Response: Epistomological and Epistolary frames
December 17, 2024
Dear Monique,
The things I collect and roughly assemble in cabinets, in drawers, boxes and shelves, jewelry boxes (filled with rocks and drift wood, tiny bones) are so widely various that I worry sometimes worry that I am a bit of a hoarder. I think that the impulse to collect is a scholarly one. But I think it also demonstrates an essential curiosity for and appreciation of the world around us, a certain attunement to the things that comprise the world we move within. I think there also needs to be a distinction between a collection that is specifically scholarly and therefore data and a collection that perhaps has not yet found a reason and is therefore simply an accumulation of curiosities—and also a means of preserving memory, or more simply as means of warding off forgetting. Is this data too? Sometimes it is the collection of an intensely personal memory of something that was collectively experienced. My kids always chide me: “Mom! Why are you taking pictures/screen shot of that? Why are you always filming the sky? The water? The leaves?” I can’t always answer, but eventually the reason becomes clear. It’s just this feeling, and intuition that there is something important here and it needs to be captured somehow, put into a memory bank, usually because it is something ephemeral.
Response: Something has happened to me since the mid-1990s when I was a graduate student and now, the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, in that I know longer think in book. I too am no longer content with the “discrete form of the book, with its tidy covers and beginning, middles, and ends.” In the most basic, foundational practice, digital formats such as hypertext, remain exciting to me for the way in which digital formats can draw together so many different ideas, and not just text, but also visual samples and examples, sound, film. For me, to a certain extent, the book died when I could see how to make thoughts and ideas move—and speak—quite literally. That is not to say that I don’t still love and read physical books, it’s just that I don’t really think “in book.” I think I love other media too much to be able to cordon off an interesting idea within language. Not everything I think about can be expressed in words, which is where the affordances of digital multi-media work for me.
Frame 2:
Response: This cuts deeply into some maternal guilt that I carry. Here we are, living in an age of proliferating visual data- I literally have at least 7 different visual recording devices, filed recorder, various mics, microscopes and 10s of thousands of photos, and yet there is nary a photo album to been found in my house. I yearn for the photo album simplicity of my childhood—the excitement of finally receiving the printed photos from a holiday or birthday party, the disappointment of discovering someone had closed their eyes, looked down, made a strange face, and knowing that you would have to live with it now that it was immortalized in the print, the moment being so long gone that it can not be recreated-- and I wonder if I have robbed my children of essential memories by not having photo albums laying about the house for them to look at. I want to make photo albums, but I find the task of curating the thousands of photos to choose just a few to be overwhelming. I miss the days when taking a picture was a singularly special moment, where taking one photo and one photo only to remember an occasion by was the norm. Did we value our memories more then because they were rarer and more preciously archived? Slow photography.
Frame 3:
Response: So many rocks. Yes. When I was 4, my grandmother gave me a little purse that had all kinds of pockets on it. It was routinely stuffed with rocks, interesting sticks, leaves, beach glass, the odd tiny animal bone. This carried on into adulthood. You will still find rocks in the compartments of my purse, where one might ordinarily find lipstick. What you said about rock collecting, that “Rocks are generally selected because of a pleasing shape texture color or weight. They become decontextualized from their geography, but attached to feelings that were once embedded in place,” resonates. My kids do this too- when I recently had to clean out my old car to sell it, what I mostly found in the various compartments in the back seats were rocks – precious little mementos from our various road trips over the years, the treasures of their roaming on beaches, forests, and badlands.
It’s also a form of documentary, these little bits and pieces from where we’ve been and what we’ve observed.
Frame 4:
Field Notes/Field guide: I’m thinking about how we arrived here- Did it start in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic? Or back in the late 1990s in Graduate School? Or over those two winters that we burnt midnight oil writing grant applications, scratching every last thought out across the night sky?
in solidarity,
Jolene
