10.8.10
Re-start
After 2.5 years I'm going to blog again. From now on I want this to be an aesthetic experience, a record of studio work and the Visual Culture Seminars I'm going to deliver in Arte Ilimitada School in Lisbon.
30.5.07
1. Declaration of Intentions
It wasn’t very difficult for me to find subjects to explore through writing but it was difficult to start writing bearing in mind this text was supposed to be a text for others. This doesn’t only mean it needs to be clear enough to be understood but also that it should meet expectations I am not sure I’ll ever be able to fulfil. The main problems were the high demands on my rather colloquial English that is never as good as I wish and the fact that writing is not something I do as well, or at least as frequently as drawing or talking.
I had to find a strategy to make this activity a constant improvement of fragmented texts. I also needed to make writing happen in such a way I could extract as much as possible from it but still make sure it wasn’t sampling or remixing concepts and other contextual objects. So I decided to set up a blog (web log) one of the most recent and virtual ways to write about the physicality of writing. The initial plan was to have white letters on a white background. This would force the reader and commenter to select the little texts I posted in order to be able to see them. However this proved to be way too subtle, and instead of being an activated reading, it blocked the reading of the text completely. As a consequence of that I decided to keep the colour of the text and use one of the grey colours used by Photoshop, Word and other computer programs to represent the empty space on the background. These texts will probably never be read properly by many but they are support material for the official written work I am developing. The best analogy I can think of to explain its function is the one with junk DNA. Without these spare and apparently useless elements evolution would be so slow the changes induced by accident and chance would almost always be irrelevant. Besides opening the possibility for a profound change in the “official text” it will hopefully also take this into a more performative format.
Before I start embracing other topics I also wanted to state clearly that I am not a natural writer. This means I need to acknowledge a bigger than average gap between what I want to say and what is actually written down. When the medium I need to use is an externally imposed system, such as any language, I become (almost too) aware that the more intensity and energy I put on it the more confusing and useless it might become for others.
How else can one write but of those things which one does not know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow – or rather to make it impossible. Perhaps writing has a relation to silence altogether more threatening than that which it is supposed to entertain with death. We are therefore well aware, unfortunately, that we have spoken about science in a manner which is not scientific.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, page xx
What Deleuze writes in this preface is the best declaration of intentions I could possibly put forward. This is the reason why I did not embrace, as my main subject, any scientific theme or parallel between writing (or art) and science which I would outline in a text much more comfortably. It is also this same goal that stops me from accepting any easy routes. My conscious intention to accept the need to read difficult critical thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze comes from the determination that the easy path is usually not the best one for achieving my goals. The struggle I felt, as a reader, will push my expression through words to the intensity and strength Nietzsche describes in this powerful paragraph on reading and writing:
Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.
It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, page 23
After a couple of weeks doing everything but writing I woke up from a long night of dreams with the clear feeling that more important than knowing what to write is to consider the physicality of writing. It wasn’t really necessary to analyse the historical origins of writing but to expand on my personal experience of what the physicality of this act is.
When I was asked to focus my research and my interests I pictured an essay that started exploring writing as a gesture of the hand using a pointy object on a surface. The goal was to associate this action with the registration of sound, speech or imagination using specific shapes which were extremely close to drawing and painting.
I thought that naturally I would then engage with the influence of the 20th century technologies that influenced writing: with the typewriter I would explore the nostalgia of modernism. With the computer I would try to grasp the post-modern “good old times” feeling that both the typewriter and the personal computer quickly acquired.
Finally I thought it would be interesting to finish with the contemporary applications changing the recording of speech and our relation to information. This is so important that voice recognizers and speech synthesisers are already becoming mundane things. Typing might become an absurd activity sooner then we imagine. The reconnections and eternal return to/of speech could be in the core of this paper’s wrapping up and unfolding. Nevertheless it became obvious the text should be open ended (like the work I’ve been producing). I wanted to find a way to differ from historical context and defer the meaning of this interpretation of the deconstruction of interpretation (at this point I was thinking I would apply Derrida’s “Différance” to his deconstruction of writing). Engaging with the fragmentation of this society’s critical framework involved the application of the same strategies that had put it together.
2. Before Writing
While trying to approach an undefined subject matter for a paper complementary to a couple of studio works which are primarily about writing, I decided to explore the physicality of such an act as a possible way to approach the experience I’m undergoing right now.
The responsibility inherent in writing is so tremendous that one must bear in mind it defines history to start with[1]. Before it, mankind’s past is a blurry or unrecorded humongous pre-history. This is what a writer has to feel comfortable with before he starts writing. Such an extreme cultural object did not become so important without feeding on previous crucial productions and I believe its main influence is drawing. Proof of this is the fact that writing was ideographic and even sculptural (cuneiform writing) in its remote origins.
Before the individual starts to write he is already a writer. Not just historically but imaginatively. Becoming a flâneur with artistic or scientific goals the writer does more than interpret the world. The intellectual flâneur does not just flirt with concepts but embraces them by taking risks. The engaged writer walks through the “avenues” and “roads” others made before and expands his horizons as much as his own imagination allows. The intention is to be inclusive and not exclusive, to make while drawing, to draw while writing, to write while reading and talk while observing. Not to be specific will probably become very specific of the writer who defines himself as an intellectual or artistic flâneur. This is where many have been defining themselves during the last century and it is a strong approach but it is just not enough. The mind’s frameset for writing in my personal experience was always attached to depression, loneliness, late night sleepiness, punishment, silence, suffering and to the scariest thing one could do at school. Before writing a word in Portuguese I always realized all the possible combination of letters that could give me that exact same sound. Everyone would understand most of those possibilities but only one was considered correct. Nothing could be scarier than to know others could understand us and still classify a word as “wrong”. This is why initially I considered it the ideal activity for people who loved “pointing fingers”. And the worst thing was that one could not explain or argue anything back, the text used to be static and not ecstatic. There were no criteria one could use except the cultural convention. It wasn’t an efficiency issue or a mathematical necessity. Speech was being transferred into paper using a set of rules where accident was unappreciated, graphic intensity perceived as “noise” and pain part of the “game” (for holding the pen for too long in the same position to start with).
More than transferring sound in general and speech in particular into a text, writing is more and more the transfer of thought and imagination into words. This was deeply discussed in 20th century philosophy and I don’t aim to state the obvious or a simplistic version of what was thought then. Let’s just acknowledge the “distanciation”[2] Paul Ricoeur explored between the two:
Writing raises a specific problem as soon as it is not merely the fixation of a previous oral discourse, the inscription of spoken language, but is human thought directly brought to writing without the intermediary stage of spoken language. Then writing takes the place of speaking. A kind of short-cut occurs between the meaning of discourse and the material medium.
Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, page 28
It is this shortcut between the meaning and the material I am interested in exploring in my studio practice. However I am aware that my thoughts are not even using the material medium to come through as I’m typing in a computer. Instead the shortcut is happening between thought and the virtual. I am well aware of the huge differences between Ricoeur and Derrida, but I still want to enhance this previous quote with a comment made on one of Derrida’s lectures on this topic:
Overturning the classical hierarchy privileging speech over writing […] the system of binary opposition, [Derrida criticizes it by stating that traditionally many used to think that] […] Attached to speech are signifiers such as presence, goodness, truth, light, male, mastery, and wisdom; attached to writing there are absence, badness or evil, falsity, dark, female, enslavement and foolishness. The double strategy of deconstruction entails marking the interval between the opposing members of each pair from these terms and then reinscribing each of these terms in a new writing practice that “simultaneously provokes the overturning of the hierarchy speech/writing, and the entire system attached to it, and releases the dissonance of writing within speech” (Derrida 1981: 42)
Roughley, Reading Derrida Reading Joyce, page 59
These thoughts might conceal the solution for my approach to writing. A hybrid writing between the spoken and the written, the text that reads itself (consider the work exhibited in the interim show analysed later on), the feminine and the masculine, truth and falsity.
Even if one disregards the philosophical transformations developed during the last century, one still needs to recognize the great advantages of writing. The most important one for my practice is that it can be taken in by others at different paces depending on their engagement and the associations established by the reader. To that extent the great advantage of writing over any other media is that it doesn’t need a pause button that would block the fluid transition between someone’s thoughts being read and our own thought. The importance I just gave to the imaginative leap in reading is very similar to the one I believe the writer goes through before writing. All those apparently unproductive moments one is struggling with the possibility of imminent writing, even when it doesn’t take place immediately (or even for a few days), is what I believe surrounds the most important moments for writing. Usually when someone starts writing, including performatively, there is already a structure, an idea or a few crucial steps that were previously mastered in a moratorium like process. It is this gap in time that is usually attacked by television, internet chat programs, emails, blogs, DVDs, music, cinema and any other media that contribute to the hyper-stimulation of one’s attention and actually causing distraction. If on one hand writing became harder to engage with, while “seductive distractions” took over a previously quieter world; on the other hand the number of people writing increased because of these media. The demand and functions of writing changed and suddenly every word we can’t understand is subtitled. These effects of the media made the world a very aggressive and overdosed place to be in where there is always something to say or write that unfortunately many believe was already thought or written by someone else. The influence of this technology was so notorious that some areas of human culture suffered from the way people use the public spaces in many developed countries. Whole interactive spaces lost importance for a while, such as: the cinema, the café, the spontaneous intellectually oriented groups, etc… I believe the “retro” culture is changing this by nostalgically recovering these features back to post-post-modern life. One can only imagine the words that were lost because of the idleness caused by the moving image and the ones that wouldn’t have been written if it never existed. It might be relevant to consider the way concepts, ideas and all the other foundations for empowering texts and movements changed… Apparently our societies found better ways to manipulate the masses.
