22 October 2011
jorge louis borges speaks in 1966 while josef albers speaks in 1968. but here they speak to each other today, based on a loosely arranged script machine.
the bezold effect is an optical phenomena which albers used in his teaching. it describes how one colour appears to change lightness or hue intensity when adjacent to a contrasting colour.
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i have found no evidence that these great minds ever met in person. like some sort of
necro-networking nitwit i’m strangely star-struck by bringing these voices into close proximity. i mean, these dead-guys really seem to be talking, arguing and believably ignoring each other! imagine the bizarre weaves of conversation that other script machines could conjure
the script machine
- interview with jorge louis borges
- interview with josef albers
- 7 comments from each interview, in alternating fashion
- the artist to begin will be judged by a flipping of a 1p coin; heads = borges, tails = albers. [coin flipped 11:50am 5th sept 2011]
- each comment can be one or more sentences long, though the final sentence must end with a question mark [?] for it to be considered usable.
- prime numbers dictate the number of entry used to compile script
* this post is a replicate of my submission to matzine#10
Labels: albers, borges, collage, history, illusion, interview, matzine, script, words
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19 May 2011
the city of oedipus
[as published in matzine #08]
like clockwork, étienne + i would spend two long days a month in studio monoculeure. always, the first studio day was the first friday of the month; the second, the second saturday
in turns, one would fall asleep, or employ chloroform. meanwhile the other, thirty three minutes later, would shake his friend awake, whereupon the dreamer would take his dream and put them on a page; the dimensions of their studio wall.
friday, my turn, i inhaled fully and closed my eye. a moment passed before i opened again. absurdly, both étienne and the fresh, wall-sized page were nowhere to be seen.
eight days following, in studio monoculeure, étienne and i met again, rather upset with one another. an emphatic, erratic explosion of airborne blame ensued. étienne defended that the previous friday it had been his turn to capture his dream on the page. only, when he opened his eye the room was empty of both partner and page.
disturbed and irreconcilable, we could agree on only one thing; to meet again twenty days later.
friday, the first day of the month, with little trust or patience surviving, we hung the page along the centre beam of the studio, ready to take a dream on both surfaces. we entered our respective unconsciousnesses simultaneously.
i was in a heavily-dark place; a vast and dense chamber. there was a sense of minutes passing, then hours. i navigated every permutation of turn and stride [ if one could call indeterminate movements navigation; my residual self-image was unrestrained, yet unable to move to anywhere ]. a numb intuition said my partner shared this space with me, just as the excited thought skimmed across the void; we had found it!
although consciously imperceptible at the time, an afterimage of the dream persisted - whole and familiar - though strictly unknowable. a double, a mirror, the eye that can view itself directly.
now awake, days later, stylus and knife in hands, both sides of the page were black with lead scratchings. there was no page left unwarped, only two un-placable, unfathomable maps; uncanny in dissymmetries; the city of oedipus
[this is a fictional foray originally presented in matzine #08 in response to the idea 'domestic exotic'. i really enjoyed writing this - and exposing my retina's to the matzine readers was an added delight]
Labels: borges, dreams, light, matzine, mythology, shadow
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23 April 2011
lexicon-scape :
is fallaciously called
a vast polemic
the heresiarchs of uqbar
i conjectured that
fortified my doubt
the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism
the scrupulous cartographical indices
he suffered from unreality
his tired rectangular beard had once been red
engage in taciturn chess games
the duodecimal system of numbering (in which twelve is written as 10)
these subordinate sleuthing procedures
the many and weighty tomes
a perfect synonym of the cosmos
a dialectical game
a kind of reductio ad absurdum
a very daring hypothesis
the complete victory of this idealist pantheism
one of its modest demiurgi was herbert ashe
i perceived then something of its premonitory character
covered with hard heraldic fauna
the perceptible and tenuous tremor of a sleeping bird
the proprietor's rudimentary hospitality
intermingled inextricable insults
a scattered dynasty of solitary men
i am reading borges at the moment, and taking my time about it. the list above is a collection not dissimilar to previous lexicon-scapes - meatier and spicier. i intend to write about my fascination with tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius in more detail and at a later point, whereas here and now i want to look at the evolution of the lexicon-scape.
lexicon-scape is in flux - while making these word lists i have found it invariably enlightening, promoting a mode of questioning of the text you present yourself. i have begun expanding the focus of this exercise by looking at word patterns and descriptive formats alongside my current interest in individual words. there are some motives for this shift -
d e f i n i t i o n m i n i n g
the context of a word almost always implies the word's meaning, exclusively from the etymology of that word.
