I’ll say the people holding it

Come to Some Arrangement

Outline the Steps

Diagrams

I come back to these diagrams very often.

DO SOMETHING

I found out this week that a book I’m making is going to be published by (un)limited store in December. The book will be launched in December at ArtistBook International at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and before that there’s lots of work to do. It’s a kind of instruction manual and I’m calling it DO SOMETHING. Here are some ideas about the book:

In Literature it is only necessary to outline the steps. Let the people dance!*

DO SOMETHING uses the generic diagrammatic form of the instruction manual to create a specific dance of objects and actions.

The objects in the manual are imaginary, and do not exist outside of their drawings on paper. Arranged about the page as if to accommodate a text which is missing, the images are left to speak on their own. Like a translation whose original has been lost, these floating instructions are a trace without a reference, telling a story that cannot be grasped.

Proposed Positivity Posters #3

THE PEAR HOLDER IS BACK

Some other holders are here.

Something You Can Do On Your Own

1. Find that the plastic light pull at the end of the cord can be screwed apart, and find that there is space inside.
2. Cut a thin strip of paper, write your name along it, roll it into a tube and insert it into the light pull.
3. Be in the room a few years later when someone who knows your name finds that the light pull can be screwed apart and that there is paper inside.
4. Look at the person when he or she opens out the paper and looks at you and nods slightly but does not say anything to you.
5. Do not say anything while the person rolls up the paper and puts it back and closes the light pull.
6. Do not say anything to the person subsequently about this, and do not expect that he or she will say anything to you about it.

Imagining Forks at Locus Solus

[I've been reading Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus lately, and the other day I started wondering how my forks would appear if they turned up in Professor Canterel's garden. Below is a treatment of my forks in light-hearted homage to the novel, to see how they might look from a distance. This text is one of several I've been experimenting with over the summer as a way of replacing objects with descriptions.]

This irregular clicking gained clarity as we approached a wide doorway cut into the right-hand wall of the inner corridor. At the professor’s instruction we passed through the doorway and formed a small congregation immediately inside a darkened rectangular room the diminutive proportions of which, on account of the low ceiling and flickering candlelight, lent a domestic air to the tableau set before us.

A slim wooden table occupied the central section of the room before a wooden chair of similar design. The chair accommodated a young woman absorbed in the unsystematic maintenance of several intersecting clockwork machines spread about the tabletop in front of her.

Holidays Vocabulary

I made this in 2005 and I found it again the other day. Though I’m not meant to be working this month I’m surreptitiously preparing it for a Resonance fm broadcast, to be aired on September 21 as part of Digestives.