Before writing I need to create an encapsulating environment using tea (possibly to compensate for the lack of oral pleasure that one has while writing instead of talking), silence or a musically neutral environment (to be able to read before the text is written), maybe even the night and the dawn can be another protective layer because, like I used to say, the “annoying” people are asleep (meaning that no one will ever interrupt one’s engagement with writing, thinking or talking).
3. While Writing
It is now possible for us to detect one of the subtlest connections between writing and masturbation in Sade's world. Both activities express the power and liberty of isolation in certain circumstances: the lack of need for a partner in sexual activity as well as the ability in Sodome to give up the presence of an addressee other than oneself for the written text make one absolute ruler of one's pleasures and will. Moreover, nothing is ever lost, for everything moves within a circle that begins and ends with the subject. Consequently, the union of the addressor and addressee in writing as well as the conflation of activity and passivity, causing and gaining pleasure in masturbation, enables Sade and his protagonists to live in a private and isolated reality with which nothing can interfere.
Rinon, Sadian Reflections, page 52
Loneliness is behind every text like a hidden presence. A certain setting that I just illustrated in the previous chapter is necessary for writing to take place. Many then go for a pen and paper (a few use typewriters) but increasingly more writers use computers. All of these different technologies influence the content of the written text and become a relevant factor to consider the content of the text. Every sound and every characteristic of the system used for writing change the form, but most importantly, the message a text carries.
If one thinks of the project I developed for the interim show with 96 pages of almost just full-stops, one will realize that if this was done with pen and paper it would just be a drawing, if it was done with a computer I wouldn’t even have to write all the pages and I would have to say “96 pages of full-stops” instead because the uncertainty would be ruled out of the process. I thought the content of this text I was going to write changed profoundly through the use of the typewriter and the interaction with the paper as an object enhanced it beyond my intentions.
This simple awareness of the physicality of the text, that is nostalgically being lost, influenced me to start thinking about a layer of mimesis in writing. Just like painting, photography, or any other visual media the written word implies a distance towards the same thing that it is trying to encapsulate or represent.
Literature, like the book (and like other arts) mirrors reality. Its truth is mimesis; its truth is measured in terms of the adequacy of its reflection. Plato's dealings with literature exhibit this conception and resistance to it. Derrida reminds us in "Double Session" that Plato exiles Homer from his republic on the grounds that mimesis is dangerous. Yet this dismissal is not Plato's final word on mimesis. Mimesis, like writing, plays between good and bad depending on what it copies and whether it copies accurately.
Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference, page 75
Being aware of this similarity between writing and art, I am now going to engage a short exploration of each of the technologies used for writing in the same order I used these throughout my life.
3.1 About Pen & Paper
I should start by stating clearly that this medium was never useful for me personally. I always perceived it as an opportunity for drawing. Ink, like paint, being applied on a surface with no chance for mistakes. Actually the way I ended up using the pen most of the time did not allow the detection of mistakes since the production was visual / retinal. Rationality and the intellect are progressively ruled out of the paper when I pretend to start writing with a pen. Even when words are involved I never spell check, rearrange or reread the text. Even if most people don’t perceive this technology the way I do there are still certain characteristics that will persist.
Generally if one uses a beautiful and immaculate white page to drawn letters with complete freedom the text can not be changed unless it becomes an unacceptable draft. So the side product of failure during this process is a pile of paper in bin… This, unlike the digital media, gives a romantic sense to the consecutive trials. Each page needs a pure flow like any drawing. The thickness of the paper influences the likeliness of the ink to show on the back of the written page and how thick the written line becomes. Every detail is ancestrally connected to thousands of years of tradition. The final format for a text written this way is probably a book (even if it is not, its’ most likely fate is being stored in an attic) but publishing is still a few steps away from the pages written this way.
Like I explained before, using this is not a very effective system for visually based minds. Drawing is too likely to take over. The production of text that stands on its own is not given an honest chance to happen. The “writer” quickly shifts the words into images and combines illustration with text. Writes an image or draws a text. This spontaneous mutation of this format influences the content for its physicality: the desire the visual mind nourishes for the dot, line and plane makes writing unlikely when the focus is a retinal production. These basic elements that constitute letters (and the planes where they stand) are obviously shared with drawing and painting. This was the medium available for me to write with in the beginning of my life and it was always a true struggle.
3.2 The Old Computer
Until I had my first computer nothing led me to believe in writing the way Paul Ricoeur did. Until the day I started typing silently in my room, writing seemed to be the best excuse for people to get upset and annoy each other. I was considered a very good student in all the other disciplines and modules but not Portuguese. Fortunately more or less at the same time I got that wonderful piece of technology I started learning English. My computer spoke a similar language to this new tongue but used abbreviations (MS-DOS). This allowed me to contact with an alternative and non-traumatic language and gave me a distance from the “Ditado” (the spelling exercise where a whole text is read and students write it down) which was always so close to “Ditadura” (dictatorship – the political regime in Portugal until 1974). The words are phonetically and graphically similar because they both have roots on the Latin word that stood for dictate (tell)… maybe the same “telling” is used for stories and for orders, maybe not. Interestingly enough, the same people who believed in one loved the other. Meanwhile my English started improving considerably but also the personal computers started correcting the spelling mistakes in Portuguese as well. With such a detached (not emotional computer spell-check) and constant feedback I stopped making so many of those mistakes and my grades started improving for Portuguese. Motivation exploded and writing became an intellectual recording of aspirations and ideas. I even had the illusion one day someone would find my computer and realize I had registered everything relevant I ever thought. This illusion of the intellectual teenager went so far I decided to become a stoic and focus on this quest denying every other impulse for 4 or 5 years of my life. Science, literature and undervalued maquettes for artistic projects were always in progress. Something problematic happened then: computers became too powerful. Photoshop came and Win Word slowly started being left aside. With an inkjet and Photoshop the written work didn’t seem to be enough. Images and digital drawings started finding their own space.
The English language proved to be independent enough from my past to motivate me to create a new identity and write independently from this digital digression from typing to the use of the mouse to draw and manipulate virtual layered colours and shapes.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the project of minor literature in their book on Franz Kafka [...] precisely because Kafka was a Czech Jew who wrote in German (Deleuze and Guatarri 1986). He did not occupy a language or culture that he could consider his own or identical with his being. All great literature, for Deleuze and Guatarri, is minor in this sense: language seems foreign, open to mutation, and the vehicle for the creation of identity rather than the expression of identity.
Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, page 103
This effect and the affect behind the use of language, that Deleuze analyses, also happened within my personal development, even though I never wrote anything resembling Kafka’s genius literature. What I needed was a new media for writing which would allow the smallest number of formal possibilities and variations. I needed to find something in between the computer and the pen and paper. By coincidence, or not, I inherited my grandfather’s typewriter. Due to the symbolic meaning of this object Deleuze might have considered my fascination with this nostalgia of modernism[3] and even what I felt towards obsolete low quality computer games a residue of the capitalist appropriation of any past culture as a “retro” product. In fact I lived in such a political system but I did not identify myself with many of its features.
3.3 The Typewriter
I always believed in individual exploration of all media and areas of knowledge. Simultaneous to the exploration of the visual digital media I started realizing I had missed two crucial media because of the culture and time I was born in: painting on canvas and the typewriter. Even though the last one was exclusive of my grandparents’ generation I wasn’t interested in the personal memories this old machine brought to me. What I wanted was to engage on my exploration of the nostalgic feelings I got from the object itself, leaving personal memories aside. Until then I didn’t live anything significant related to this object but I was still aware of the crucial period during which it was most used. The films that triggered exterior memories, such as Second World War movies, “Shining”, “Henry Fool” and “Finding Forest” were just a few. Not that they were all great films but they showed me what I had missed by not interacting with the typewriter. The fascination with the sound and the mechanisms was immediate but other characteristics such as the hate triggered in those who wanted to sleep and the matrix imposed on the location of each letter and the one and only mandatory font were extremely interesting. The nostalgia of modernism and the definition of an intellectual community that never excluded any area of culture of their café seminars were connecting to me through these ancestral memories. Before the Actor-network theory[4] started speaking of an extremely intense set of connections without an outside, before Derrida said there was no outside of the text, the modernist intellectual defined his culture and intellectuality as an unlimited object expanding with time. This nostalgia of the non-specialist, passionate reader and writer who was friends with the painters and all the cultural performers became a myth from a past I never lived. This was the same past that I knew was so crucial to define my present experience. Before I knew what an electron was I was using electricity to play games on a spectrum. This was the lack of balance I was trying to compensate with my nostalgia of the modern. Now this nostalgia is actually extended to the beginning of computer games like I mentioned before probably because it is my closest experience that resembles this temporal gap.
3.4 The Recent Computer
Technology changed progressively but significantly since I first used a computer to write. It is crucial to mention that these days there are multiple digital formats available for writing. Some of these are based on old formats such as the letter (the email), but most of the written text being produced is based on chat programs, sms, text messages, WebPages, blogs and many other recently developed layouts.
As I mentioned before the most recent developments in the digital world are using video, mp3, voice synthesizers and recognizers which change our perception of sound. As recorded speech and audio-books were reinvented writing changed its role and goals.
It wasn’t very difficult for me to find subjects to explore through writing but it was difficult to start writing bearing in mind this text was supposed to be a text for others. This doesn’t only mean it needs to be clear enough to be understood but also that it should meet expectations I am not sure I’ll ever be able to fulfil. The main problems were the high demands on my rather colloquial English that is never as good as I wish and the fact that writing is not something I do as well, or at least as frequently as drawing or talking.
