marginalia

marginalia and other crimes. cambridge university library.

case 2 - borrowable stock, damage outside the library
some damage is accidental. books get damaged in house-fires, in floods when water-pipes burst and other unforeseen accidents. readers pay for replacement copies. and these expense may be covered by their household insurance policies.
water, fire, miscellaneous, ink, coffee, not OK for bath, not OK for bath, OK for bath, rain,bottle of water

case 3 - damage by animals, small humans and birds
other damage that might be grouped under the heading of carelessness includes: books chewed by dogs, children's artistic additions to the text, books chewed by mice.
dog, dog, mice, mice, mice, child's sticker, child's sticker, child's scribbling, child's scribbling, pigeon droppings?, safe keeping - a plastic bag

case 4 - marginalia
these examples of marginal notes are typical of much of the damage done to our stock. although pencil marks can be erased, however carefully the marks are removed, it does damage the text. and if a text is marked and erased a few times it is ruined.
ink, signed, signed, comments on comments, comments on comments, single author many books, single author many books, ?, international

case 5 - colored marginalia
marked text comes in many colors. the use of color-changing pencils, in these two examples, helped identify the culprit.
pencil crayon, pencil crayon, highlighter one color, highlighter multiple colors, highlighter multiple colors, underlines in ink, marginal comments as well, highlighter multiple colors, highlighter multiple colors, underlines in ink, marginal comments as well

case 6 - pencil marking and adhesive notes
pencil marking, whole page, whole page, small amounts in ink - still pay for whole book, adhesive notes, adhesive notes, adhesive notes, adhesive notes

case 7 - physical damage
how the UL responds to the damage
accidents: books damaged by accident are replaced with the same edition. the reader is charged the replacement price plus an administration charge. the damaged copy is stored at 'class z'. some readers ask to have the damaged copy but it is not permitted. the new copy is put at the same location, with the same classmark, that the damaged copy originally had.
defacement: books damaged deliberately are replaced with the same edition. the reader is charged the replacement price plus an administration charge. the library syndicate levies a fine of up to £175, depending on the circumstances. on the first offense, once all fines are paid, the reader usually retains their privilege of using UL. we have not had a case of a second offense. these matters are usually settled in-house. but replacement costs quickly accumulate into large sums. one case cost the reader £2,500 in total.
abstraction: ripping pages from texts is regarded as theft. the police may be involved and readers who are successfully prosecuted lose all their privileges to use UL forever. texts are replaced and stored at higher levels of security. the original copy is retained at class z.
tearing out pages, tearing out pages, tearing out pages, cutting out photo

melancholia

we have a big heart for melancholia - sadness is beautiful. the blue side of life is where we are as persons and as artists. the music also reflects our introversion.
- tenhi.

richard mosse

British Journal of Photography
March 25 2010
Richard Mosse: La Vie En Rose
by Olivier Laurent

Ask Richard Mosse what first fascinated him about the Congo and he'll give you a long list. "Joseph Conrad. Tin Tin. The Rumble in the Jungle. The Belgian colonial legacy. The beer. The Ebola virus. A country the size of Western Europe with less paved roads than Ireland. The ‘bulletproof' Mai Mai warriors. A conflict so pathologised that it is well past the point of human comprehension."

But it's the latter reason that led the Irish-born photographer to use Kodak's Aerochrome film. Discontinued last year, the film is particularly sensitive to infra-red light, rather than to the usual visible spectrum of colours registered by traditional film. Since foliage reflects infra-red while buildings don't, the US Army used it during the Vietnam War to detect and reveal hidden soldiers. "I wanted to export this technology to a harder situation, to up-end the generic conventions of calcified mass-media narratives and challenge the way we're allowed to represent this forgotten conflict," says Mosse. "I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance technology, to use it reflexively in order to question the ways in which war photography is constructed."

Mosse was first inspired to use the film after seeing the work of Florian Maier-Aichen. "This German artist rejects the influence of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Becher school to embrace a kind of Romantic exploration of the landscape of the American West," says Mosse. "I was moved by the beauty of this work, and wondered whether he used colour infra-red film to compose certain images. I'm not sure whether he actually did, but I got excited by the technology, which is considered to be a kind of photographic taboo – thou shalt not cross-process; thou shalt not use colour infra-red film."

