Beginning

Landscape Pages

Some new collages I've been working on.

Open Wound

Talking about William S. Burroughs' cut-up method with students last week, I came across this online text-recombining engine. My favorite thing about it is that it's called Open Wound 1.0, but it's a pretty interesting version of a randomizer. It assigns tags to words based on their parts of speech, and tried to reassemble a grammatical text. As such, it doesn't actually work, but the attempt is interesting. This is the beginning of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, reassembled:

From the Technical image of technical Literature by technical voltaire
I was in an mill, panting on the everything can, my battle picked by the
gown 's head, when I suddenly felt the lavish can of the old metal ruled
from shrill! Leaning need to free words, chiseling them from the steel of
the bushy period. It has, of course, like any life, a divine head, a
master, two steps, and two noble feet, but will never have two meters.
Something to know with, run a few steps, and then stop, bristling, almost
immediately!

Speaking of collision and accumulation

From the chapter "HABIT is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit" [bold mine]:

Something comes along. Something else comes along. They collide and stick. They stay together, perhaps combine with something else again to form a larger combination. This is called a "connective synthesis." An example is sediment. A grain comes to rest. Another joins it. Many grains follow from a variety of sources, brought to a point of accumulation by chance. Not brute chance. Chance discrimination. . . . Not all grains answering to the description join the gang. Given a particular grain, no one, however savvy in sedimentation, can predict whether it will be one of the select. . . . A statistical process of this kind, combining chance and approximate necessity, can be called "selection." A selection is an act of perception, since something, in this case a set of natural laws, "perceives" the grains that come together in a layer. The resulting muck is an "individual."

A part

Detail of GA Collider, ink, acrylic and collage on paper, 2008

I wonder how one makes sense of more-information-than-can-be-perceived/understood. And what does "more-information-than-can-be-perceived/understood" even look like?

The above image is just a part of a much bigger image that wrestles with making sense of too much.

Xerox

as

collage as transformer
collage as redefiner
collage as make-do
collage as gathering

room as installation
room as painting
room blurring distinction between function and aesthetics
idiosyncratic decoration
idiosyncratic definition

what would it be like to live here?

Red-Green Binary