l y r i c a l r h y t h m s
"man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him" | page 37 | inter-lyrical tools and literary expression are mostly hidden when focusing on one word. i want this lexicon-scape exercise to work harder.
i have been swooning over the phonetics of these singular words, sometimes over an exotic sound they produce, over a unique way they instruct your mouth [like a reverse conductor], or leaving the physical world; the associations these words recklessly conjure in our mind. the translation process entwines fluidly from printed word to every neuro-psycho-sense of the body e.g. memories and assimilations of smell and intrigue, light and texture, pain and all sorts of emotional trauma. now looking at a broader set of words and authors' intent i feel some richer engagement with the poetry of the text can be read.
a r t i s t i c a r t i c u l a t i o n
"buckley was a freethinker, a fatalist and a defender of slavery" | page 40 | this uneasy triptych of attributes is so deliberate in its expressed, evocative juxtapositions; is this an art of adjacency?
some of these words are used by authors, for me, in unexpected ways. and for someone who is as intimidated by english language as i have been this is a welcoming, revolutionary idea - you can make the language work for you! you can bend and break perceived axioms of a language in favour of telling a story, appropriate to the story. language becomes an artistic exploration rather than a rigid, rule-based exercise.
d e s c r i p t i v e d e n s i t i e s
jorges luis borges was able to pack and unpack, layer and criss-cross prose. a personal, exciting thing is that i have encountered no other writer's work that paces me like the stories contained within labyrinths.
notable moments in this story
"mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men"
page 27
"we discovered beneath its rigorous prose a fundamental vagueness"
page 28
"and all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody"
page 31
"an infinite leibniz labouring away darkly and modestly"
page 32
"the world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. it is successive and temporal, not spatial"
page 32
"the sun and the water on the swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose colour we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep"
page 33
"another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process"
page 34
"all men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. all men who repeat a line from shakespeare are william shakespeare"
page 36
"the concept of plagiarism does not exist : it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. the critics often invent authors : they select two dissimilar works - the tao te ching and the 1001 nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres"
page 37
"a book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete"
page 37
"such was the intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality"
page 41
"this sensation of a very small and at the same time extremely heavy object produced a disagreeable impression of repugnance and fear"
page 41
*page numbers are references in the penguin modern classics edition of jorges luis borges book labyrinths
lexicon-scape is in flux - while making these word lists i have found it invariably enlightening, promoting a mode of questioning of the text you present yourself. i have begun expanding the focus of this exercise by looking at word patterns and descriptive formats alongside my current interest in individual words. there are some motives for this shift -
d e f i n i t i o n m i n i n g
the context of a word almost always implies the word's meaning, exclusively from the etymology of that word.
l y r i c a l r h y t h m s
"man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him" | page 37 | inter-lyrical tools and literary expression are mostly hidden when focusing on one word. i want this lexicon-scape exercise to work harder.
i have been swooning over the phonetics of these singular words, sometimes over an exotic sound they produce, over a unique way they instruct your mouth [like a reverse conductor], or leaving the physical world; the associations these words recklessly conjure in our mind. the translation process entwines fluidly from printed word to every neuro-psycho-sense of the body e.g. memories and assimilations of smell and intrigue, light and texture, pain and all sorts of emotional trauma. now looking at a broader set of words and authors' intent i feel some richer engagement with the poetry of the text can be read.
a r t i s t i c a r t i c u l a t i o n
"buckley was a freethinker, a fatalist and a defender of slavery" | page 40 | this uneasy triptych of attributes is so deliberate in its expressed, evocative juxtapositions; is this an art of adjacency?
some of these words are used by authors, for me, in unexpected ways. and for someone who is as intimidated by english language as i have been this is a welcoming, revolutionary idea - you can make the language work for you! you can bend and break perceived axioms of a language in favour of telling a story, appropriate to the story. language becomes an artistic exploration rather than a rigid, rule-based exercise.
d e s c r i p t i v e d e n s i t i e s
jorges luis borges was able to pack and unpack, layer and criss-cross prose. a personal, exciting thing is that i have encountered no other writer's work that paces me like the stories contained within labyrinths.
