User:Bnstlv/specialissue-21

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01 Kick-off: TTY (Working Title)

Pad: SI21, session: 0

Special Issue 21 will be in collaboration with Martino (SI21 guest editor) and 7+ artists and publishers (aka guest contributors). I'm very excited about what's planned for this trimester and looking forward to meeting all of our guests and publishing things on a weekly basis together.

In our first session, we talked with Martino about the history and different use cases of teletype machines, why TTY is interesting, and what's inside. Martino also mentioned some of his previous work, collective projects at Constant, BXL and more. We also discussed the format of the SI21, an ongoing publishing arrangement, to be released every week. It's called Blob for now. To finish off the first day of the new trimester, we read a piece by Lori Emerson Six (Difficult and Inconvenient) Values to Reclaim the Future with Old Media.

Here are a few shots of TTY:

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Authors mentioned during class:

• Samuel Butler (novelist)
• Raymond Roussel

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02 Week1: Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Martino

Pad: SI21, session: 2

Morning | What is our relationship with writing? + Discourse on inscription

During this session, each one of us shared our personal relationship with writing, discussing the differences between writing in our native language and writing in English. Andrea then opened the discussion by explaining his approach to writing, talked about the definition of 'inscription', and looked at examples of writing (and word formatting) by various authors.

This made me think of the stella (archaeology, a big piece of stone with an inscription) we found in the Basilica in Plovdiv back in 2019 and the inscribed names on the stone.

The stone piece (stella) we found in the Basilica in 2019

An inscription is always meant to be read, it is not present, and it has to be deciphered. Inscriptions involve the use of tools, the body, and the hand. 

Not sure if I understood it correctly, but I found it very interesting what Andrea said about how some scientists believe that due to the lack of spacing in some inscriptions, it was necessary for someone to read the text out loud, i.e. reading body and verbal reading.

We also discussed the form of ancient texts and how they are documented and studied by archaeologists and epigraphists. Andrea also referred to Emily Dickinson's pocket letters.

We then looked at examples of how to give rhythm to a text, including Norman Henry Pritchard, Lyn Hejinian (in her poetry she plays with spacing lines in alphabetical order), Karen Brodine (and her book 'Woman Sitting at the Machine Thinking'), Alice Notley, and Hannah Weiner.

Andrea also mentioned Kamau Brathwaite, with reference to the three major crises he faced in his life:

- destroyed Barbados (losing memory = lost his hard drive)
- lost his wife (she had a computer, and she initially started inscribing his work)
- people entered his home to rob him, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. However, the bullet didn't shoot, but Kamau said he basically "died" at this very moment.

One thing that I find interesting was when Andrea explained something about the challenges of using Caribbean language in Shakespeare's work (see Sycorax): "There's no way for him (Shakespeare) to use Caribbean when working on the Tempest because the language itself has to be experienced through listening, it just works differently."

I recorded a short audio of the audio recording we listened to of Kamau reading text aloud to prove the idea of authentic Caribbean inscription. (again, it is possible that I haven't understood fully what has been said in class).

Martino continued the conversation and made a few references to historical materialism, materialism in media, and materialism in Marxism, including the base-superstructure model we covered with Steve last trimester. We also explored the notion that writing has become more fundamental than language itself, given that we are all now 'alphabetised'.

Afternoon | Writing, Revisions and Fixing breadcube

Andrea and Martino suggested doing a writing exercise. First, we had to select a page from the books A & M brought, and then edit we had to write (or rewrite) using the space between/above/below the lines. I chose to work with a quote by Helmut Kopetsky (whose work is centred around radio documentaries). Limit: compose at least 6 new sentences/lines.

I completely misunderstood the task and instead on the piece of paper I printed out, I started working directly on my wiki... I created a page, Why Radio? by Helmut Kopetsky (Berlin, Germany), and decided to do a phonetic transcription of the quote from Bulgarian to English and then I translated the piece into English. It felt right to try to 'phonetise' the text. In it, Kopetsky talks passionately about why he is doing radio, why this medium, and why matters to him. Irmak volunteered :) to be the one who read the phonetic version and she managed to read the text really well.

Need to do the second part of the assignment. 

Finally, we ended the day with Martino showing us how to do direct inscription on a hard drive (breadcube).

Some more photos of today:

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