I had to find a strategy to make this activity a constant improvement of fragmented texts. I also needed to make writing happen in such a way I could extract as much as possible from it but still make sure it wasn’t sampling or remixing concepts and other contextual objects. So I decided to set up a blog (web log) one of the most recent and virtual ways to write about the physicality of writing. The initial plan was to have white letters on a white background. This would force the reader and commenter to select the little texts I posted in order to be able to see them. However this proved to be way too subtle, and instead of being an activated reading, it blocked the reading of the text completely. As a consequence of that I decided to keep the colour of the text and use one of the grey colours used by Photoshop, Word and other computer programs to represent the empty space on the background. These texts will probably never be read properly by many but they are support material for the official written work I am developing. The best analogy I can think of to explain its function is the one with junk DNA. Without these spare and apparently useless elements evolution would be so slow the changes induced by accident and chance would almost always be irrelevant. Besides opening the possibility for a profound change in the “official text” it will hopefully also take this into a more performative format.
Before I start embracing other topics I also wanted to state clearly that I am not a natural writer. This means I need to acknowledge a bigger than average gap between what I want to say and what is actually written down. When the medium I need to use is an externally imposed system, such as any language, I become (almost too) aware that the more intensity and energy I put on it the more confusing and useless it might become for others.
How else can one write but of those things which one does not know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow – or rather to make it impossible. Perhaps writing has a relation to silence altogether more threatening than that which it is supposed to entertain with death. We are therefore well aware, unfortunately, that we have spoken about science in a manner which is not scientific.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, page xx
What Deleuze writes in this preface is the best declaration of intentions I could possibly put forward. This is the reason why I did not embrace, as my main subject, any scientific theme or parallel between writing (or art) and science which I would outline in a text much more comfortably. It is also this same goal that stops me from accepting any easy routes. My conscious intention to accept the need to read difficult critical thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze comes from the determination that the easy path is usually not the best one for achieving my goals. The struggle I felt, as a reader, will push my expression through words to the intensity and strength Nietzsche describes in this powerful paragraph on reading and writing:
Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.
It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, page 23
After a couple of weeks doing everything but writing I woke up from a long night of dreams with the clear feeling that more important than knowing what to write is to consider the physicality of writing. It wasn’t really necessary to analyse the historical origins of writing but to expand on my personal experience of what the physicality of this act is.
When I was asked to focus my research and my interests I pictured an essay that started exploring writing as a gesture of the hand using a pointy object on a surface. The goal was to associate this action with the registration of sound, speech or imagination using specific shapes which were extremely close to drawing and painting.
I thought that naturally I would then engage with the influence of the 20th century technologies that influenced writing: with the typewriter I would explore the nostalgia of modernism. With the computer I would try to grasp the post-modern “good old times” feeling that both the typewriter and the personal computer quickly acquired.
Finally I thought it would be interesting to finish with the contemporary applications changing the recording of speech and our relation to information. This is so important that voice recognizers and speech synthesisers are already becoming mundane things. Typing might become an absurd activity sooner then we imagine. The reconnections and eternal return to/of speech could be in the core of this paper’s wrapping up and unfolding. Nevertheless it became obvious the text should be open ended (like the work I’ve been producing). I wanted to find a way to differ from historical context and defer the meaning of this interpretation of the deconstruction of interpretation (at this point I was thinking I would apply Derrida’s “Différance” to his deconstruction of writing). Engaging with the fragmentation of this society’s critical framework involved the application of the same strategies that had put it together.
2. Before Writing
While trying to approach an undefined subject matter for a paper complementary to a couple of studio works which are primarily about writing, I decided to explore the physicality of such an act as a possible way to approach the experience I’m undergoing right now.
The responsibility inherent in writing is so tremendous that one must bear in mind it defines history to start with[1]. Before it, mankind’s past is a blurry or unrecorded humongous pre-history. This is what a writer has to feel comfortable with before he starts writing. Such an extreme cultural object did not become so important without feeding on previous crucial productions and I believe its main influence is drawing. Proof of this is the fact that writing was ideographic and even sculptural (cuneiform writing) in its remote origins.
Before the individual starts to write he is already a writer. Not just historically but imaginatively. Becoming a flâneur with artistic or scientific goals the writer does more than interpret the world. The intellectual flâneur does not just flirt with concepts but embraces them by taking risks. The engaged writer walks through the “avenues” and “roads” others made before and expands his horizons as much as his own imagination allows. The intention is to be inclusive and not exclusive, to make while drawing, to draw while writing, to write while reading and talk while observing. Not to be specific will probably become very specific of the writer who defines himself as an intellectual or artistic flâneur. This is where many have been defining themselves during the last century and it is a strong approach but it is just not enough. The mind’s frameset for writing in my personal experience was always attached to depression, loneliness, late night sleepiness, punishment, silence, suffering and to the scariest thing one could do at school. Before writing a word in Portuguese I always realized all the possible combination of letters that could give me that exact same sound. Everyone would understand most of those possibilities but only one was considered correct. Nothing could be scarier than to know others could understand us and still classify a word as “wrong”. This is why initially I considered it the ideal activity for people who loved “pointing fingers”. And the worst thing was that one could not explain or argue anything back, the text used to be static and not ecstatic. There were no criteria one could use except the cultural convention. It wasn’t an efficiency issue or a mathematical necessity. Speech was being transferred into paper using a set of rules where accident was unappreciated, graphic intensity perceived as “noise” and pain part of the “game” (for holding the pen for too long in the same position to start with).
More than transferring sound in general and speech in particular into a text, writing is more and more the transfer of thought and imagination into words. This was deeply discussed in 20th century philosophy and I don’t aim to state the obvious or a simplistic version of what was thought then. Let’s just acknowledge the “distanciation”[2] Paul Ricoeur explored between the two:
Writing raises a specific problem as soon as it is not merely the fixation of a previous oral discourse, the inscription of spoken language, but is human thought directly brought to writing without the intermediary stage of spoken language. Then writing takes the place of speaking. A kind of short-cut occurs between the meaning of discourse and the material medium.
Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, page 28
It is this shortcut between the meaning and the material I am interested in exploring in my studio practice. However I am aware that my thoughts are not even using the material medium to come through as I’m typing in a computer. Instead the shortcut is happening between thought and the virtual. I am well aware of the huge differences between Ricoeur and Derrida, but I still want to enhance this previous quote with a comment made on one of Derrida’s lectures on this topic:
Overturning the classical hierarchy privileging speech over writing […] the system of binary opposition, [Derrida criticizes it by stating that traditionally many used to think that] […] Attached to speech are signifiers such as presence, goodness, truth, light, male, mastery, and wisdom; attached to writing there are absence, badness or evil, falsity, dark, female, enslavement and foolishness. The double strategy of deconstruction entails marking the interval between the opposing members of each pair from these terms and then reinscribing each of these terms in a new writing practice that “simultaneously provokes the overturning of the hierarchy speech/writing, and the entire system attached to it, and releases the dissonance of writing within speech” (Derrida 1981: 42)
Roughley, Reading Derrida Reading Joyce, page 59
These thoughts might conceal the solution for my approach to writing. A hybrid writing between the spoken and the written, the text that reads itself (consider the work exhibited in the interim show analysed later on), the feminine and the masculine, truth and falsity.
Even if one disregards the philosophical transformations developed during the last century, one still needs to recognize the great advantages of writing. The most important one for my practice is that it can be taken in by others at different paces depending on their engagement and the associations established by the reader. To that extent the great advantage of writing over any other media is that it doesn’t need a pause button that would block the fluid transition between someone’s thoughts being read and our own thought. The importance I just gave to the imaginative leap in reading is very similar to the one I believe the writer goes through before writing. All those apparently unproductive moments one is struggling with the possibility of imminent writing, even when it doesn’t take place immediately (or even for a few days), is what I believe surrounds the most important moments for writing. Usually when someone starts writing, including performatively, there is already a structure, an idea or a few crucial steps that were previously mastered in a moratorium like process. It is this gap in time that is usually attacked by television, internet chat programs, emails, blogs, DVDs, music, cinema and any other media that contribute to the hyper-stimulation of one’s attention and actually causing distraction. If on one hand writing became harder to engage with, while “seductive distractions” took over a previously quieter world; on the other hand the number of people writing increased because of these media. The demand and functions of writing changed and suddenly every word we can’t understand is subtitled. These effects of the media made the world a very aggressive and overdosed place to be in where there is always something to say or write that unfortunately many believe was already thought or written by someone else. The influence of this technology was so notorious that some areas of human culture suffered from the way people use the public spaces in many developed countries. Whole interactive spaces lost importance for a while, such as: the cinema, the café, the spontaneous intellectually oriented groups, etc… I believe the “retro” culture is changing this by nostalgically recovering these features back to post-post-modern life. One can only imagine the words that were lost because of the idleness caused by the moving image and the ones that wouldn’t have been written if it never existed. It might be relevant to consider the way concepts, ideas and all the other foundations for empowering texts and movements changed… Apparently our societies found better ways to manipulate the masses.
Before writing I need to create an encapsulating environment using tea (possibly to compensate for the lack of oral pleasure that one has while writing instead of talking), silence or a musically neutral environment (to be able to read before the text is written), maybe even the night and the dawn can be another protective layer because, like I used to say, the “annoying” people are asleep (meaning that no one will ever interrupt one’s engagement with writing, thinking or talking).
3. While Writing
It is now possible for us to detect one of the subtlest connections between writing and masturbation in Sade's world. Both activities express the power and liberty of isolation in certain circumstances: the lack of need for a partner in sexual activity as well as the ability in Sodome to give up the presence of an addressee other than oneself for the written text make one absolute ruler of one's pleasures and will. Moreover, nothing is ever lost, for everything moves within a circle that begins and ends with the subject. Consequently, the union of the addressor and addressee in writing as well as the conflation of activity and passivity, causing and gaining pleasure in masturbation, enables Sade and his protagonists to live in a private and isolated reality with which nothing can interfere.
