this is bad art

Nothing to see here; nothing to look for or at. Nothing far or near. Coherence is overrated! If nobody can truly understand then why make anything legible at all! If there is no possible way for me to communicate the clefts of my sheared-rock of a heart, then why worry about anything that leaks out of it? I let fifteen minutes pass, fifteen years, I don’t know. I think about a space in my mind that is the same as floating in the ocean, my ears filled with glugging water, the waves rocking my body to and fro.

I was overwhelmed by the archive project, burrowing deeper and deeper without any sense of progress or perspective. I wondered: Is this whole garbage barge (GARBARGE??) moving at all? Is this accomplishing my goals? How will I know if it is or is not? What is the ‘goal’ of a project that feels like an endless, unchartered sea? If I keep on this route how will I ever finish anything? I needed to re-find the center, or whatever felt like the closest thing to the squelchy heart of the whole endeavor.

I hated talking on the phone, and really the only people who called me were my parents (and spammers). So they went to voicemail. Constantly. After years of having a mother who would, on some occasions, call me upwards of four times a day, I had finally tried to set a few boundaries. Then I let them grow taller and taller. When I resolved to stop answering so many phone calls, I couldn’t tell if their need was increasing or if my desire for freedom and self-determination was growing, or both.

I’ve finally gotten around to tagging all of my old journal entries, but it’s a little more trying than I anticipated. Firstly, because I have not been very efficient. I say “efficient” less in terms of productivity and more in terms of wheel-spinning. It’s basically a “theme” of my work to take the long way round, to over-stress and over-work myself over nothing. To spend hours upon hours hunched over a tiny detail until it becomes unrecognizable but the piece as a whole has remained a stranger in the next room the whole time.

how it feels to collect you: (I have been trying to reframe some of my language from “archiving” to “collecting,” as I believe that it is more accurate. Archiving implies a method of organization and an attention to certain information that I am currently disregarding.) like a betrayal of your current self, the you who is not reading this right now, the “future you” to whom you wrote as a despairing high school sophomore like re-committing my love to you, both in the past and in the present like delaying our reunion.

Here are two elusive things. In 1996-1997, I was taught a primary-level cross-disciplinary curriculum for “gifted” (cringe) students in a small pull-out program. The curriculum implements a frame story that may involve several children traveling to a distant land (it may have been another country, or perhaps an imaginary dimension) and meeting a girl named Zara who wore a Claddagh ring. The program included an audio-cassette reading of the story and several accompanying songs, which may have centered around common aphorisms like “look before you leap.

Now when I think of making something new I also think about having to preserve it. Might as well get it saved away ahead of time so you don’t have to yank its guts out of another wayback scrape. It adds an extra weight to whatever I start, which is a hindrance. What is worth keeping? What is okay to throw away? Despite a year and a half of ferreting around, I haven’t come to any answer at all.

Research Archives Archive as a narrative tool and a form of surveillance; the concept of curation as control. Archive as an art form or framing device; examples of fictional archives or creative cataloging Practical archiving concepts and skills – software, cataloging, and preservation techniques Context Web 1.0, theories of World Wide Web connectivity, data/knowledge-sharing concepts (The Medium is the Message) Online communities, particularly relating to moderation, cohesiveness as a function of size, and personal identity formation.