units text

From: jimleftwich@mac.com
Subject: Re: shadows 2
Date: May 13, 2007 11:00:43 AM EDT
To: ttaylor002@centurytel.net

the units as photographs are just bad photographs. i should
be clear about that as a starting point for any discussion of
them. i don't think of myself as a photographer, but maybe
that's only a form of self-defense. i can think of myself as
a bad photographer and still carry on with what i'm trying
to do. the units series began as a way of thinking about
letters, and quasi-letteral shapes. i have a box of junk i've
used off and on for years, broken legos, pieces of plastic
packaging, trash i picked up while driving around charlottesville.
i started years ago by arranging these materials on sheets
of text and then spray painting over the arrangement. then
last year i made arrangements with the bits of trash on index
cards and spray painted them. that's where the units series
begins on textimagepoem (and in the flickr sets). the thinking
behind the process was similar to the thinking about the
decompositions series. if we break words down to syllables in
order to hear the poems we write, then we can also break
the syllables down to letters and think about writing a
different kind of poetry (not necessarily visual poetry). once
we do that, we can begin to think about breaking the letters
down to their component parts. i started working with this
notion while doing some asemic pieces several years ago.
i bought the blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems and
used it to generate quasi-letteral forms, combinations of
shapes intended to evoke the shapes of the roman alphabet.
a couple of years ago i spray painted my bookshelves using
a stack of stencils, some of them broken, to create patterns.
i photographed the results and forgot about them for a year
or so. i used a digital camera set on automatic (not on close-up),
and shot close-ups, using the automatic flash. everything is
blurry and out of focus. i like the effect. i did the same thing
with a bunch of spray painted stencils a few months ago. the
flash is very intrusive in many of them. sometimes i can't
even tell i'm looking at a photograph of a spray-painted stencil.
the shapes, and the spaces around and between the shapes,
form abstract patterns, new shapes, sometimes quite unexpected.
the most recent set in this series contains photographs of flyers,
yard sale signs, election posters, etc.... a lot of this stuff is in a
large box in my basement. a lot of these photos are made with
something moving - the camera, the stuff in the box, or me. these
are shot on automatic, too, rather than on the sport setting for
motion. the out-of-focus blurriness and the intrusive flash are
intentional. i don't want clear, crisp photographs of letters and
shapes. i want a destabilized, de-familiarized space. we could
think of the units as an extreme form of writing against itself.
we could even think of abulafia (Moshe Idel - "This technique of
breaking-down or atomizing the Name is the most distinctive
characteristic of Abulafia’s technique; the Holy Name contains within
itself ‘scientific’ readings of the structure of the world and its activities,
thereby possessing both an ‘informative’ character and magical powers.
It is reasonable to assume that both qualities are associated with the
peculiar structure of the Name. However, in Abulafia’s view this
structure must be destroyed in order to exploit the ‘prophetic’ potential
of these Names and to create a series of new structures by means of
letter-combinations. In the course of the changes taking place in the
structure of the Name, the structure of human consciousness likewise
changes.")