Line Writing
My map includes many different symbols used as a code for various gestures and activities. Every time I’d enter a space, I would use the same set of symbols to give an idea of what exactly the space contained or, more accurately, what kinds of people, what energy. For example, if someone was eating, I would draw a big mouth with two buck teeth. If they were in their own world, on their computer or with their headphones in, I’d draw a computer or a musical note. On a rainy day, I’d draw an umbrella to represent the people carrying umbrellas.
I was inspired by the movement and singularity of each person and the collective of all people in what Michael de Certeau calls “the rumble of so many differences” and “nervousness of New York traffic” (de Certeau 92). Capturing the array of behaviors helped me to feel more at ease, like I had a grip on the situation and on my little selected area of the city. De Certeau asserts that, for example, “surveys of routes,” of strictly archival and objective information about a situation of place miss much of what actually occurs: that is in gesture, behavior, and interaction between people (de-Certeau 97). To fill out my map even further, I would continue to add various details and idiosyncrasies of people's behaviors so that the map gives an even clearer description of the area and the people within it.
WWW Writing
Www / Borges Tim Berners-Lee’s article on the World Wide Web is full of facts. It examines what exactly makes up what we call the web, in a way that examines the function and the inner workings of the web. Similar to Jorge Luis Borges’ in Library of Babel he quantifies rather than qualifies exactly what's on the web. By examining piece by piece the world wide web, Lee starts to build an image or idea of it in our heads. He describes every known aspect and ability of the web, from Hypertext markup language to the future of the web, based on our current possibilities. While Berners-Lee’s article does touch on the various ways in which the internet as a source of information can expand our minds, it talks more about the strictly factual parts of it: hows its built, how it functions, and how its used.
Borges, on the other hand, poetically waxes about the infinite opportunities for knowledge found in the library, about how “there was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon” (Borges 55). For Borges, the library is yes, about information, but is less about the structure of the information than the fact of it. He refers to the library, from the very beginning, as a universe instead of an institution like any other. By examining the physical design of the space, Borges expands on the poeticism of the library itself, not merely its setup. When looked at side by side, these two pieces of writing demonstrate the difference between using facts to give a description and using facts to explore a deeper idea, even about something as mundane as a library.
News Writing
for this project I wanted to rearrange various news sources to make a point about the chaos and incoherence of media. for the majority of the project I took screen grabs from footage of the baghdad explosions and superimposed on them images from newspapers and tabloids from around the same time. I was inspired by Sarah Charlesworth’s effort to reconstruct the news in order to show its audience what they’re really looking at, to teach them to be aware of what is actually in the media they’re consuming. For this project I was very inspired by in particular the juxtaposition of stories of the attacks in Baghdad and tabloid stories weddings and ads. I wanted to take a more critical stance on this media vomit so I overlapped the images and several cutout names of media organizations like the New York Times and the Daily Observer. Charleworth said that with her series about the news she tried to “make an intervention so that we could see more clearly what was already there.” This was also my goal.
Moma Bookfair
I greatly enjoyed the MoMA Bookfair at PS1. My favorite publisher was called Dispersed Holdings, who put out a book called Speed of Resin. This book features many colored and distorted images of dancers. I liked the way the magazine was set up, how the spreads were put together. I also liked how this publisher put out other multimedia work. They had on display and for sale naturally dyed couch cushions, fake pill bottles filled with folded up zines, poems sewed with red thread, and tapes. The second thing I liked was a cloth bag filled with paper packaged soap. On the outside of this object it said “Reach through the tight pucker of time; feel their survival against your skin.” This was an interesting find for me because I am very interested in textiles and in the apothecary. It is nice to see the everyday object, like soap, reinvented. It seems as though reinventing many day to day objects could improve all our lives greatly. The last thing that stood out to me was the NYPL Picture Collection. This was basically a mini archive of many different images. It worked similarly to a library in that attendees of the book fair could go up and look at and touch the different prints.
Mauve
I chose to write about the color Mauve. Shelly Jackson’s essay on the color is full of specificity and concreteness. The image I chose is the one included in the mauve essay, and it is actually not of something mauve. It is a picture of the bottle of mauve dye. The bottle itself is a dusty dark blue, with an even darker inky substance inside. On the outside is a yellow label with “Original Mauveine” written on it. To me, this picture perfect;ty represents mauve. As Jackson points out, “it’s a little too french.” It is rare, soft, and sacred. It is sometimes gimmicky and trendy. It is interesting to me mauve’s relation to nature, and the idea that mauve is in nature but art tries to imitate it. Color is fascinating in that way, the natural is always itself and everything else is an attempt to copy that. I also love accidents, and a lot of what happens with color is accidental. Mauve was created originally as an attempt to be a cure for malaria, and turned out as a color. It’s always one way or the other, color or cure. I find that mauve has the subtlety that’s missing in many other colors, say, cyan or black. It does not find its place in many images that I myself take but I find myself intrigued by it in the images of others and in everyday life.