adminicle

the republic of whoever is there

Cultivation Theory

How do societies exchange normative ideas? Does the telly affect what we think is right?

If we want to consider, in books, what the 'republic of letters' brings about ( we usually link it to the emergence of the Enlightenment ), what does publishing, in its varied forms, including electronic media, bring about today?

There are lots of small enclaves in whatever the 'republic' is today (and that's not even a particularly relevant term anymore, though it does conjure that sense of a shared socially constructed view of an imagined world made real).

Cultivation theory seems like a good place to set out from, even if only to kick it to death in the process.

Cosmological World-Making

Watching a snippet of John Mullan' s How Reading Made us Modern last night, my ears pricked up when the good professor intones the fact that in pre-eighteenth century England, the only books you'd find most places would be the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, "and perhaps some choice work of Christian devotion".

Would it be possible, I thought, to write a view of Pilgrim's Progress as fan fiction? Bunyan's certainly a fan of the good book, and as for world-making, there's a whole Christian cosmology in there that seems to still be pretty popular. As for governance of the formal boundaries and schisms of the field as such, no-one does sectarian suspicion quite like the church, and the very word canon meant church law before it meant anything else. (I think). And as for the Author of some of the texts in question...

To really get at this field ('Christian textuality and its fans'?) is a gargantuan task of Foucauldian proportions; mapping its powers and proclivities. One would have to perform a bit of sleight-of-hand to avoid exposing any such essay to the vast gulf that it opens up. But it does open it up.

Still haven't read any of Jenkins' views on the subject of authorial identity fandom, but I think I'll be carrying some baggage in there with me.

Holding Breath

I've just finished v 2.1 of 'Holding Breath', my book based on a snippet of the 'Cupid & Psyche' myth. I'm devising this as a sequence of double page spreads in Blurb: each page will have 1/8" overlap in the gutter so that the bit one otherwise loses gets repeated so that the problem is mitigated a bit. That's the idea anyway...

Here are the contact sheets so far. I'm still editing- that's what the sheets are for. There are still weak pages and the visual narrative is still gelling; I still need to work across the pages some more and there are may be some more writing to do to meet up with visual developments.

Axis Mundi: Pleasures of the text

The scribbles are more-or-less random quotes from Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text, which has arrived just a bit too late to inform my article on 'The Promise of Reading', even though its descriptions of the pleasure/bliss of reading would be really useful for my notions about why book-makers want to make-reading.

Perhaps another idea wll come out of it. Anyway, this sketch purses the Axis Mundi project I've been thinking about: everything is at the centre of the world. Potentially everything is holy. But there's a disconnection between the perspectival organisation offered by photography and conventional imagery (even, partly by narrative, though its a perspective organised largely by the reader). We look through a conventional lens, literally and figuratively to see the world. We find it centred wherever we look, in the objects of our experience and in our perception of space and volumes. This back and forth argument between the 'holiness' of the real world with its distinct objects and experience, and on the other hand, the animating principle of the viewer/reader/being, recalls defunct notions of sight and seeing. Do we see by projecting rays actively out of our eyeballs? Or do we perceive rays which enter directly into our consciousness. (Both, perhaps? Or rather, we do see light, but we make up a lot of what we think we perceive as real).

Which is a lot to ask of a poor old stencil, a photo of a keyboard, and a couple of illegible quotations. We'll see how the book gets on...

axis mundi

Axis mundi

Axis Mundi

nomanisanisland


axismundiaxismundiaxismundiaxismundiaxismundiaxismundi

pill orchard

pill orchard, originally uploaded by aesop.

This image comes from some work I did yesterday at the community orchard in Pill. I've been thinking about a 'book distributed in space'- one that happens as a real space (either as an installation, or, as here, only at the point of recording).  This has obvious similarities with the way that our experience of the environment works on a semiotic level. We read a city's signs much as we would a multi-authored text. some of what we see is in fact signification of the most classic sort: signs, writings. Others include behaviour and historical traces left on the environment.

With this idea I'm trying to work on a form of 'book-making' that tilts my point of view out of the reverie of the page, and into real life. As you can see, it's obviously still at an experimental stage, but I'm finding things out about the different rhetorical effects that the combination of space, word and camera achieve- to say nothing of the aspects of the installation that briefly exists. In this image I've come a little further along the road to clarity with the large bold words (my first experiment was illegible because it was just handwritten on paper), and elements like the path have been used to reinforce the spatial aspect. There's an argument between flat and deep readings here, because the simple left to right flat reading doesn't work. It has to be read as a space in order to be construed. When finally presented in book form, on flat pages, this technique will, I think, become even stranger than it is now. It also suggests a commentary on or echo of our 'reading tactics' in/of the world. Are we reading surfaces or structures? Straight lines or spaces? Is there an element of time to our perception, or is it more-or-less instant, arriving at the speed of perception (usually light)?

I also want this work to fit into my series on Whistling Copse, though here, the commodity and land are public, in contrast to Whistling Copse, which was emphatically and tragically not.

In this picture I'm starting to learn more about how I might use the contours of different objects to play with the space more: the grass obscures the feet of some of the stands- why not play with this? A sign could peer out from behind a bush.

I'm aware of the fact that the signs would present an even more unsettling, flat appearance if they were more carefully placed facing the camera, ie not at slight angles, but I'm entertaining the idea that I want to retain lots of evidence of the artifice (hence also the unashamed use of masking tape, which was nonetheless very necessary in the breeze).

As it happened I didn't have enough juice in my batteries to finish this shoot, which I initially cursed as it would be next to impossible to set up the shoot again, but I have enough of a sequence here to study the effect, and I will continue the experiment, with the added experiment of a caesura into a different spatial arrangement, most probably an entirely different space.
I'd like to continue in an urban setting, where the signs would become softer edged by comparison with the more similar environment, but I can't afford to leave a half dozen music stands in the street to get pinched! I need a half dozen assistants to hold onto them!

Emblems on the Streets

I'm doing a project at work right now involving transcribing and working with listings from old Bristol directories. My work involves looking for artisans and artists and creating relationships of place and time for various trades. However, one of the things I'm struck by is the vast variety of different shop signs there must have been.

green man

squirrel

ship

ring of bells

little tower

white hart

fountain

crown

hole in the wall

bear

white horse

black horse

etc, etc. Some streets must have been teeming with animals, ships, kings and miniature architecture of all kinds. It would be an interesting art project to realise a couple of 18th century Bristol streets by their shop signs alone. Especially when we consider what the urban landscape has become because of adverisements.

Practice Space