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I’m beginning a new digital project for y’all. Its called Sympathetic Objects. Basically, I’m interested in the objects that are passing through life with me. I’ve started a new collection for this project – everything that came into being May 1982.
Object #1:
(A bit of a given… but…)
National Geographic Magazine from May 1982
Object #001
It’s been a couple of days since I’ve made a post of any consequence. I have had a number of not so pleasant things on my plate and am now just starting to lean back in and write about ideas. I’m finally getting around to changing my web-presence, portfolio site, and print identity. Whew.
Rest assured that the new http://andrewschroeder.net will be twice as wonderful as the first (which should not be hard, considering how weak my portfolio site is at the moment).
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- Experimental Jetset from AMS, I’ve carried this object with me for two years now.
On to today’s post.
Directly to my left is a copy of Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. Manguel covers all the little technologies and techniques we’ve developed over the centuries that make reading a beautiful, nuanced, and fulfilling thing. Imagine life without the technology of reading silently…
In many ways an anthology of the practice of reading, the book has made me think of the ways that I attempt to expand, contract, and shut-out the world via reading.
For example, perhaps my favorite passage thus far (read while freezing my ass off on the #24), is his description of the ways that we’ve come to accept the book as a type of outsourced memory. Historically, readers were taught not to mar books/scrolls/scripts with their doodles and notes as a way of marking what they found important. Instead, those who read were encouraged to meditate on the shape, form, and spatial location of words on a page and then be able to recall information from that geographic knowledge.
Its all very beautiful, if impractical. Perhaps we’re being pushed back to this system with all of the “thought-mapping” and word-webbing software that is available. I’m trying to imagine my library at home as a spatial construction. Instead of all of my notes in sketchbooks, databases, and blogs – what if I could actually recall the geography, the physical place, of my acquired knowledge?
In a way this physical location of memories/ideas/knowlege still lingers on in my life: whenever anyone borrows a book from me, I feel a little physical loss… almost as though the weight of that knowlege is being removed from me.
Fun thoughts for a Tuesday…. imagine a world where human beings only have physical memories… where we have to possess the object in order to remember the actions associated with it.
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Another take on reading from Paris is Burning.
