Various Writings: Chapter One

Dion Star

VARIOUS WRITINGS: CHAPTER I There are rumours that writing will cease, books will die, the digital eye will take over. Standing at the edge of this precipice we look away from these preoccupations. Instead we look back, investigating the act of writing through systematic consideration, attempting to disregard all preconceptions. This exposition focuses on the gestural and uses Vilém Flusser’s concept of ‘pseudo writing’, to analyse the interaction between the physical actions and the technologies of writing. The first act of Various Writings’ was a response to Vilém Flusser’s text The Gesture of Writing. This text radicalised our ideas on what constitutes research and thematised the conditions of sharing in ‘other’ terms. Flusser meticulously disassembles the act of writing. We follow in his footsteps, using personal mythologies, Oulipian constraints / translations, taxonomies and non-verbal conversations as implements to excavate relics of writing. We collect codes, tools, surfaces; test writing against various technologies and translate it into movements, attitudes and objects.

Introduction | Observation 1 I Observation 2 | Observation 3 | Studies | Bibliography

Studies

Studies presents a selection of artworks generated by Various Writings. It is an archive-in-progress, indicating how Various Writings engage with research and practice by adopting certain methodologies to become a perpetual generator of activity. Some of the objects/images relate to Flusser’s nine distinct conditions of writing. Other works and studies are particularly informed by the games and restraints of the French-speaking group of writers and mathematicians, Oulipo, and methods of adapted antonymic translation.

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