Rinon, Sadian Reflections, page 52
Loneliness is behind every text like a hidden presence. A certain setting that I just illustrated in the previous chapter is necessary for writing to take place. Many then go for a pen and paper (a few use typewriters) but increasingly more writers use computers. All of these different technologies influence the content of the written text and become a relevant factor to consider the content of the text. Every sound and every characteristic of the system used for writing change the form, but most importantly, the message a text carries.
If one thinks of the project I developed for the interim show with 96 pages of almost just full-stops, one will realize that if this was done with pen and paper it would just be a drawing, if it was done with a computer I wouldn’t even have to write all the pages and I would have to say “96 pages of full-stops” instead because the uncertainty would be ruled out of the process. I thought the content of this text I was going to write changed profoundly through the use of the typewriter and the interaction with the paper as an object enhanced it beyond my intentions.
This simple awareness of the physicality of the text, that is nostalgically being lost, influenced me to start thinking about a layer of mimesis in writing. Just like painting, photography, or any other visual media the written word implies a distance towards the same thing that it is trying to encapsulate or represent.
Literature, like the book (and like other arts) mirrors reality. Its truth is mimesis; its truth is measured in terms of the adequacy of its reflection. Plato's dealings with literature exhibit this conception and resistance to it. Derrida reminds us in "Double Session" that Plato exiles Homer from his republic on the grounds that mimesis is dangerous. Yet this dismissal is not Plato's final word on mimesis. Mimesis, like writing, plays between good and bad depending on what it copies and whether it copies accurately.
Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference, page 75
Being aware of this similarity between writing and art, I am now going to engage a short exploration of each of the technologies used for writing in the same order I used these throughout my life.
3.1 About Pen & Paper
I should start by stating clearly that this medium was never useful for me personally. I always perceived it as an opportunity for drawing. Ink, like paint, being applied on a surface with no chance for mistakes. Actually the way I ended up using the pen most of the time did not allow the detection of mistakes since the production was visual / retinal. Rationality and the intellect are progressively ruled out of the paper when I pretend to start writing with a pen. Even when words are involved I never spell check, rearrange or reread the text. Even if most people don’t perceive this technology the way I do there are still certain characteristics that will persist.
Generally if one uses a beautiful and immaculate white page to drawn letters with complete freedom the text can not be changed unless it becomes an unacceptable draft. So the side product of failure during this process is a pile of paper in bin… This, unlike the digital media, gives a romantic sense to the consecutive trials. Each page needs a pure flow like any drawing. The thickness of the paper influences the likeliness of the ink to show on the back of the written page and how thick the written line becomes. Every detail is ancestrally connected to thousands of years of tradition. The final format for a text written this way is probably a book (even if it is not, its’ most likely fate is being stored in an attic) but publishing is still a few steps away from the pages written this way.
Like I explained before, using this is not a very effective system for visually based minds. Drawing is too likely to take over. The production of text that stands on its own is not given an honest chance to happen. The “writer” quickly shifts the words into images and combines illustration with text. Writes an image or draws a text. This spontaneous mutation of this format influences the content for its physicality: the desire the visual mind nourishes for the dot, line and plane makes writing unlikely when the focus is a retinal production. These basic elements that constitute letters (and the planes where they stand) are obviously shared with drawing and painting. This was the medium available for me to write with in the beginning of my life and it was always a true struggle.
3.2 The Old Computer
Until I had my first computer nothing led me to believe in writing the way Paul Ricoeur did. Until the day I started typing silently in my room, writing seemed to be the best excuse for people to get upset and annoy each other. I was considered a very good student in all the other disciplines and modules but not Portuguese. Fortunately more or less at the same time I got that wonderful piece of technology I started learning English. My computer spoke a similar language to this new tongue but used abbreviations (MS-DOS). This allowed me to contact with an alternative and non-traumatic language and gave me a distance from the “Ditado” (the spelling exercise where a whole text is read and students write it down) which was always so close to “Ditadura” (dictatorship – the political regime in Portugal until 1974). The words are phonetically and graphically similar because they both have roots on the Latin word that stood for dictate (tell)… maybe the same “telling” is used for stories and for orders, maybe not. Interestingly enough, the same people who believed in one loved the other. Meanwhile my English started improving considerably but also the personal computers started correcting the spelling mistakes in Portuguese as well. With such a detached (not emotional computer spell-check) and constant feedback I stopped making so many of those mistakes and my grades started improving for Portuguese. Motivation exploded and writing became an intellectual recording of aspirations and ideas. I even had the illusion one day someone would find my computer and realize I had registered everything relevant I ever thought. This illusion of the intellectual teenager went so far I decided to become a stoic and focus on this quest denying every other impulse for 4 or 5 years of my life. Science, literature and undervalued maquettes for artistic projects were always in progress. Something problematic happened then: computers became too powerful. Photoshop came and Win Word slowly started being left aside. With an inkjet and Photoshop the written work didn’t seem to be enough. Images and digital drawings started finding their own space.
The English language proved to be independent enough from my past to motivate me to create a new identity and write independently from this digital digression from typing to the use of the mouse to draw and manipulate virtual layered colours and shapes.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the project of minor literature in their book on Franz Kafka [...] precisely because Kafka was a Czech Jew who wrote in German (Deleuze and Guatarri 1986). He did not occupy a language or culture that he could consider his own or identical with his being. All great literature, for Deleuze and Guatarri, is minor in this sense: language seems foreign, open to mutation, and the vehicle for the creation of identity rather than the expression of identity.
Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, page 103
This effect and the affect behind the use of language, that Deleuze analyses, also happened within my personal development, even though I never wrote anything resembling Kafka’s genius literature. What I needed was a new media for writing which would allow the smallest number of formal possibilities and variations. I needed to find something in between the computer and the pen and paper. By coincidence, or not, I inherited my grandfather’s typewriter. Due to the symbolic meaning of this object Deleuze might have considered my fascination with this nostalgia of modernism[3] and even what I felt towards obsolete low quality computer games a residue of the capitalist appropriation of any past culture as a “retro” product. In fact I lived in such a political system but I did not identify myself with many of its features.
3.3 The Typewriter
I always believed in individual exploration of all media and areas of knowledge. Simultaneous to the exploration of the visual digital media I started realizing I had missed two crucial media because of the culture and time I was born in: painting on canvas and the typewriter. Even though the last one was exclusive of my grandparents’ generation I wasn’t interested in the personal memories this old machine brought to me. What I wanted was to engage on my exploration of the nostalgic feelings I got from the object itself, leaving personal memories aside. Until then I didn’t live anything significant related to this object but I was still aware of the crucial period during which it was most used. The films that triggered exterior memories, such as Second World War movies, “Shining”, “Henry Fool” and “Finding Forest” were just a few. Not that they were all great films but they showed me what I had missed by not interacting with the typewriter. The fascination with the sound and the mechanisms was immediate but other characteristics such as the hate triggered in those who wanted to sleep and the matrix imposed on the location of each letter and the one and only mandatory font were extremely interesting. The nostalgia of modernism and the definition of an intellectual community that never excluded any area of culture of their café seminars were connecting to me through these ancestral memories. Before the Actor-network theory[4] started speaking of an extremely intense set of connections without an outside, before Derrida said there was no outside of the text, the modernist intellectual defined his culture and intellectuality as an unlimited object expanding with time. This nostalgia of the non-specialist, passionate reader and writer who was friends with the painters and all the cultural performers became a myth from a past I never lived. This was the same past that I knew was so crucial to define my present experience. Before I knew what an electron was I was using electricity to play games on a spectrum. This was the lack of balance I was trying to compensate with my nostalgia of the modern. Now this nostalgia is actually extended to the beginning of computer games like I mentioned before probably because it is my closest experience that resembles this temporal gap.
3.4 The Recent Computer
Technology changed progressively but significantly since I first used a computer to write. It is crucial to mention that these days there are multiple digital formats available for writing. Some of these are based on old formats such as the letter (the email), but most of the written text being produced is based on chat programs, sms, text messages, WebPages, blogs and many other recently developed layouts.
As I mentioned before the most recent developments in the digital world are using video, mp3, voice synthesizers and recognizers which change our perception of sound. As recorded speech and audio-books were reinvented writing changed its role and goals.
4. After Writing
In the past I used to write essays about subjects related to work I had done previously. As my practice evolved and my writing became more consistent they started being developed more or less simultaneously. Strangely I have just realized that an essay I wrote last year wasn’t really about the analysis of any work but the future perspectives I wanted to explore connecting language and my practice.
The last few projects I’ve been developing have been concerned with the physicality of writing. I would like to engage an exploration of a few elements that informed this work.
4.1 The Full Stop project
The work titled “…” was the first one to literally incorporate writing. This change did not only correspond to a new formal outcome but also to a completely new strategy. Partially this was related to studio space limitations and at the same time the true and honest wish to embrace an effort to produce a work which would connect to many issues I was interested in. Formally it is connected to minimalism but its content is multilayered and ontological.
In short, minimalism is as self-critical as any late modernist art, but its analysis tends toward the epistemological more than the ontological, for it focuses on the perceptual conditions and conventional limits of art more than on its formal essence and categorical being. It is this orientation that is so often mistaken as “conceptual.”