While Mosse refuses to reveal where he got the discontinued film - "I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you," he jokes – up until February, a small company in Germany supplied it in the 120 medium format by cutting it down from a large roll stock. However, even that supplier has now run out of the film, BJP understands. But this setback hasn't deterred Mosse from his continued interest in Congo and infra-red technology. The 30-year-old photographer plans to go back next year with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, with whom he's worked on previous projects.
"We plan to shoot IR Red One video. That involves sending the Red One camera back to the factory where the OLPF filter will be removed from the digital sensor." The result "will be quite extraordinary and very different to the old Aerochrome stock," he says. "It will be a kind of blown-out monochrome palette. We've actually shot infra-red before in Iraq, where Trevor repurposed his Zeiss lens to peer through a US Army IR goggle eyepiece. The result was this nightmarish green-and-black palette, rather like the old DOS interface for anyone old enough to remember computer screens before Windows and the Mac Classic."

However, he says, "the IR we will shoot in Congo will probably look a lot different, rather like the moment an atom bomb detonates. The world will seem shadowless, like a breathless high-noon desert landscape, yet we'll be beating through the jungle shadows."

www.richardmosse.com

kris kuksi

“A post-industrial Rococo master, Kris Kuksi obsessively arranges characters and architecture in asymmetric compositions with an exquisite sense of drama. Instead of stones and shells he uses screaming plastic soldiers, miniature engine blocks, towering spires and assorted debris to form his landscapes.The political, spiritual and material conflict within these shrines is enacted under the calm gaze of remote deities and august statuary. Kuksi manages to evoke, at once, a sanctum and a mausoleum for our suffocated spirit.”
Guillermo del Toro

for the past couple of years, i've been fascinated by kuksi's sculptures - thanks to D who first introduced me to this amazing body of spiritual intensity.
1) obsessively delicate sculpting, 2) militant, dogmatic messages to the contrary, 3) multiple microcosmic narratives within each piece, 4) solitary craftsmanship, 5) tension between smallness of human and aspiration to surpass it - a.k.a. religious.

On theater...A passing comment

all panoramas and dioramas, including their variations, are enveloped in containers that are as large as a georama dome and as small as a honeycomb box for the diorama model i make. on one level, the containers control light and, therefore, what can be and cannot be viewed. on another, they create, what bachelard calls, an illusion of shelter that allows one 'to dream,' to wander. to bachelard, many memories are impregnated in a house where every nook and corridor serves to delineate them. the more securely they are fixed in space, he claims, the sounder they are. the notion of memory then begins to shift from time to space where determination of dates for our intimacy becomes no longer relevant; rather "the spaces in which we have suffered...enjoyed, desired and compromised...remain indelible within us." in tsai ming liang's goodbye, dragon inn, the architectural space of the fu-ho theater also contains the cityscape of various people, noise, activities, and even ghosts. the theater is the city's oneric house where many movies have been screened and stories scratched onto the heavily textured walls and floors of the building. it is a residue of which the city has left its traces; it represents a soon to be lost aesthetic shelter.

if goodbye is about capturing a sense of place...that is dying, diorama is about capturing a sense of place that is about to begin. a diorama model is contained in a box, a device that controls the direction and magnitude of light so that it can appear more realistically in a photograph. it also acts as a three-dimensional stage to construct and display a potential landscape scenario. in landscape design, the diorama box houses the future of a place, steered by our curiosity to what appears strangely familiar. imagination of a designer and viewers take place in this box; beyond the three-dimensional objects in foreground and the two-dimensional photograph of a site context in background, one begins to daydream about the possible place that can come to life.

then, there is a paradox. on one hand, both movie theater and diorama box control movement and vision of a spectator; on another, they serve as a bachelardian shelter that encourage mental wandering. to achieve a perfect illusion of reality, earlier panorama and diorama accompanied highly calculated rotundas and props inside to manipulate spectator's vision. modern movie theaters follow the same path: a darkened room and the screen bordered with black walls or heavy curtains allow no exchange, no circulation and no communication with any outside. screening takes place in a closed space where viewers are not expected to move out of their assigned seats. every viewer faces in one direction toward the screen, toward the same film; all cellular phones must be turned off and no babies must cry. in a similiar principle, a diorama box selects, crops, and fragments landscape that only matches the designer's intention to be shown. the landscape is presented and represented as an object that demands compliance.

