This blog is 4 years old today.
I don’t recall being 4, really, but according to the stories I’ve heard, I mostly enjoyed it.
Lately I’ve been obsessing over scanner art on the Internet, trying to find anyone else who has been doing things on the more performative side (like Compressionism), and also remembering (I had forgotten) that I did a series of textile designs with scannings of water, spices and various other objects in 1993, when I was at Cornell. Wish I could find those files somewhere….
Been reading this Hansen book, which is oftentimes unnecessarily dense and self-congratulatory (whilst mocking other theorists), but it has more than a few great ideas that I certainly would never have come to on my own. Also started Brian Massumi’s 2002 book, Parables for the Virtual, and it’s kind of blowing my mind a bit; he’s such a generous thinker! One passage on writing (the whole introduction maintains this level of intimacy and playfulness along with the integrity and conviction of an inventor-writer):
The essays in this volume work through examples. The writing tries not only to accept the risk of sprouting deviant, but to invite it. Take joy in your digressions. Because that is where the unexpected arises. That is the experimental aspect. If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. You have to be willing to surprise yourself writing things you didn’t think you thought. Letting examples burgeon requires using inattention as a writing tool. You have to let yourself get so caught up in the flow of your writing that it ceases at moments to be recognizable to you as your own. This means you have to be prepared for failure. For with inattention comes risk: of silliness, or even outbreaks of stupidity. But perhaps in order to write experimentally, you have to be willing to “affirm†even your own stupidity. Embracing one’s own stupidity is not the prevailing academic posture (at least not in the way I mean it here).
… page 18
And so on. I like to think I produce (in my various media, including text) much in the same way Massumi writes.