Foster, The Return of the Real, page 40
This project was attacked aggressively by Shahin Alfrasiabi that stated it was just a repetition of minimalist work. Instead of replying seriously at the time I decided to make a joke about it and say that if it was a repetition it was like the rewriting of Don Quixote that Jorge Luis Borges describes in one of his short stories. The fact was that Borges informed this work but I did not believe it was a repetition of previous work. It is quite different to write about the repetition of a work and to actually repeat it. What I should have explained was that I never heard of a minimalist work informed by the Library of Babel or the geometry of Tlön (a country that was made up by a secret society). But this was just the beginning, because I never heard of a work about the physicality of writing that expanded on the properties Kandinsky outlined for the point in his book Point and Line to Plane. Texture, silence (represented by the full stops), sound (the typing of the work was recorded and reproduced), text, uncertainty (because I missed the full stop key several times) were informing this work. But it didn’t stop there because what I was reading at the time was obviously also influencing it:
Repeated, the same line is no longer exactly the same, the ring no longer has the same centre, the origin has played. Something is missing that would make the circle perfect. But within the elleipsis by means of simple redoubling of the route, the solicitation of closure, and the jointing of the line, the book has let itself be thought as such. […]
As soon as the sign emerges, it begins by repeating itself. Without this, it would not be a sign, would not be what it is, that is to say, the non-self-identity which regularly refers to the same.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, page 296
If nothing else this paragraph made me consider other possibilities beyond the obvious circle. The off-centre ellipsis had to become the focus of my attention after I read this.
The origin of this work was the experimentation I engaged with a found typewriter. In one of those experiments I made a long sequence of full stops and realized I was looking at them as if they were pixels. Unlike the computer, the typewriter allowed the intensity with which I pressed the key to come through allowing the recording of a gesture in a minimal looking matrix and mediated by an obsolete technology. I had become a printer of a drawing planned on my computer. I was writing an image of an asymmetrical ellipsis using a typewriter. Should I expect it to be interpreted just as a huge full stop? While writing that text of (mostly) silence I was trying to imagine if people would read this noisy recording (the sound of the typing), as I was writing silence down and performing sound. It was a text that read and interpreted itself due to the sound and its fractal structure.
Only now that the project is finished I have realized that I have once again used a media conceived exclusively for writing to make a performative drawing and extend it to an installation by exploring the visual properties of a typewriter.
There are still a few properties of this work I did not describe such as the Braille like texture one could touch on the back, the overhead projector I used to light the project, or the fact that the sound was coming from the inside of the typewriter case. However there are two other subjects that I believe are interesting enough to discuss in this text: the inclusion of the typewriter in the work and Shahin’s most recent criticism of this work.
The typewriter was included in the project at first because the full stop key broke while I was finishing the project. This would be a proof of authenticity but there were other reasons I could not identify until recently. In a critical seminar people asked me if I didn’t think that it was enough to imagine a typewriter instead of actually having the object in display. In that moment I realized that the mental image of a typewriter would not be precise enough to enable people to understand the text that wasn’t made out of full stops. The presence of the object was essential for people to realize which keys were right next to the full stop. Finally the fact that I displayed the typewriter loaded with paper in a plinth that invited people to write also allowed me to get 3 or 4 pages of comments from the public.
The other topic worth mentioning is Shahin Alfrasiabi’s criticism of this project in this last assessment. He said that he felt confused with so many different things being explored in one project. I thought we had a communication barrier because what I enjoyed in this work was the diversity of influences informing it and the variety of possible interpretations. Without wanting to describe the completely opposite perceptions we had about the work, I would just like to say that the discrepancies and lack of communication were so bad I realised I needed to change tutor.
After all this project was based on a meditative activity taking repetition to a scale where the banal became something else. It was a mix between knitting in front of the television and an engagement with the issue of productivity and suffering in writing. My only goal was that the scale of the repetition changed “something in the mind that contemplates it”[5].
4.2 Work in progress[6]
The work represented above concerns the physicality of writing as well but because it is an animation I can only show you a still image. The most significant development in this project was the fact that I extended points into small straight lines and decided to explore the pen and paper. On the left side of the animation one can see the side of the page where I wrote and on the right side the back of that same page. This animation resulted from the fact that the pages I was using were thin and allowed the ink to mark the next page with points I would use as a reference for the next frame.
I believed at this point that the exploration of the line was taking me back to three dimensional works. I wanted to engage a more pleasant studio activity by using the straight line as the basic element common to most letters[7].
These sketches for sculptural / installation work were explored in my practice using trunking. The Variations on the open cube by Sol Lewitt were an important influence for instance on the number of “lines. I used: 12 - the number a closed cube has but I ended up opening it anyway[8]. This new series of work is motivated by the bodily representation of lines in order to form three dimensional self sustaining structures resembling letters. It will also radicate in Derrida’s description of the frame as a border where the painting is progressively deconstructed.
In short, the frame enchases the fiction of painting into writing, and vice versa.
Leavey (Derrida), Introducing The Archaeology of the Frivolous, page 15
John P. Leavey, Jr., in his introduction titled the fractured frame, the seduction of fiction plays with the interference between Twombly and Derrida. Even though, as far as I’m concerned, Derrida only developed his thoughts about the frame related to painting, I aim to extend this to a three dimensional work. It is quite likely that sound will be part of this work because I want to keep the association between the sign (or structure resembling a letter) and what it represents in speech or thought.
5. Deferring conclusions[9]
I feel this text already needs editing but I’m not sure about how to do it. I should remind you it is the first time I’m trying this kind of writing and as a consequence I’m not sure if it is too personal or if it actually deals with the subject matter I tried to engage with. I’m quite sure there won’t be any conclusions to take even in the end of the year. Writing this way is more likely to make me rethink my practice and find ways to interact with others than anything else. It is actually strange that at the moment my writing is anticipating my practice.
So far my only goal is to transform “poison into medicine” like the old Buddhist saying states. This applies not just to the transformation of a bad memory of writing into practical work that I’m passionate about but also to the challenges I have been setting myself through reading becoming a relaxing experience through writing.
6. Accumulative Extension
There were many formats I could have explored in order to keep this document up to date with what has been happening since the first draft was written: I could have done a completely new paper, add to the previous document extensive footnotes or remake the final sections. I feel that would have been almost like performing a plastic surgery on something that should be kept as a memory of the process. Gladly I remembered the origin of this text: it started taking shape in a blog form so I believe I should revise it with a “blogger approach” and that means cumulatively adding more text… at least I believe this will make sense considering what happened in the studio since it was only a storage space (cumulating potential) until recently.
I could not do it in any other way. Changing the previous text too much would be like loosing an object I found and kept. I felt it would be an unnecessary loss. However, I must confess I was tempted to edit a lot of the text that concerned Shahin Alfrasiabi and the last few section titles that were obviously outdated. Instead I kept the text about the effects those tutorials had on me and added a footnote to the titles that needed updating.
Another question remained when I considered adding text to this draft: Should there be an open end to this text like I intended initially? Dealing with this intension (of leaving it open) and the friction it provoked with the lack of openness the draft actually had, turned this into another topic I needed to write about. Initially this friction interested me and was stopping the production of this extra text. But by working with it and using it as a topic it ended up having the opposite effect. As a matter of fact I decided to take risks and disturb an apparently settled and finished structure I had achieved before (like I have been trying to do with my practical work).
The content of this last section also offered a few different possibilities for areas I could unfold a bit more:
Another question remained when I considered adding text to this draft: Should there be an open end to this text like I intended initially? Dealing with this intension (of leaving it open) and the friction it provoked with the lack of openness the draft actually had, turned this into another topic I needed to write about. Initially this friction interested me and was stopping the production of this extra text. But by working with it and using it as a topic it ended up having the opposite effect. As a matter of fact I decided to take risks and disturb an apparently settled and finished structure I had achieved before (like I have been trying to do with my practical work).
The content of this last section also offered a few different possibilities for areas I could unfold a bit more:
1. I could take the physicality of writing as an exploration of the body and the awareness of its crucial role. Its indirect representation through previous references such as the typewriter’s broken key or the memory of crumpling paper could be developed for example through foot notes. This would open a vast field of research that could allow me to make a more literal connection between the digital and the finger. I believe that would only make sense if my practice developed toward the periscopes I was planning to develop this year: these would allow people to see their own bodies from unusual points of view: their ass and the side of the face for example (see the following image).
2. I could also focus on changes happening in the studio practice and the reason why making static structures remotely resembling letters was not enough (see the following image). These structures should perform a sound and stop being passive constructions. It would also be crucial to have all the potential accumulated in the studio put forward with new work and my old rigid (“conceptualized”) strategy would not allow it. However it might not make a lot of sense to write exclusively on this topic.
3. Finally I could analyse the connections between the pain/fear I felt when I thought about using the studio (for something other than storage) and the ghosts that contemporary thinkers had cast on it. Their writings draped a difficult scary fabric on my practical production. This possibility would imply exploring the cathartic properties of this act of writing and its internal physicality (its consequences on my brain and my mind) as far as that is actually possible.
Each one of these alternatives is related to a specific studio project but the most recent and obscure (less obvious) one is the last and that is why I’m going to focus my attention on it. Nevertheless before I develop the topic I should clarify the contingencies that made it relevant. Primarily the change that took place (changing tutor) right after I finished writing the draft proved to have different consequences to those I anticipated. This induced a crisis and made me question the authority of writing over my practice. Because of this apparently problematic period I am now forced to admit that writing no longer anticipates the studio practice, maybe there was only an expectation that it would... Adding a section about ghost hunting, studio fears and pains became then mandatory.
7. Ghost hunting
Ghosts can be considered real to the extent that peoples’ behaviour change because of the expectation they have of them. Writing was the first ghost I dealt with in this paper and something similar needs to take place in other areas such as the influence of theory in my practice.
I felt theory and reading built up specific expectations about my own practice. If on one hand these can become anxieties and be problematic, on the other hand it also induces a frame of mind that intensifies the wish to question preconceptions. As a result of these changes (and this awareness) I needed to deal with all the limitations I was trying to “work around” for a long time. It is now proved to me that it is time to “work with” not around anything. I have to change my approach to the studio into a more flexible combination of tensions and intensions. After understanding Daniel Burren’s essay The function of the studio I should be able to change my attitude and start using the studio space simultaneously as a gallery space and working area. The physical transformations in the studio are slowly manifesting as another way of thinking, more or less in the same fashion the editing of a blog gave rise to this document.
