Most of my past few weeks were spent doing two things:
a/ to explore the notion of archiving (on site/ in notation); and
b/ to work through the questions around engagement.
I want to unpack the latter here in more detail as part of my submission of SYP2: Resolving my work: PDF zines for circulation as WIP.
The project plan of SYP always included an analogue element: perhaps a artist book/box to circulate in a limited edition; perhaps a performance/event on site or adjacent to (besides its already existing digital form, perhaps edited, perhaps transposed to a different platform from the padlet site).
The idea of an assemblage, an artist box, a limited edition originates with the idea of a large Research drawing or perhaps a large drawing that concluded the body of work. I have spent many hours on site/ about the site to work through the elements, strands, connections and dissonances only to find that such drawing remained elusive. There was however a list of objects that could transpose the site to elsewhere (even fit into a box to be posted; to be non-precious too). Some elements were: larch essential oil, a cone, a feather, an instruction for a drawing machine, a notation of burning birchwood and crows flying overhead.
Again, the materials seem too… perhaps too literal or too romantic, too much trying for immersion when earlier I had deliberately trying to distance myself from that and a simple sense-transferal from here to anywhere.
In my sketchbooks of the original site, the staircase, I find two instructive participatory processes that I have experimented with: a zine around a hatch atop of the staircase, and an instruction for a viewing device. The latter was posted to three friends/colleagues and returned.
Along with my current sketchbook notes and the instructions to touch that I developed as part of For Cover, these in turn became the following:
An expandable collection of PDFs, with printing and folding instructions, relating to variable elements of my practice as research: site, object, method. I modelled two and am attaching them here along with some relevant visual documentation.
#3 Detach:: presents a series of instructions around the notion of distance: to process a single line, phrase or in entirety
#4 Open:: a new invitation to copy a viewing device and use it.
I made simple instructions on the outside, along with title and a return address.
They can circulate as PDF and by means of a double-sided printer can then materialise as a small folded zine, a single image inside.
The series is flexible and can be expanded in various directions and include a number of objects and enquiries.
This unfolding does not yet have an adequate instruction in the PDF:
Research | Body of Work | Sustain Your Practice 
2 thoughts on “A/ folder or perhaps: An instructive glossary to”