F405i SESSION 4

Closer shots #1. (Don’t know if these will appear in the correct order.)

More pages including the centerfold. #3

Since the brief for this assignment was so wide open, I set myself some loose guidelines/goals to work within/toward:

Create a zine in the form of a stitched pamphlet.
Order the images in a way that makes some kind of narrative or sequential sense. (If only to me).
Make it for yourself as a one off. (Let it be emancipatory for you). But design it in such a way that conceivably this could be copied/reprinted in physical form for an audience beyond yourself. (Be open to the idea that what you create might, in turn, be emancipatory for others.)
Ignore chronology.
Minimal text.
Don’t write anything for or in the “book”.
All text (my words or words of someone else) needs to come from within my existing sources.
Reflect the reading I’ve been doing.
Incorporate the feelings I have experienced during the course so far.
Make the process as playful and messy as possible.
Treat all collage materials from previous works as fair game to be recycled and remixed into something new with potential new meanings.
Incorporate source images that have been difficult to revisit during the earlier assignments.
Use images from 3 of the new archive folders i’ve created:
Feminisms
Scotland: identity, language, symbols, places
Dark places on the map
Mix those themes up.
Let some sources stand alone. Mix others together in new ways.
No digital collage. Physical cut and paste only.
Only technology: photocopy all source images so the originals can return to the archive.
Mess about with changing the size of the copies.
Repeat images.
Mix of monochrome and colour.

Current reading that fed into the process:
The Riot Grrrl Collection by Lisa Darms.
Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism by Alison Piepmeier

Theme:
I wanted to put my new archive process to work. The folder system I’m putting together is nowhere near complete but i had enough to be getting on with.
I decided to make an autobiographical “book” within a broadly feminist theme that reflected some emotions and memories contained within the archive AND reflect the process of, and emotions felt when, uncovering the sources during the course. I wanted the book to be a representation of the past itself and the present in which because of this course I’ve been revisiting a lot of images from the past that awaken a lot of emotion and at times felt overwhelming.

Our printer has stopped working properly and is basically reduced to being an ink jet photocopier. So I knew, especially as I couldn’t go to a print shop that i had to work within some practical limitations. But i wanted to create an artifact something new that represents the archiving process I’ve been developing during the course, is itself a new source and now part of that archive, but also a standalone work.
I really enjoyed doing it. It felt liberating to play with images that have a painful history and have been featured in works that i made in very different periods of my life. They lost some of their power. As if they too were being liberated.

I think i am going to make a lot more of these. I could easily see this becoming my new favourite medium. I loved the speed and energy of it. It suits the kind of sources i have and i like remixing sources from 15 years back and finding new meaning in them.
I might need to get a laser printer. 🙂

Jon – I find your digital book process fascinating. I can read a coherent thread of thought at work in it and yet the Lorem ipsum cover gives the book a lovely non-determined, provisional framing that doesn’t force the dots to be joined. The contents aren’t being tied down. I’ve enjoyed thinking about that and led to me not labeling or titling my own book. At least for now. Time will tell.

Cherith and Alexandria, both your assembled collections are works of art in themselves. I can imaging myself all to easily spending hours in a museum huddled over a glass case poring over them and wanting to touch them. They remind me again of this question of when a source becomes an art object of its own. If there is even a distinction to be drawn.

Emma, I appreciate your thoughts on writing and shredding and about the power of hand written words we make. I have long thought there is something curious that we use the same word to signify spelling words when we write and the much older and longer act of making magic spells. And that our written diaries and journals have a deep sense of being a kind of private spell-making – they express wishes we imagine into being and make manifest on the page. Your John Travolta story is a beautiful example of that. Both suggesting the wishes behind the act and the fears those wishes can uncover if they are no longer secret but read. Which shows the power they hold. I will be thinking about that anecdote for years to come. There’s so many layers to it.

The colour system for your books is also really interesting. Their covers are what have taken primacy over their contents and prompted memories and thoughts about your own “eye” it’s perhaps unlikely they wouldn’t have done otherwise if arranged differently. That too suggests a beautifully rich seam of potential meanings.

Andy – I am so sorry you remain without power. That sucks. And I feel very fortunate this storm season.
I pulled out a mini book of yours I have had for over 20 years now. It’s crossed the Atlantic twice. I’ve never written in it. But it is mind blowing to consider that when you gave it to me I had no idea at all that a decade ahead I would move to America, in the interim you would live with joel in the house I would be moving into and that I would follow you into the same art studios at DPC. And I am surrounded in this house by your artwork so that this place is filled with your marks. And now here we are another decade on & on a course being led by another alum of that same studio space.
It gives this little notebook retroactively an almost divinatory power. It’s a treasured little piece of my own archive that carries a deep meaning far beyond its size. I’m so glad I held onto it.
I’ve attached images of it as an affirmation of your ongoing journey and bookmaking.

One final thought – there’s a common thread in many of our ponderings – nearly all of us have expressed the challenge of working out a way to better access our sources. I so identify with the problem of having to search through hundreds of pages of notes to find that one little thing we recall recording somewhere sometime. At the heart of this process is a perpetual conundrum- how to organize sources so they don’t get buried by too rigid a system but are order enough to be accessible/ more efficient/habitual and how to do it with a light enough touch that we can be surprised by them in unexpected ways. That act of intentionally mooshing is proving so delicate a creative act & unique to each of us. It’s been a real privilege to witness each person’s process and thought process. It’s made me think and see my own archive in ways I never would have spontaneously done on my own.