Metafiction, Myth and Language: A World in Words (and Pictures)

 With the editing/spellchecking of the text now almost complete and due to be sent to the printers at the end of the weekend (after the final round of edits and fine-tuning), biggest concerns have recently been turning to the display space. I've added a chair and cushion to invite a viewer experience of the book - the narrative text. The cushion, with its poetic Latin inscription, is revealed to be a sarcastic mirror of the poetic content of the book. The nature of the Latin text is actually pretty significant, as this blog post and translation shows. The idea that it is itself a 'deconstructed' (cut up/rearranged/repackaged) text about poetry and writing poetry is another layer of playfulness and rebuilding in this museum space, which is more like a space that looks a bit like a museum space - like the Latin text which looks like a Latin text but isn't really (it's corrupt, edited and faulty). In another sense, the Latin may be as obscure as some of the names and

Looking back over some of the modernist poetry we studied in Semester 1's Humanities class, I've continued to apply more radical visual structures to the poetic text, using words and their placement as a means of enforcing certain feelings or concepts for the reader: for example, during an earlier scene where the main character struggles up the rocky path to her home at a pivotal moment, separating each word describing the journey onto a line, spaced out from the previous, and following, words to suggest a tricky series of steps (compounds and phrases such as 'rock-tripped', 'thorn-pricked', 'branch-beaten' enforcing the difficulty of the climb). And, in the climactic battle - the main emotional thrust of which is not the overall victory of the allies, or the defeat of the tyrant king and queen - but the loss of the main character's best friend, the effect of which reaches its pinnacle in the third page below, signifying almost unbearable isolation a

 Additional: After posting the above designs, I decided to play around with inverting and multiplying them in Photoshop and investigating the abstract spaces which opened up between the repeated images: This led into a mini-exploration of the Japanese concept of Ma (negative, empty space or void - a concept which I had explored previously in my 2020 Honours degree work) and created a few abstract forms as a result:   Some of these are still recognisable from their original forms - some are rather Rorschach-like. I'm not quite sure what use these might be to the overall exhibition or the book design, although it seemed to chime faintly with Derrida's deconstruction of binary oppositions (black/white, say) and therefore seemed to be a physical and literal 'bit between' those boundaries and extremes (black outlines creating forms on white paper) amd therefore somewhat linked to the notion that characters, races and nations in the text are not 'black and white' -

 Today's tutorial went well, focusing mainly on space - both physical and visual, in the 'museum'/exhibition layout, and in the text itself, which is now in the final editing and presentation stage. We discussed the nature of traditional museums and how they tend to put the visitor through a planned timeline of experience - navigating different places and spaces - circular and/or linear. This came back to my sketchy idea of enforcing some kind of cyclical physicality upon the visitor to my space - bringing them back to the beginning (cf. the ouroborus snake design, again). Seeing strong examples of what can be done with art books and layout had influenced my thoughts on using more white space in the book/text (and reflecting this in the physical museum layout) - by adding blank pages, or creating extra spaces between lines and words at crucial points in the narrative, and interpolating the drawings of characters not as illustrations but as 'break points', for exampl

 First tutorial today of the third and final semester in the approach to the resolution of this final project. Great to talk about my ideas so far and proposed developments, as well as a few off-the-cuff ideas, the type of which invariably pop into the head during such sessions. I'll start piecing together these ideas and possible inspirations soon, and spent the rest of the afternoon scrounging around the yard and adjoining field for likely pieces of sandstone for new stoneworking pieces. My attempts at wood-carving were non-starters and are not even worth sharing here, which is disappointing - but the stone-seeking was productive and I found a few good slabs (I'll worry about how to get them into the art school much nearer the time, but I do have a plan for that).   The largest slab (on the right) weighs in at 27kg - the one on the left is about 22. Whilst thinking about what will be (tomorrow I'll start measuring up some of the other designs and get them traced on to the

  The latest addition to the library arrived earlier today. Even a cursory skim through this text reveals it to be like no other 'novel' I've ever encountered - if it can even truly fit that category, and I can see the connections to Borges straight away, as well as to what I'm trying to do with my own adventures in text and meta-textuality. What does a specific text say? What lies beyond the text - both directly alluded to, or indirectly (via the reader's own experiences and knowledge)? As few people in the West know much, if anything, of the Khazars, we are relying upon the author as an athority - although we can always choose to conduct our own research beyond the novel, in the 'real world'. My situation is different, in that I'm creating something pretty much from scratch (with only allusions to ideas, knowledge and events that exist outside these texts) and then presenting it - whether on a full platter, or only piece by piece, still remains to be