according to baudry, cinema presumes a subject as this passive observer. the screen reflects images, not reality; cinematic apparatus lends the film spectator the position of a trancendental subject and at the same time blocks the insight that this position is something that is constructed. baudry relates the spectator's self-misrecognition to lacan's theory of the mirror phase: at an age when it experiences its own body as uncoordinated and fragmentary, the child is provided with a visual impression of individual physical wholeness in the mirror image. the mirror image appears to him as an ideal ego; the identity available to the child, therefore, derives from a site external to itself. baudry explains: "just as the mirror assembles the fragmented body in a sort of imaginary integration of the self, the trancendental self unites the discontinous fragments of phenomena, of lived experience, into unifying meaning. through it each fragment assumes meaning by being integrated into an 'organic' unity." according to him, cinema fulfills this wish by producing a phantasmification of the subject. the cinematic apparatus is intended to be hidden in order to maintain a fiction, which exists in the first place due to a denial of a real social coercion. for baudry, the only way to break through this phantasmification was to make its production obvious and visible.

however, what baudry seems to underestimate is that this self-surgery - assembling discontinuous fragments into a body of meaningful narratives - is in fact an act of empowerment. the long, static camerawork in goodbye forces us to pause...until our eyes, either out of boredom or curiosity, begin to wander themselves in the screen searching for own meaning. even the crowd in tsai's film doesn't seem to be affected by the rules of the theater: a young couple chews on popcorn too loudly; an old man joins the auditorium at his convenient time; and the japanese tourist constantly switches his seat and pursues erotic encounter while ignoring the screening entirely. perhaps this is where freedom seeps in. and imagination. the impression of reality during cinematic experience is produced not due to what baudry claimed a denial of social coercion but due to a willingness to overcome and rebel against such coercion. and perhaps in the diorama, a small fragment of the selected landscape and its deadly silence, must i add, trigger the viewer in the same way that tsai's long, static shots did....especially in the case of diorama models, there is still a charm to its naively deceptive nature. parcell claims that because diorama is not a historical reconstruction, it retains a potential for fiction without an authorized narrator to explain what it means. also relevant is its delivery of the qualities of space not through a measured space-making but through a hybrid of suggestive materials such as barbeque brush and color pencil shavings that defy literal and to-scale conventions in landscape representation. it is a play afterall, a spectacle of deception that requires the spectators to consent to being duped; the consent, however, is not inflicted.

Domus of lost virginity

Zhang Dali, Chinese Offspring (2003-5)



Jin Meng, Room with a view (2002)

zhang and jin's photographic journey is a phantasmagoric picturesque, an unfolding space of an interior and haunting objects in distance that questions our gaze - a gaze of political and social desire; a gaze that survived repression and hardship. we wander through the derelict topography of architecture as a lonely witness of an upheaval and change, albeit illusional, which has left us with a ruined map of cities and symbols...community is hung upside down, iconic loci flee, and what was once a proud order in society only remains within the confines of a picture-frame as a static memory.

Haptic reality

Dioramas @ American Museum of Natural History

"journey poems, view paintings, and garden views were among the new forms of shared spatiovisual pleasure [during the eighteenth century]. they combined a sensualist theory of the imagination with the touch of physicality. a haptic consciousness was being produced. the broadening of visuality inaugurated at this time was essentially about changing the way desire was positioned: it effectively 'located' desire in space and articulated it as a spatial practice."

"working closely with topographical representation, this genre of view painting emphasized the drama of location; the portrait of the city in italian vedutismo, that is, tended toward a narrative dramatization of sites, characterized by a heightened and tactile texture of place."

- G. Bruno, Atlas of emotion: journeys in art, architecture, and film

diorama is a simulacrum of haptic reality, a design tool in which a narrative and material texture can be imagined and tested as an extension of site context. it is not necessarily a historical reconstruction, as stephen parcell argues; it retains a potential for fiction without an authorized narrator to explain what it means. it's a metaphor free from didactic feeds.