notable moments in this story
"mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men"
page 27
"we discovered beneath its rigorous prose a fundamental vagueness"
page 28
"and all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody"
page 31
"an infinite leibniz labouring away darkly and modestly"
page 32
"the world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. it is successive and temporal, not spatial"
page 32
"the sun and the water on the swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose colour we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep"
page 33
"another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process"
page 34
"all men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. all men who repeat a line from shakespeare are william shakespeare"
page 36
"the concept of plagiarism does not exist : it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. the critics often invent authors : they select two dissimilar works - the tao te ching and the 1001 nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres"
page 37
"a book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete"
page 37
"such was the intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality"
page 41
"this sensation of a very small and at the same time extremely heavy object produced a disagreeable impression of repugnance and fear"
page 41
*page numbers are references in the penguin modern classics edition of jorges luis borges book labyrinths
Labels: borges, lexicon-scape, words
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5 December 2010
lexicon-scape :
brunelleschi, lacan, le corbusier
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above is a list of words taken from brunelleschi, lacan, le corbusier : architecture, space and the construction of subjectivity by dr. lorens holm. this lexicon-scape follows the same rules as my previous attempt with 'down and out...' yet with this reading of an academic text, the list builds much more quickly, while my reading of it slows down! hence this list represents just 30 pages of his 250 page book.
off the back of my last lexicocentric post, a friend, ian pollard, has kindly pointed me in two mutually diverse directions. the first, which i shall speak about here, is to the french troupe oulipo : short for ouvroir de littérature potentielle. these literarians, poets and linguists, from all flights of thought, wished to create new techniques, tools and machines for using words.
"the seeking of new structures and patterns that may be used by writers in any way they enjoy." Constraints are used to trigger new ideas and the Oulipo group is an ongoing source of novel techniques, often based on mathematical ideas -- such as counting letters and syllables, substitution algorithms, permutations, palindromes, and even chess problems."
- from another blog
as if seeking a new language of grammar, the rules by which words were brought together seem exploratory and fresh; they employed palindromes, lipograms and other constraints. i think my favourite is the snowball. here follows a 'melting snowball' poem by harry matthews, in which each sequential word is one letter shorter than the previous.
Incontrovertible
sadomasochistic
orthographical
compositional
restrictions
insistently
discipline
grandiose
sixteen's
initial
hubris
right
down
now
to
0
off the back of my last lexicocentric post, a friend, ian pollard, has kindly pointed me in two mutually diverse directions. the first, which i shall speak about here, is to the french troupe oulipo : short for ouvroir de littérature potentielle. these literarians, poets and linguists, from all flights of thought, wished to create new techniques, tools and machines for using words.
"the seeking of new structures and patterns that may be used by writers in any way they enjoy." Constraints are used to trigger new ideas and the Oulipo group is an ongoing source of novel techniques, often based on mathematical ideas -- such as counting letters and syllables, substitution algorithms, permutations, palindromes, and even chess problems."
- from another blog
as if seeking a new language of grammar, the rules by which words were brought together seem exploratory and fresh; they employed palindromes, lipograms and other constraints. i think my favourite is the snowball. here follows a 'melting snowball' poem by harry matthews, in which each sequential word is one letter shorter than the previous.
Incontrovertible
sadomasochistic
orthographical
compositional
restrictions
insistently
discipline
grandiose
sixteen's
initial
hubris
right
down
now
to
0
i imagine this mathematicallesque discipline [or perhaps game?] as a great segue between fields of interest. i imagine the numbers of pupils at school who could delight in these ways of looking at words and prose, rather than the strict, perhaps hard-to-teach methods which i encountered. i'd love to think that while going through borges' library of babel, one would come across every permutation of these writing styles and an infinite amount of others, unfathomable to our cerebral capacity!!!
[thanks for the reference ian]
Labels: borges, lexicon-scape, words
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17 October 2010
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above is a list of words taken from down and out in paris and london, by george orwell.
the words are in order as they appear in the book. the collective's common denominators [for there are many] are that the word made me pause reading; usually due to a distracting interest in the word's sound, its phonetics, meaning, etymology, geographical origin, potential malapropism or some other quality of the word. these qualities set out the criteria for a type of survey.
it is a list of words, and it is a survey of a book. i like the idea that this survey can be a reduced reading of the book, granted the particular parameters/filters i employed irreversibly garble any broad meaningfulness from orwell's pages. these three columns of words represent a lexicon-scape, an essence in some form, albeit a contrived one.
the process needs more discipline in order to produce a rigorous series of lists of different books; the criteria needs more elaboration and understand - but as a framework for the re-cognization of text there seems to be at least some obvious benefits for the reader [...questioning the meanings of seemingly unambiguous prose; testing the rhythm of text etc] and i suspect many curious, literally abstract interpretations of books and text out there [...graphing the number of syllables per word?]
i'm reminded of borges' library of babel; more to follow with next lexicon-scape. [note to self; think of a less clumsy word. perhaps into the portmanteaux archive]
Labels: borges, lexicon-scape, london, orwell
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