Wednesday, April 23, 2008

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.

1 comment:

forker girl said...

First of all, that last photo of the DL1 installation looks rather imposing; I can imagine a bizarre dignitary projected holographically into that space and campaigning for votes, and other forms of support.

The entire project is quite inviting, and the scale of it assisted with its power. Characters in the comic irregularly framed billboards approached lifesize in the context of alien lifeforms truncated relative to average human sizes limits
for reasons of planetary restrictions in their indigenous world, different atmospheric composition and pressure, chemical distributions, planetary mass, gravitational effects, distance from a star system, and perhaps methane-based, creatures looking forward to meet and greets with organisms that inhabit earth's deep sea smokers, hydro-thermal abysses

--these are compliments to what was achieved.

Even to read these comics to derive a codex of meaning requires a map that the comic-reader makes --you made all entry points (quite a feat), the line between cells all entry points

which is to say that I saw nothing that had to be an exit or demanded that anything present be an exit for there were paths back into the progression, even because of that excellent strategy of disrupting the boundary of comic cells so that they were more like boundaries of coastlines, not the edges of the world, but the waters between, a begging for further navigation

despite the characters being outlines --being coastlines themselves

without being populated. Uninhabited countries themselves interacting.

As for the interesting tensions between between lost, excrement, senses, and visitor, these are also, in my configuration, names of lost worlds, abandoned worlds, continental drift --the loop that of being tethered to the planet yet drifting, continents wandering, solid land unbound, unanchored, adrift as if with no ambition, good-for-nothings land masses in need of being grounded

the garbled language of this motion, not of communication one landmass to another but of this odd migration, the land masses going home, going to their rockiness, the mother's milk of magma.

Thank you for your fascinating work!