PROJECT

the CONCEPT:
the comic relies on the framing of the cell in order to communicate a linear narrative. my project aims to deconstruct the heiarchy of linear narrative by creating a jumbled, free association narrative through the arrangement of five comics. the comics have reccurring characters, but connect narratively to each other loosely at best. even within th e framing of each comic, narrative obtains two-dimensionality by distorting the line of progression between cells.

the CHARACTERS:
the main character is a hollow dome ghost. he is in complete isolation in that he is the only character in the narrative, save for a ghostly floating fish character that he mistakes for his nose. it's not up to me to interpret this desolation: the setting only serves to not distract from the flow and wanderlust of two-dimensional narrative.

LOST

this comic acts as a central node for the two-dimensional communication between comic narratives. within the comic itself, the eye can follow the traditional progression (left to right, row to row) or follow the directions of the characters.

EXCREMENT

this is the philisophical node of the composition.

SENSES

the duality of life/death greatly affects the prescence of our protagonist: dead but not useless, communicating but not living.

VISITOR


what is the nature of interaction with a dead//useless node of perception? the outcome is inevitable: he can never really understand the nature of connection.

UNIBROW

finally, grappling with the nature of time when your time has already passed. how does it feel to be in temporal suspension, no longer able to move in a linear path, but instead only able to move through two-dimensionality (THINKING IN CIRCLES)?

THE FINAL FRAMING:

the 5 comics are mounted on a plastic board and suspended from the ceiling. connecting them is different-colored twine which indicated the narrative between the narratives. the effect is a distortion of how to look at the piece or read the piece, placing its interpretation into a gray, unframable area. each twine projects onto the floor and is attatched to one of three tape loops, which were performed through delay. the nature of the tape loop- a continuous strip of magnetic tape that will play on its own forever but never progresses into anything new but is, of course, stuck on a loop- seeks to infuse the piece with the same looped, going-nowhere aesthetic. it also adds to the distinctly homemade aesthetic of the work: unpolished, unsheened, unfinshed. the spirit of the performance is undocumented, and its ghost sleeps in each individual loop cast on the ground.

"IN THE LAB!"

purpose hypothesis experiment observation conclusion


PURPOSE: in considering the cross-section of charles olson's work and john cage's work to suggest a network of "framing" which seeks to deconstruct the piece's "ultimate" finished frame and thus remove its closed-system inducing "sheen."

HYPOTHESIS: the work of the artists will signify open-stem networks of framing which are both destructive to the idea of an "ultimate" finished work and elusive towards "ultimate" poam interpretation.

EXPERIMENT:
charles olson :: his work deals with the instant, or the snapshot of a thought in midprogression. by freezing the moment, his work extends both ways: by not awknowledging the past or future, both temporal distortions are implied through freezed motion. his dogma states that "all hiearchies, like dualities, are dead ducks."

john cage :: the lecture is divided into lyrical progression, removing its classification from a concrete poem to something more fluid and elusive. the poem should not be read in "an artificial manner", cleansing from its interpretation a critical eye.

OBSERVATION:
charles olson :: the poam is framed by elusive islands of prose composd randomly and at different angles among the page. he does not adhere to the heiarchy of the straight line across the page. rather, word association strings together abstractions.

john cage :: as the poem is read in 4/4 rythm, words begin to slip from their meaning and add to the rythm more than the interpretation. the poem therefore has a dual existance, saddling itself between comprehension of ideas and construction of a lyrical poetic form.

CONCLUSION: i was right! but this scientific process is probably a mere reframing of a traditional thesis anyway.

-when reading the print poam with reflection on my framing aesthetic, i've realized the importance of structural aesthetic within a piece.

-however, i by definition am reading these poams from an obscured point of view: my own. in this way, the role and heiarchy of the author is messed with. i'm essentially forcing my ideas onto others- yet is the removal of authorship from a poem necessarily a bad thing? my proposal is no in that it seeks to illuminate the objective beauty of the poem: a headless beast evokes great emotion.