During my seminar presentation I said that forgetting plans, rules, philosophy and methods is a way of actually learning them. Later I realized I had to let go of control and that made me think of the following reflection:
200. No one can control what is really creative, and everybody just has to let it go its own way.
Goethe, p. 23
I knew this would change me and in fact I am already doing everything I can to take advantage of this opportunity. Working with the contingencies is the one thing I am sure is starting to happen, probably still slowly but at least things are being revalued. I am no longer conformed to the safe approach. I started using video to increase my conscious analysis of what I do (including using time lapse to record the production of this paper - a piece that is obviously not ready yet – please see the following photographs showing the “making of the making of”). Many plans are collapsing and room for difference is actually being created.
In these last few lines I would just like to outline the process I’m currently starting to engage: to eliminate as many Ghosts as I can from the creative process. Part of this course of action was already mentioned but the preconceptions of what a finished work is can be extended and exploited much more deeply and intensely. I know that beyond the influence of the minimal aesthetics or the full engagement with the conceptual venture of writing are other deeply rooted philosophical issues I will pursue and explore. Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections in their apparent innocence became relevant once again:
Anyone who now intends to write or argue about art ought to have some idea of what philosophy has achieved and continues to achieve in our day.
Goethe, p.136
However the problem with the philosophy and thinkers I’ve been researching is not arguing for their relevance. The most demanding task for me is to demystify what I read only a few years after most of them died. A book I’ve recently started reading has been helping me understand why some passages of (almost) contemporary thinkers might seem excessively heavy and pompous. The book I’m referring to is called Intellectual Impostures. In this book a mathematician and a physicist engage a confrontation of contemporary thinkers with the abuse and misleading use of scientific concepts in their written discourse. While reading it I realized that I could have been one of the targets if I allowed myself the excessive use of scientific concepts (that I had studied in Portuguese universities) in the production of hermetic texts. But even more relevant than that “warning” was how human and innocently absurd some passages from many thinkers are. Because I still need to analyse in more detail many of the claims of this “scientific criticism” I’ll just say that this is certainly something I’ll have to take in consideration in the talk I’ll give in Lisbon on Art and Science in October 2007. I might have to disagree with some of the excessive rigour exerted on the philosophical texts that sometimes are beyond the scientists understanding but overall I’d say it is an excellent extraction (or filtration) of a basic rhetoric strategy that in many cases was skilfully identified.
The consequences of the identification of irrelevant science being used in texts I admired made these heavy works much more manageable and allowed the writing I’ve been developing in this paper to pursue the hybrid line between speech and writing.
“Pretentious” might be the word that will make many of my ghosts fall, both in my practice and my writing, by making at least some of the work of those I consider unavoidable references to become as human as the people I meet everyday.
This hunting could keep going for ever because I’m my worst nightmare in the sense that I’m the worst of all the tricksters that build layers of delusion. I’m the only one who can fully fool myself and give too much credit to what I can’t absorb and fully understand.
[1] It is unavoidable to mention Of Grammatology, page 27, the chapter on Linguistics and Grammatology.
[2] Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas, by John Brookshire Thompson, page 52
[3] It is unfolded on the next chapter why I associate the typewriter with the nostalgia of modernism.
[4] Actor Network Theory - ANT – several essays and documents can be found online through Google. I have read a few texts by Bruno Latour and the most interesting was titled: A few clarifications.
[5] Hume’s theory on repetition as described by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.
[6] This section title no longer makes sense, yet I decided to keep it. The reason for keeping the original is explained in the section titled: Accumulative Extension.
[7] This changed because I had to give other strategies a chance. These “letter like structures" were formally pleasant but showed me how the preconception of the “finished work” was influencing my practice.
[8] This project will be mentioned again in this paper (a photograph will be provided then).
[9] Some of these words including the title of this section are outdated. However an extension contradictory to the idea of re-editing proved to be necessary. If I were writing these “final words” today I would have titled them: Towards a future extension.
[8] This project will be mentioned again in this paper (a photograph will be provided then).
[9] Some of these words including the title of this section are outdated. However an extension contradictory to the idea of re-editing proved to be necessary. If I were writing these “final words” today I would have titled them: Towards a future extension.
8. Bibliography
1. Deleuze, G., Difference and Repetition, Continuum Ltd., 1994
2. Nietzsche, F., Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Courier Dover Publications, 1999
3. Ricoeur, P., Interpretation Theory: Discourse and Surplus of Meaning TCU Press, 1976
4. Roughley, A., Reading Derrida Reading Joyce, University Press of Florida, 1999
5. Rinon, Y., Sadian Reflections, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005
6. Armour, E. T., Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference:Subverting the Race/Gender Divide, University of Chicago Press, 1999
7. Colebrook, C., Gilles Deleuze, Routledge (UK),2001
8. Foster, H., The Return of the Real, The MIT Press, 1996
9. Derrida, J., Writing and Difference, Routeledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1978
10. Derrida, J., The Archaeology of the Frivolous, University of Nebraska Press, 1987
11. Buren, D., The Function of the Studio, 1971 included in
Doherty, C., from Studio to Situation, Black Dog Publishing, 2004
12. Goethe, J. W. V., Maxims and Reflections, Penguin Books Ltd., 1998
13. Sokal, A. & Bricmont, J., Intellectual Impostures, Profile Books Ltd, 1998
19.1.07
Full stop project
Kandinsky - Point and Line to Plane
Jorge Luis Borges - The geometry of Thlön, Babel's library, Caracters that read or tel their own stories.
Nostalgia - the sound of the sowing machine, the sound of the library in Rila, modernism and the repetitive work parallel to my grandmother knitting in front of the tv.
Science - fractal, uncertainty, pixel, digital made modern...
Minimalist aesthetics but a narrative, ontological instead of epistemological, the artists hand, intensity, narrative, performative, "duchampean" elements and connections.
sound/silêncio, light?, braile, age of mechanical reproduction, nostagia da modernidade, minimalism, conceptualism, nostalgia, thought, the art school situation, art and language. Pixel, Pics, Fish project connection. Three dots, symbology of number three. Intensity of the artistic gesture in the mechanicized action. finding forest. Rebecca horn installation. Subtileza. Repetition, Time.signature of intensity. Related to the language projects with the mirror and maybe even frame.
Cell, particula. Matrix and the concept of crafts, kniting. Mistakes, concentration and distractions. Percurtion and written music that performs itself when it is written.
More: The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Eternal return. The responsibility of each instant.
Jorge Luis Borges - The geometry of Thlön, Babel's library, Caracters that read or tel their own stories.
Nostalgia - the sound of the sowing machine, the sound of the library in Rila, modernism and the repetitive work parallel to my grandmother knitting in front of the tv.
Science - fractal, uncertainty, pixel, digital made modern...
Minimalist aesthetics but a narrative, ontological instead of epistemological, the artists hand, intensity, narrative, performative, "duchampean" elements and connections.
sound/silêncio, light?, braile, age of mechanical reproduction, nostagia da modernidade, minimalism, conceptualism, nostalgia, thought, the art school situation, art and language. Pixel, Pics, Fish project connection. Three dots, symbology of number three. Intensity of the artistic gesture in the mechanicized action. finding forest. Rebecca horn installation. Subtileza. Repetition, Time.signature of intensity. Related to the language projects with the mirror and maybe even frame.
Cell, particula. Matrix and the concept of crafts, kniting. Mistakes, concentration and distractions. Percurtion and written music that performs itself when it is written.
More: The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Eternal return. The responsibility of each instant.
Possible subjects in a really bad text
There are so many absurd topics I would love to write about but that would become nothing other then an exercise... I would love to expose the excessive pressure made on students to validate their practice through the use of references and its consequent contextualization. I dreamt of writing a strong text about the reflux that is so crucial in contemporary art not just through the ideas of eternal return but also the retro culture that is becoming stronger and stronger. It would be am inquiry on appropriation itself and as necessary for homage. In previous years I researched language and its interaction with the artistic practice but this is already producing its effects in the work that I’m currently making and would take me directly to the importance of criticism and tutoring, in which I should admit I’m losing my faith on. I would also love to pick two great references such as Nietzsche and Deleuze develop an investigation more or less superficial on two specific works such as The Will to Power and the book Deleuze wrote on Nietzsche but I have to admit it is too much of a task for this context (maybe not). Even other banal concepts could be quite interesting to explore in a text which only restrictions are the size and the fact that it should be academically relevant. These could include an exploration of the idea of temperature, physically and scientifically at first and intellectually as a side product of friction or any unconservative force in any activity. Just to finish mentioning all these possibilities that came to me I would like to write the obvious topics that usually come to our minds when one is struggling trying to pick one of many things to write about: "Unspecificity" and the activity of writing.
By writing and reading what I achieve is a feeling of ruin. I can feel death crawling in my back and steeling my health, my smile, my hair and the fortune of those that have youth and energy. Reading and writing that so far have been all I’ve learned to do in institutions is proving to be a frustrating and unproductive activity. If I’m supposed to die let it happen at once so I won’t have to bother suffering thinking about it. And then the contradiction of the stream of consciousness. And the certainty we wouldn’t be doing anything creative if we were not going to die – just because we believe it is another way to stay alive. These forces summed up are nothing but passion, belief and pain mixed in a blander and served as if they were posh. The factual side of words bores me. I wish I didn’t give the impression to people that I love writing just because I love philosophy, art and science. I only write as a consequence of my suffering. This can have origins in the academic pressure to hand in something with a certain number of words or it can be an emotional condition that invaded me (like it did before I accepted the fact that I wanted to give my life to Art and nothing else).
