right now i'm making postcards -- a series -- each one with a story fragment/section on the back. sending them off one-a-day to a friend, who will ultimately put them into his ("the reader's") preferred order.
the postcards are all different sizes, depending on the length of the text, and each also features an image, usually just a bad home-printer color printout of photos also by me.
ideas addressed in this project fluctuate around: sequencing; fragmentation; the use of public utilities in art (usps); fluidity of story (anti-arc of fiction); images that don't "illustrate" text but rather pair with it; analogue/tactile relationships with words, images, "the page."
materials used are minimal and recycled and free-- scraps of cardboard, electrical tape, glue, sharpees, whatever's lying around the house. right now i'm even working without a glue stick, as mine ran out last week and i haven't restocked.
i'm thinking/wondering about/how to ultimately bind all the cards (24 total, plus title page et al) together. but that would cement an order, which i'm not sure i want to do.
suggestions?
[i like this project, too, because it makes me make something every day. even if i just spend five minutes taping together some paper and cardboard, it's daily and it's using my hands (not a keyboard, ahem).]
front (about 8x6 inches, this one):
back:
close up:
3 comments:
maybe an envelope? and then could pull out the postcards like flashcards... or that um, christian marclay book "shuffle"? has a little case that the cards go inside of...i think it's published by aperture?
I love the one of a kind cards, the sending them continuously to the same person.
For the collaboration element of it to work, it seems like the recipient would have to be allowed to cement an order. (Or what does it say that there already is an order in the way they are received? the obvious chronological??).
It may also be fun for the recipient to make an order in the for of an index or suggested reading order, with some code written on the cards themselves, but leaving them out of order (either bound or free) so that the reader can also do something else with it. I'm thinking here of the coded pagination/index of Jesse Ball & Thordis Bjornsdottir's "Vera & Linus." (which is not an artist's book, per se, but a super fun little peice of experimental fiction).
I do like Sara's suggestion of carrying out the mail aspect a little further. There are so many elements already in the initial stages of the project that can be exploited for a great finished product.
Have fun!
oo, great suggestions both of you! thanks. i do think maybe the ordering should be one of the reader's "rights." the impetus for the project was simply that i had all these fragments, and couldn't figure out how to sequence them, and wanted them to "breathe" out in the world for a bit before it was decided. so i'm not against order per se, just... not sure. but having so much fun!
and will have to look at'venus & linus'....
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