Collaborative seminars - first week

Over two days, six teams presented hour-long seminars on various assigned topics. Our seminar presentation - on the book as documentary/commentary - was first on the agenda. As a result of the little exercise we set the class, we have material for making a documentary/commentary book of our own.

We set out a continuum from the objective, truthful, factual documentary to the subjective, fictional, opinionated commentary, and asked where various types of work fit (poetry, newspaper story, diary, travelogue, etc). Mi-Young presented various artists' books on the "documentary" end of the spectrum, including Sol Lewitt's Autobiography, Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document and the work of Hanne Darboven, and I chose "commentary" examples from a 1995 exhibition, Science and the Artist's Book, at the Smithsonian Institution, based on historical science books.

For the topic "text in the book and text of the book" we were given cloths with texts written at one end, which we were to read after covering our heads with them. People whose first language wasn't English had to translate their sentence and read it in their own language. Readings were orchestrated by taps on the head, and the voices ran around the room singly and in various combinations.
This is the view from under the cloth -
It felt rather disembodied to be functioning as a hidden voice, one instrument in the group.

In addition to considering the role of synesthesia, members of the group spoke briefly about artists who have influenced their own work - Kurt Schwitters (his Merzbau is on the right-hand page)
Zao Wou-Ki -
"Systems for making and systems for thought" brought up discussion on systems and games, and the role and desirability of systems - do systems kill spontaneity? Artists mentioned included Sol Lewitt, poet Kenneth Goldsmith, pop artist Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Fiona Banner.

The group got involved in putting stickers on the wall according to a simple system -
start from a dot, and leave no bar open-ended -

It looks spontaneous -- or were we evolving our own system?