Every morning
recaptured in a dream
Every evening abandoned
A house covered with dawn
Open to the winds of my youth.
-J.
Laroche |
Since
leaving my "first universe," my childhood home, I've
been a revenant passing through many places. Then
I realized that a home is not a structure but a vision that
is
under construction; and if we creatively
dis-place ourselves, we can "include all that resides 'outside'
our selves—the lakes,
rocks, birds, oil spills, and ancestors—as part of
our experience of subjectivity."1
Along
with pursuing a "style of old age" for digital literary
art, one that may appear in a precocious youth, the arduous transitions
of middle-age, or as an elder's hard-won wisdom, Writing
Home continues my work toward composing a "deeper
kind of literacy, even when consumed on an e–reader."2 As
with several preceding projects, I've shed the adoration
of multimedia,
to
meditate on the granular
text and the
silent flow
of its accompanying permeated images.
As this
project passed the halfway mark,
I realized that by size and color these letters are related
to "a rectangular piece of thick paper or thin cardboard
intended for
writing and
mailing without an envelope;"3 that
is, they are picture postcards conceived in a digital format.
Although cast in a medium that
virtually collapses time,
the effort required to write and read them severs
any affinity they may have with a Twitter,
"a short burst of inconsequential information,"4 as
opposed to a "deeper
kind of literacy."
Contents
1-
A. Fidyk, "On Home and Identity:
Following the Way of the Roma." Spring Journal.
Vol 85, Spring 2011.
2- D. Huntsperger,"Clickthrough Culture and Difficult Literature." Rain
Taxi (Online Edition), Fall 2012.
3- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcard
4- J. Dorsey, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey
Thank you to Pacifica
Graduate Institute, where I am Artist-in-Residence;
The University of California, Santa
Barbara, for a Research
Fellowship; Portland State University for Internet
resources; and the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture,
Virginia Polytechnic University, for archiving
my digital work.
-Joel Weishaus
