Over Christmas, I was thinking about documentation. A couple of weeks previously, someone had told me that it’s something I seem to do fairly instinctively. From a professional point of view this makes me laugh, because documentation is always the least attractive aspect of any project for me. But when it comes to something that I’ve got more of a personal interest in, I take the point.
I remembered something that I used to do when I was young. When we went on long car journeys, I’d sit there with a pad of paper in my lap and a pencil in my hand, trying to move my wrist smoothly along each line, but letting myself be influenced by the bumps in the road. I imagined myself as a human seismograph, making a “recording” of our journey that I could then “play back” in future.
Weird kid. But it seems that impulse to document began early and it has persisted in numerous forms (including this blog) ever since. Ultimately, I guess it’s part of an ongoing, life-long battle against loss. Whether you view that as a positive, healthy thing or something that springs more from anxiety and nerves is another matter. It depends on the extent to which it’s carried out, I suppose.
“To remember everything is a form of madness, Owen.”
- Brian Friel, Translations
You could also argue that trying consciously to forget seems like another form of insanity too. I document far less these days… too little, I sometimes think. I don’t feel as driven to do it. Maybe I’m like a recovering addict, trying to avoid that adrenaline surge that comes with the perfect encapsulation of the moment. Maybe I’m just better at appreciating the moment, then letting it go.
I do think the video above (via Caroline) is utterly beautiful, though. The structure of a song, dissected and transcribed into another medium, then undermined and dissolved before your eyes. Coincidentally, my first full-time job was working with a specialist printing company that produced the paper charts onto which those pens describe the music so insistently, with such precise lunacy.
Absolutely brilliant brilliant brilliant!
Happy 2010, Stuart.
Thanks Natalie. And to you.
Weird kids. I used to do the same thing on car journeys. Biro tip touching the pad of paper, recording each twist and turn, rise and fall of the journey. JIM E of UPcDownC produced a fashion range using the musical wave form of his band’s music. Very cool.x
Heh… I realised that I probably wasn’t the only person who did this, but assumed it was far too weird to hear a “Me too” from anyone I actually know.
Do you know the story behind the artwork for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures? Until a couple of years ago, I assumed that was a musical waveform too. It’s actually a graph of the final 100 bursts of radiation from a pulsar… a mathematical representation of a dying star. I’ve only just realised that this was probably the inspiration for the title of my recurring Dwarf Star Origami pieces, which started to emerge about the same time that I learnt this.