Comments on: Week Four: open.ended

By: Lori Emerson

Lori Emerson — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 18:56:41 +0000

I’m not sure if Zephyr or Heliopod will be notified of my note here, but thanks so much to both of your for reading and responding (and so sorry it’s taken me ages to acknowledge you–).

Z: I love your idea of a movement between materials – I wonder what it would look like? Maybe something like the “interface free” touch screen that was introduced last year? Little compares to the pleasures of touching a book or a book object – I imagine your comic journal as a box of loose cards that can be arranged and rearranged, over and over again. what could replicate this experience in the digital realm?

H: that’s great you mention the futurists – I haven’t done much reading on them but I’m still fascinated with the few Marinetti statements I know of where he talks about his dream of a cinematic poem…

By: heliopod

heliopod — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 03:33:45 +0000

Lori….

You brilliantly weave ideas and poetics in this post. Bravo…really…bravo….

As far as 3-d structures, I am fascinated by futurists predictions that one day we will truly have virtual/holosuites or some such real world interactive spaces. And then I consider early and current experiments with 3-d and I find sadly that we have not even come close to exploring the possibilities and wonders of late 90s 3-d technologies/playthings. Let alone how we use and create with current techs and future possible iterations. So it would seem that revisiting these “older” forms would be a grand idea for our wee little field.

By: zephyr

zephyr — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:47:26 +0000

i’ve been thinking a lot about the book-bound possibilities of ‘genuine chance operations’ in the context of comics, or graphic narratives – i used to keep a kind of ‘comicked’ journal and every few months entertain the idea of trying to publish ‘it’ (as if it were one), but the question of timing and binding – sequence and container – thwarts any attempt to collate the stories, which are – like memory – moving simultaneously this way and that, and are often located in two specific temporal moments already (the time from which the story/moment is narrated and the time of the tale). i’ve thought about producing a digital work where narratives intersect and become one another through hyperlinked panels, but – as a reader and lover of objects – i feel, somehow, that solving the problem by digitalizing the material is like responding to a question with a different language than the one from which it is asked… it may provide an answer to a ‘parallel’ question, but the act of translation has already shifted the meaning and material of the original inquiry.

so – how can we create ‘tangible’ works of art and language – objects that involve multiple experiences of texture and touch – that offer the same options of chance and choice as do those that are experienced through interfacing with an object such as this laptop before me? perhaps a multiplicity is needed – not one NOR the other, but a piece(s) that requests of the reader to move between the materials in order to summon the story: a narrative/web that links the book (or whatever we’ll call it) to the screen (to the city? to space and place as well?), through the activated, sensate body – which always feels to be long neglected, avoided (as if there has been an attempt at its voidance), during late sessions leaning over the keyboard, locked into a position of staccato tapping and typing, staring – regardless of the mind dance taking place.