Is it possible to start constructing a draft of a text that will combine all the strong words I put in bold in the beginning of this text? Would it be any interesting just to take a model such as the ANT model and explore those concepts in the light of that systematization? I don’t think a mix of such profound and complex things and authors would ever be interesting not even if I used those recent interesting network definitions.
I have to go to sleep. I do not want to feel guilty for ever. I should find love, calmness, physical exercise, sleep, read for pleasure, paint what I feel like painting and finally forget all the pretentious stuff that I’ve been in contact with.
By writing and reading what I achieve is a feeling of ruin. I can feel death crawling in my back and steeling my health, my smile, my hair and the fortune of those that have youth and energy. Reading and writing that so far have been all I’ve learned to do in institutions is proving to be a frustrating and unproductive activity. If I’m supposed to die let it happen at once so I won’t have to bother suffering thinking about it. And then the contradiction of the stream of consciousness. And the certainty we wouldn’t be doing anything creative if we were not going to die – just because we believe it is another way to stay alive. These forces summed up are nothing but passion, belief and pain mixed in a blander and served as if they were posh. The factual side of words bores me. I wish I didn’t give the impression to people that I love writing just because I love philosophy, art and science. I only write as a consequence of my suffering. This can have origins in the academic pressure to hand in something with a certain number of words or it can be an emotional condition that invaded me (like it did before I accepted the fact that I wanted to give my life to Art and nothing else).
Is it possible to start constructing a draft of a text that will combine all the strong words I put in bold in the beginning of this text? Would it be any interesting just to take a model such as the ANT model and explore those concepts in the light of that systematization? I don’t think a mix of such profound and complex things and authors would ever be interesting not even if I used those recent interesting network definitions.
I have to go to sleep. I do not want to feel guilty for ever. I should find love, calmness, physical exercise, sleep, read for pleasure, paint what I feel like painting and finally forget all the pretentious stuff that I’ve been in contact with.
Validation- an interaction between Art and Language
Validity is the property of anything that obeys to the rules of logic. Unlike truth which is the correspondence between a certain statement and reality (or more or less aparently verified facts), to define something as valid one only needs language and a set logical criteria to qualify the interaction between statements as valid. The process of validation as a consequence implies the definition of the language and a set of rules (criteria). To classify a text as valid one doesn’t need to know the meaning of each concept, just the language and its most basic elements. If something is valid it means that whatever it is saying it says that according to the rules of the pre-existing system.
Generally there are two general methods of validation of a statement: the classical and the scientific. The classical method is deductive (it starts stating generally accepted premisses) originating specific (usually obvious) conclusions. The scientific method of validation is experimental. It consists on verifying that a certain phenomena happens in a particular case and, through the repetition of that experience in a controled environment, concludes that those properties verified in those particular situations are actually generally applyable.
Baring this in mind I would like to explore the process of validation of Art via art school, criticism, curation and philosophical (or any other external) references.
Ubiquity
Authority
Generally there are two general methods of validation of a statement: the classical and the scientific. The classical method is deductive (it starts stating generally accepted premisses) originating specific (usually obvious) conclusions. The scientific method of validation is experimental. It consists on verifying that a certain phenomena happens in a particular case and, through the repetition of that experience in a controled environment, concludes that those properties verified in those particular situations are actually generally applyable.
Baring this in mind I would like to explore the process of validation of Art via art school, criticism, curation and philosophical (or any other external) references.
Ubiquity
Authority
How can I start to think or write about teaching?
The absurdity of the most comon perspectives on creativity as a professional activity, an academic arena or a necessary side product of certain mental deseases astonishes me for being so simplistic or folishly elaborate.
I’m not going to try to define creativity in here but I intend to point out what is inadequate to ofer as a model to explain the original production of concepts, ideas, feelings, texts or objects.
Some might argue that it is too defensive since it is much easier to destroy a system then it is to build one or give definitions of what something is. Let me argue non the less that we are talking about a very special area: we are dealing with the activity that leeds to exceptional results. However, I am going to try and propose directions which could be explored extensively in the persuit of artistic production and how to give that possibility to others.
First step
If knowledge in general has always been perceived as an historical production we can not say the same about art and creativity. Pre-historical periods provide us today with enough evidance for us to realize the primordial origin of original objects and images. We associate it with other kinds of languages. The written word wasn’t invented yet but the manipulation of conceps, ideas and speech was already pushing minds into the unavoidable power of making more or less useless things.
The reason why I need to mention this is because we can not talk about life without mentioning the miscelanious soup of organic molecules where life started to understand its properties. The same happens with art and creativity. There is, non-the less a big difference between these two words I’ve been using almost together. Creativity is frequently used for the resolution of practical products and usually produces useful solutions. Art for me is the “making” disreagarding function. Like a section of creativity with a bizare explanation for its existence and creation. To a certain extent one could say that only with categorization of functionality the word Art was necessary to the define everything creative that wasn’t useful. I don’t want to go deep is the linguistic origins of the word Duchamp mentioned superficially or argue for some antropological description of the religious funtion atributed to every prehistorical production we believe was artistic. It is irrelevant for this texts goal if all these massive problems are just mentioned of if they become the centre of these words I’m putting together as if I were working. The fact is that his is a persuit for the creation of a what is strong in the conception of what I’ve been doing and hopefully will always do.
I just commited the most stupid mistake: to start with the origin of life, dinossaurs, cave man and the transition to the Homo Sapiens sapiens. It is the same problem the teaching of history, portuguese, art, geography and any other area has. They start with what we believe is the beginning and cronologically bore to death the students that could be entusiastically enjoying a useful explanation of what is happening in from of them and slowly progress to the past in search for the justification or more information about recent past in even more distant events.
This aproach to what I believe about theory should start
I’m not going to try to define creativity in here but I intend to point out what is inadequate to ofer as a model to explain the original production of concepts, ideas, feelings, texts or objects.
Some might argue that it is too defensive since it is much easier to destroy a system then it is to build one or give definitions of what something is. Let me argue non the less that we are talking about a very special area: we are dealing with the activity that leeds to exceptional results. However, I am going to try and propose directions which could be explored extensively in the persuit of artistic production and how to give that possibility to others.
First step
If knowledge in general has always been perceived as an historical production we can not say the same about art and creativity. Pre-historical periods provide us today with enough evidance for us to realize the primordial origin of original objects and images. We associate it with other kinds of languages. The written word wasn’t invented yet but the manipulation of conceps, ideas and speech was already pushing minds into the unavoidable power of making more or less useless things.
The reason why I need to mention this is because we can not talk about life without mentioning the miscelanious soup of organic molecules where life started to understand its properties. The same happens with art and creativity. There is, non-the less a big difference between these two words I’ve been using almost together. Creativity is frequently used for the resolution of practical products and usually produces useful solutions. Art for me is the “making” disreagarding function. Like a section of creativity with a bizare explanation for its existence and creation. To a certain extent one could say that only with categorization of functionality the word Art was necessary to the define everything creative that wasn’t useful. I don’t want to go deep is the linguistic origins of the word Duchamp mentioned superficially or argue for some antropological description of the religious funtion atributed to every prehistorical production we believe was artistic. It is irrelevant for this texts goal if all these massive problems are just mentioned of if they become the centre of these words I’m putting together as if I were working. The fact is that his is a persuit for the creation of a what is strong in the conception of what I’ve been doing and hopefully will always do.
I just commited the most stupid mistake: to start with the origin of life, dinossaurs, cave man and the transition to the Homo Sapiens sapiens. It is the same problem the teaching of history, portuguese, art, geography and any other area has. They start with what we believe is the beginning and cronologically bore to death the students that could be entusiastically enjoying a useful explanation of what is happening in from of them and slowly progress to the past in search for the justification or more information about recent past in even more distant events.
This aproach to what I believe about theory should start
Old projects residues...
Question: If you left the refrigerator door open, what would happen to the room temperature and why?
Asked by: Sophie
Answer: The room would get warmer! Think of a refrigerator as a device that transfers heat from inside a box to its surroundings. The room around a refrigerator is warmed as it receives the heat removed from inside the box. If you leave the door open, heat is merely recycled from the room into the refrigerator, then back into the room. A net room temperature increase would result from the heat of the motor that would be constantly running to move energy around in a circle. It would be like hooking up a water pump to remove water from your basement and routing the discharge tube back to the basement.
Answered by: Paul Walorski, B.A. Physics, Part-time Physics Instructor
Asked by: Sophie
Answer: The room would get warmer! Think of a refrigerator as a device that transfers heat from inside a box to its surroundings. The room around a refrigerator is warmed as it receives the heat removed from inside the box. If you leave the door open, heat is merely recycled from the room into the refrigerator, then back into the room. A net room temperature increase would result from the heat of the motor that would be constantly running to move energy around in a circle. It would be like hooking up a water pump to remove water from your basement and routing the discharge tube back to the basement.
Answered by: Paul Walorski, B.A. Physics, Part-time Physics Instructor
Concerning the spoken and the written in particular
Isn’t the spoken more performative then the written? Are there intermediate mediums such as msn conversations? Film myself performing my dissertation. The philosophical problems interconnected to the written and the spoken. The importance of myth and mistery (maybe myth) in the spoken word (Buda, Jesus, Socrates… the difference between an artist talking or an artist writing). Authority of these different media for language and it’s implications. The effect and the affect. The unwritable and unsayable and the performative aspects of my work. The importance of the idea of space and the specificity of a venue and the effect it has on me. How does this connect to the importance of the image and the spoken language in post-modernism? Television, Radio, Internet and the battle between word and image being apparently sorted with sound and moving images (the bad consequences of this medium), conventional and new, book and report.Visual culture in the context of art and language. Understanding and engaging.
Myth should be replaced by uncertainty.
The random reflux of language and art. The application of language to specific projects such as the fridge project. The importance of temperature is still to unvail but it might be connected to the awareness of the phisical sensation even when that is not the best souce of knoledge.