REFRAME

as i've reiterated before, the existance of a concentric reframe both literally underlines the existing overframe and undermines its power to section and sanction. By reframing, a piece can exist in plural dimensions when considering a "frame" as a context with which to interpret what's inside of it.

on jerome rothenburg:
-dadaism relates pointedly to my frame philosophy in that it seeks to obscure and reject any sort of framing within an art historical canon- it even hates to be framed under an "ism" and thus dadaism is a paradoxical term. rothenburg reframes the spirit of dadaism by straining images together for no apparant reason: finally settling on the image of duchamp's fountain.

FRAME

frame exists to dictate the boundaries of ideas in my project. imagine frame in the context of a comic: each scene is dictated by the size of its cell, and each narrative is dictated by the size of its overarching frame. my project focuses "as i will further elaborate in a later post" on the desanctifaction of the frame and the exploration of different nodes of interpretation in order for my idea to jump from frame to frame or entirely break through the given frame. i do this by implementing concentric frames in order to undermine their authority in my piece.

juxtaposing my framing philosophy with images from Super Vision:
(178) these cross-sections of the human body contain many concentric frames: first, the outline of the body, then the framed organs, and eventually the frames of cells themselves. the human body is a problematic frame in that it constantly changes appearance and is in constant microscopic (skin shedding) and macroscopic (defecation, spitting, bleeding) flux. obscured by the framing of the skin, frames are being broken and unbroken constantly by the body.

(28) how do you frame gigantic images not normally seen by the naked eye, such as earth itself? by converting something "unphotographical" into a constructed image, compromises must be made: in this case, pixelizaton of the image. this shows the restrictions apparant in framing something that's not supposed to fit on the frame of a computer monitor or a page.

(138) more examples of skin shedding. the frame of the cell can be useful at first, and later degrade into uselessness. the image itself seems barren, but the potentiality is actually buried under the ragged landscape.

(162) the "snowflake" created by connected polarities reveals the potential of an unplanned, random frame. what can be derived for this? its spontaneity implies the significance of a hastily created frame of mind within a soupy frame of particles.

(168) Super Vision notes that "x-ray perspective enables us to see even everyday things with additional dimensions normally unpercieved." the x-ray, then is another indication of the power of a cross-section: being able to see an image's innards that are normally obscured.

(157) ELASTIC FRAME: one that is stretched between two nodes of perception by force. the "snapback" of the rubber bands after being cleaved by the bullet shows a return to their natural frame.

(98) in contrast with the dead, useless frame of a skin cell, the micrograph of the mast cell indicates a moving, alive frame, even within the frame of a body. Super Vision regards it as a "beast": it's a microcosm of the life which it supports.

(99) these geologic cross-sections show how texture can frame a piece. It also indicates that texture can be read and translated by light into a digitally constructed frame which places it in a different space of comprehension.

SYMMETRY SYMMETRY SYMETTRY SYYMETRY SIMITRY SYYMOURTEE
ARRAY: the significance seems to be in the uniform spacing between objects. this seeks to create an identity for the image as a whole, and undermine the force of each individual repetition.
ROTATION/REFLECTION: the important thing here is that symmetry is created from a central node or line that doesn't visually exist within the composition: it's an invisible dictator which the piece literally revolves around.
GNOMON: recall the "dead tissue" philosophies above. gnomons grasp the concept of building and growth. i'm surprised the book didn't incorporate the concentric gnomon inherrant in tree rings.
RADIAL: seemingly the natural progression of ROTATION/REFLECTION. it's a reflection that has obtained perfection by extending in all possible directions (circle/sphere).

