull you away.
Yesterday at the Writer’s Circle one of them said, regarding their attempt at moving from poetry into prose:
I think that’s a beautiful phrase all on its own.
I had been telling David about how I get stuck on certain visuals, the cubic frame being one recently. Read Rosalind E. Krauss’ essay Grids:
For the artist who wished to enlarge his understanding of vision in the direction of science, the grid was there as a matrix of knowledge. By its very abstraction, the grid conveyed one of the basic laws of knowledge — the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the ‘real’ world.
The window is experienced as simultaneously transparent and opaque. As a transparent vehicle, the window is that which admits light — or spirit — into the initial darkness of the room. But if glass transmits, it also reflects. And so the window is experienced by the symbolist as a mirror as well — something that freezes and locks the self into the space of its own reduplicated being. Flowing and freeing; glace is French means glass, mirror, and ice; transparency, opacity, and water.
Looking at Sol Le Witt’s cubic forms:
And I seem to have come full circle with Jes Fan’s work.
‘Methodology’ seems to be what I’m circling around — even the stuff last week about the function of studios. The grid, the table, the matrix; these were suggested as frameworks. I’m wondering about the overlap between making, writing and researching in my practise… could I expose all of it? I’ve assumed the writing and researching informs the resulting made thing, but perhaps the journey of linking and collecting that I practise in my research could also inform the material? Or writing as a inner form of research? Writing involved in the made product? Through what — a description, a prophesy, a set of instructions?
I keep trying to map the overlapping relationships between my research and making through these maps — never quite feeling right — but could that be the piece itself?