Myth should be replaced by uncertainty.
The random reflux of language and art. The application of language to specific projects such as the fridge project. The importance of temperature is still to unvail but it might be connected to the awareness of the phisical sensation even when that is not the best souce of knoledge.
Random Reflux
“Chaos under control” – a book I dreamt about when I was a teenager
Rules are intellectual objects that help ordering functions in systems. The way this happens is based on the forced descriptive coincidence of the behaviour of that function with a cycle or with a constant characteristic. This usually applies to large scale scientific studies of the universe, periodicity of history (the largest scale we can study culture) and any other macroscopic sequence of events. On the other hand randomness, chaos, and the lack of what we would call rules are the basis of quantic systems. The relevance of this is that we live in between these two scales of events. If on one hand we live long enough and have a language that helps us realise the rules of long term weather (not just on the scale of summer and winter but for glacial ages as well) on the other hand most of the time our “rules” only give us a few days of forecast becoming completely irrelevant for the description of our daily lives where all particles (including our bodies) are chaotically shuffled into what we usually call our cultural melting pot.
If we try and relate these simplistic thoughts to art and other creative productions we will realize that language is what we use to define rules and patterns. Even when we think about creative writing as stream of consciousness we will realize its main function is to define the breaking point of order. It almost touches the unsayable / unwritable but it doesn’t obviously overcome that because even if interpretation becomes absurd the object was still written or said. Chaos is somehow interconnected to intuition, deconstruction, explosion, randomness, high temperatures, microscopic objects and the apparent impossibilities that actually happen.
“This video is so random!”
The observer’s reflux
– relational aesthetics, the pathway around the work and gallery is the same as a reflux of liquid
– The need to be critical for certain types of work to be effective such as the gallery wall ripped off. The waste of gallery space being the subject matter of the work implies that if people just believe that is good work it stops being good work at all. To write about this project would be enough if people just though it was a good piece. It wouldn’t be enough. The fact that the realization of the project is beyond the language capability of communication is essential. It produces an effect maybe an affect (check Deleuze’s definition) on people that react critically and realize they start being upset because of the opportunity to do something with the rest of the space. The truth is that if the artist had done anything else to space this hole discussion wouldn't have happened. Because people feel irritated and provoked I believe this is still a good work – but it is only good while there is someone that sees it and hates it.
Conceptual reflux
– Hegel, Eternal return (Nietzsche), Deleuze
– Temperature – scientific definition (functional) – the temperature of art movements – post modernism is dead and it didn’t have a long life. People are trying to feed on a corps. What is beyond language being helped by language – Fridge installation – the permanence of the work – the counter-intuitive environments – the open system (it is receiving electricity) – the way cold is produced – YBA’s Mark queen and Damien’s lack of depth and energy – there isn’t one machine with a 100% efficiency rate – the notion of self (the inside and outside are one single space) – politics (cfc –recycling- environment-public property). The diagnose of he creative death – temperature based
Rules are intellectual objects that help ordering functions in systems. The way this happens is based on the forced descriptive coincidence of the behaviour of that function with a cycle or with a constant characteristic. This usually applies to large scale scientific studies of the universe, periodicity of history (the largest scale we can study culture) and any other macroscopic sequence of events. On the other hand randomness, chaos, and the lack of what we would call rules are the basis of quantic systems. The relevance of this is that we live in between these two scales of events. If on one hand we live long enough and have a language that helps us realise the rules of long term weather (not just on the scale of summer and winter but for glacial ages as well) on the other hand most of the time our “rules” only give us a few days of forecast becoming completely irrelevant for the description of our daily lives where all particles (including our bodies) are chaotically shuffled into what we usually call our cultural melting pot.
If we try and relate these simplistic thoughts to art and other creative productions we will realize that language is what we use to define rules and patterns. Even when we think about creative writing as stream of consciousness we will realize its main function is to define the breaking point of order. It almost touches the unsayable / unwritable but it doesn’t obviously overcome that because even if interpretation becomes absurd the object was still written or said. Chaos is somehow interconnected to intuition, deconstruction, explosion, randomness, high temperatures, microscopic objects and the apparent impossibilities that actually happen.
“This video is so random!”
The observer’s reflux
– relational aesthetics, the pathway around the work and gallery is the same as a reflux of liquid
– The need to be critical for certain types of work to be effective such as the gallery wall ripped off. The waste of gallery space being the subject matter of the work implies that if people just believe that is good work it stops being good work at all. To write about this project would be enough if people just though it was a good piece. It wouldn’t be enough. The fact that the realization of the project is beyond the language capability of communication is essential. It produces an effect maybe an affect (check Deleuze’s definition) on people that react critically and realize they start being upset because of the opportunity to do something with the rest of the space. The truth is that if the artist had done anything else to space this hole discussion wouldn't have happened. Because people feel irritated and provoked I believe this is still a good work – but it is only good while there is someone that sees it and hates it.
Conceptual reflux
– Hegel, Eternal return (Nietzsche), Deleuze
– Temperature – scientific definition (functional) – the temperature of art movements – post modernism is dead and it didn’t have a long life. People are trying to feed on a corps. What is beyond language being helped by language – Fridge installation – the permanence of the work – the counter-intuitive environments – the open system (it is receiving electricity) – the way cold is produced – YBA’s Mark queen and Damien’s lack of depth and energy – there isn’t one machine with a 100% efficiency rate – the notion of self (the inside and outside are one single space) – politics (cfc –recycling- environment-public property). The diagnose of he creative death – temperature based
17.1.07
The 500 words we were asked for...
The research area I want to explore and exploit this year is related to the multiple interactions between language and studio work. This will not be reduced to investigations in literature or science as an influence, but will most of all consider the philosophical and artistic roots of postmodernism and the challenges it presented to contemporary culture.
One of the topics I would like to start with is the difference between language when written, spoken, absent, used for analysis and for the creation of will/difference in the creative process or even supporting an exhibition/project.
This will be approached initially from a deconstructive point of view and will probably develop and problematize Derrida and Deleuze’s thoughts specifically. During that process I hope to oppose those ideas to Roland Barthes structuralism and maybe even Freud’s psychoanalysis. The idea of the work as a semiotic object or as an unreadable text will probably be in conflict.
Friction will hopefully be one of my goals while writing this document. And I hope the rubbing between the formal (visual) and the conceptual (language related) issues will produce something I will be aiming to decompose and analyse. Maybe it will increase my “intellectual temperature” maybe it will just inform the way I present my work with words.
I believe the several approaches and references to Plato’s “mimetic critic” to art by Nietzsche, Susan Sontag and Deleuze will be part of this performative writing project. It might make sense to approach a few other problems related to how clearly things are said or written by taking in consideration Wittgenstein’s rigid approach and Derrida’s loose attitude which gave the reader interpretative freedom.
Art historically I will be paying careful attention to Installation art (and the way it was historically influenced by language) and to specific movements such as Art & Language.
The reason why I believe these subjects are so important for my practical work is because I’ve been perceiving a big connection between the way installations are experienced by an immersed observer and the way I experience language (as a reader or a writing student). Besides the resemblances I believe there are between those processes and the way they mutually influence each other, there are also conflicts and mutual aggressions I am extremely interested in.
I also have high expectations on books I’m reading on imagination, coincidence and vast areas I’ve researched to a certain extent such as New Historicism, Criticism, Hermeneutics and Phenomenology. I will also be sensitive to discussions and journals I’ll engage with and make sure those become part of the process of writing possibly using new atmospheres and forms of writing such as “chat computer programs” (i.e. msn messenger, etc).
Finally I would like to put forward the possibility of exploring only one of these topics if it becomes crucial or maybe exploring exclusively a couple of philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger because of their extreme importance and complexity.
One of the topics I would like to start with is the difference between language when written, spoken, absent, used for analysis and for the creation of will/difference in the creative process or even supporting an exhibition/project.
This will be approached initially from a deconstructive point of view and will probably develop and problematize Derrida and Deleuze’s thoughts specifically. During that process I hope to oppose those ideas to Roland Barthes structuralism and maybe even Freud’s psychoanalysis. The idea of the work as a semiotic object or as an unreadable text will probably be in conflict.
Friction will hopefully be one of my goals while writing this document. And I hope the rubbing between the formal (visual) and the conceptual (language related) issues will produce something I will be aiming to decompose and analyse. Maybe it will increase my “intellectual temperature” maybe it will just inform the way I present my work with words.
I believe the several approaches and references to Plato’s “mimetic critic” to art by Nietzsche, Susan Sontag and Deleuze will be part of this performative writing project. It might make sense to approach a few other problems related to how clearly things are said or written by taking in consideration Wittgenstein’s rigid approach and Derrida’s loose attitude which gave the reader interpretative freedom.
Art historically I will be paying careful attention to Installation art (and the way it was historically influenced by language) and to specific movements such as Art & Language.
The reason why I believe these subjects are so important for my practical work is because I’ve been perceiving a big connection between the way installations are experienced by an immersed observer and the way I experience language (as a reader or a writing student). Besides the resemblances I believe there are between those processes and the way they mutually influence each other, there are also conflicts and mutual aggressions I am extremely interested in.
I also have high expectations on books I’m reading on imagination, coincidence and vast areas I’ve researched to a certain extent such as New Historicism, Criticism, Hermeneutics and Phenomenology. I will also be sensitive to discussions and journals I’ll engage with and make sure those become part of the process of writing possibly using new atmospheres and forms of writing such as “chat computer programs” (i.e. msn messenger, etc).
Finally I would like to put forward the possibility of exploring only one of these topics if it becomes crucial or maybe exploring exclusively a couple of philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger because of their extreme importance and complexity.
3.1.07
I do not want to be here
Pain is not a game. Just a fact that will always be more truthful than anything else.
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