OCCUPIED SPACE

on miss queenie's "one day":
the unifying fiber through the poem is the poetic realization of an accent: translating a cultural stigmata into printed word. This appropriation allows for a connection through visual stimulus because the conversational tone of the poem opens new connections and nodes to latch onto. By mixing languages, the poem further mimics a conversation by focusing on the sounds of the words and not their meaning. it occupies a verbal space even though the book does not literally speak.

on tom waits's "swordfishtrombone":
what space does the printed word occupy when it's given the sanctification of a song, composed music? even though the poem isn't seperated by rhyme, in recitation it separates itself through the tone and inflection of the voice however hard it may try to maintain an unbiased approach. thus the poem itself has a hidden construction within it given to it by its social classification as "song."

on dizzy gillespie's "SABLA Y BLU":
by removing the comfort of words and word association, the repetition of the same letters sanctifies the form of the poem, since this is the only foundation one has to build his or her interpretation on.

on jaques roubaud's "from some thing black":
the piece is dictated by the three suppositions: "there is no more // nothing can be said // from now on nothing will be like her." the following is a logical dissection of the suppositions and their application to philosophy. roubaud's "meditations" occupy the space of philosophical rhetoric, cross-sections of the speaker's mind. his visions are constantly bounced off the ideas of the floating, ephermeric "her" which nothing will be like: she is the tabula rasa which roubaud's ideas are projected onto.

on david antin's "endangered nouns":
the bird symbol serves as a metaphorical bridge between the author's experiences in california and his memories in new york. he remarks "i remembered that bird i said to myself it was a . . . and then no name came it was as if instead of a name there was an empty space the size of a name that should have been there". the bird's societal classification is lost, yet its symbolization stands clear within the poem. the author obsesses over this blank space in his mind, questioning the space that "nothingness" occupies: is it a hole, and being a hole, is it therefore something? is it there, but held away from realization by a few dead or malfunctioning neurons?

on pierre joris's "from winnetou old":
joris slips, like miss queenie, between english and another language, this time german, in order to both desanctify the meaning of the individual word and the sanctification of the movement and composition of words. his prose is unbounded by sentence structure, sifting from idea to idea, each idea held in ovular nodes on the page.

SCULPTURAL POETRY

tangibility exists in a poem in its depth: as a poem extends vertically and horizontally along the page, there is also a third unseen z-axis from the page to your eye.

Yannis Ristos effectively folds the poem into itself by giving the stanzas irregular numbers, suggesting a jump in time, space, and construction between the separated prose.

Section 14 indicates concentric ideas symbolized by color: "in the white egg // a yellow chick // a blue song. The song is within the chick is within the egg, and by giving us a cross-section Ristos sidesteps reality: the visible world would see only a white egg, since the overbearing white obscures the chick and its song inside. Take into consideration the cross-section of a zebrafish gill on p.85 of Super Vision: via the transformation of vivid colors, we can see the process of blood conversion from de-oxygenated to oxygenated as if it were a topographic map, even if this could never exist to the visible eye. There is always a poetic counterbalance of ideas trapped within ideas that exists within everything, and thus the nature of the naked eye is to flatten and "simplify" this counterbalance by obscuring all but the outer layer.

In the gap between 14 and 26, Ristos moves from visual aesthetic to emotional complexity: a blade hidden up a sleeve indicates complicated social interaction, far from a chick crying a blue song. The zebrafish gill is a pristine example of this complication in that while it exists as a visual piece, it also documents the process that keeps the zebrafish alive. However striking it may seem, the gill still serves an infallible purpose.

When referenced to the zebra gill, the "blue song" gains complexity, also: an idealistic chirp, yet at hte same time a plea for live and a herald for the life within. Take into consideration the microscopic eye blood vessel of a guinea pig on p.114 of Super Vision. As an aesthetic object the hole exists in negative, useless, bottomless space, yet its actual function is vital for the guinea pig to see. Try to imagine a guinea pig looking at this image: a same blood vessel in his eye is pumping information into his brain about the bleakness and obliquity of that same blood vessel.

i meant to leave

your scarf in the woods

at half past breakfast-

but time is a social construction

and i lack the social skill

to define 'half'