Somewhere Totally Else

This book of short columns by Hans Ulrich Obrist explores a wide range of topics such as Rituals, Time, Maps and Architecture from his extensive career as an art critic. I like the way this book is divided into small entries that are dated, it communicates as the authors diary of observations.

About Inspiration and Making

Rituals

A ritual of his is reading fifteen minutes of something written by Edouard Glissant every morning.

'Why do I read Glissant so much? I like the idea of actually using a work as a toolbox. Of reaching into the thinking of another human being, as it were, and using individual elements as a tool for one's own work.' (p.22)

This is exactly how I use overheard conversation to inspire my practice

On the Night Train

Obrist talks about night trains, their chance for encounter. He says he wrote his first articles on the train and parts of his book, 'because nowhere else do I feel so much on my own, detached from the world'

On Experience and Remembering

Memory

Umberto Eco and the three forms of memory: vegetable, organic, and mineral.

Vegetable is the book - i.e paper made from wood, plants.

Organic memory is the brain.

Mineral memory is a very recent thing, stored in a material but not living thing, such as silicone. Every electronic storage disk contains silicone, without it, computers cannons function.

'Eco, the man of books, regretted that organic and vegetable remembering was in retreat in the Google era, as people have found almost everything already on the Internet before it they have a chance to rack their brains about it. But in external digital memory [...], people find only the public, general knowledge of the past, which he called semantic knowledge. In contrast to this is the episodic recollection of events and emotional states of our own, not public, past that nobody other than the actual person remembering can really know.' (p. 40-1)

Eco told the author how memory always shifts, as an adult he could barely remember his childhood language of Piedmontese but in old age he spoke it fluently. He said "On the day of my death I will remember everything." (p.41)

Dreams and Truth

Helene Cixous; we should always write in the same way we dream, for in the night we never lie. Dream I Tell you (2007) has more than 50 collected dreams that attempt to tell a story uncensored, without author intervention. Using her dream for real experience and discovery. This reminds me of how when I make art I have flashback to dreams I have had ; things that never really happened in reality but in my mind. Why do these memories come back to me? And they're almost impossible to describe, more like flashes of a feeling or smell or place.