Friday, January 25, 2008

My Executive Summary Of My Map Presentation

Where Anthony Gormley says, “the body is our first inhabitation, the building our second,” I define building as commodities. And there is one other inhabitation between his two. “He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest,” wrote Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Sound, emotions, language, words – they are another inhabitation for humanity. (The world, implied by Hem to be another inhabitation, is architecture, so Gormley caught that one too) I think in words, I talk in words. Where do I live? In words. Not only do I surround myself with them, but I am surrounded by them. Words are meaningless – they are just sounds – until you decide, “this word means this,” or until you accept another’s definition. Try saying the same word 200 times in a row and you forget what it means, how to construct it. “Sound is humanity’s original collision,” I don’t remember who said that, but words are our most prevalent form of collision.

So my presentation had three parts: the reading, the projection, and the pile of shoes. The pile of shoes was Gormley’s second inhabitation, and the jumping off point for the stories. There were eight pairs of shoes – well, seven in the pile, I was wearing my North Faces. For the reading I was there, in my body –Gormley’s first inhabitation – reading. The stories were each a story, or the story, of the shoes. However, as a friend of mine pointed out, what I ended up with was an emotional map of myself and how I handle, as well as a map of my poetic progression. With the flash animation I hoped to create such an orgy of information that it would become words for words sake and the meaning behind the words would increasingly vanish as the animation progressed. I think that was effective. But I ended up with at least two more layers of information in the animation itself: 1. It became a graphic of my creative process for poetry or architecture (which are the same exact thing): I create like that, I mark the page and toss it again and again; and 2. As I wrote the words I kept relying on some of my favorites as well as bits of conversation around me – it ended up being a map of where I am within words. I was delighted that the why was tossed away by the results in all cases.

If you want to help me out some more, let me know what you think I should have changed, why what you got out of my piece is better than what I thought I would, or whatever, in the comments for this post.

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