FIELD NOTES: Architectural Uncanny :: Poetics and the Built Environment with Martin Byrne
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Byrne's installation, the "Occupiable Sculpture" Digilog Futures, at 83 Gallery (Columbus, OH) http://www.architizer.com/en_us/projects/view/digilog-futures/40226/[/caption]
Day # 5 (1.5)
Wake feeling strangely ok.
This does not last.
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Where do poetics and the built environment overlap? What do we take in, what do we observe? Where are the boundaries where we end and our context begin? Or are these boundaries illusory?
What of these questions when you engage with and build this environment? When the city, the block, the structure, the wall, all that recedes as existent, is your medium? In this mini-series of FIELDNOTES, architect and poet Martin Byrne lets us peek into his mind/journal.
FIELD NOTES : Interrogating Truth:: Poetry and Journalism with Andre Bagoo in Trinidad and Tobago
A Note on Notebooks
Andre Bagoo
AT FIRST, I wanted to keep them separate. After all, they could not be more different. One, plain blue with the words ‘REPORTERS NOTEBOOK’ written on its thin cover. The other, a fancy Italian notebook with a hard cover that looks like brown marble; the kind of pattern you used to find on the insides of old books thrown out by the library. For a long time I walked with the reporters’ notebook on work assignments and saved the other notebook for home; for later; for after the real work of the day was done. Somehow they conspired to get together.In truth, they were meant for each other.
FIELD NOTES: Jacob Perkins, From the Cannery : Pt 4 :: Lost and Found
The crew just left after a week of touring through Valdez and the kenai peninsula. Joyous time, a little relieved to rest, but of course we're about to jump into a month straight of intense fishing with absolutely no breaks or
FIELD NOTES: Jacob Perkins, From the Cannery : Pt 3 :: Exxon Oil Spill
Pushing off the dock in Kodiak with a solid three weeks of work behind us, the small cannery we called (temporary) home, Alitak, lies behind a hundred miles of fog and snowcovered peaks. We set off on a thirty hour run north, to an equally small town, Kenai, for the salmon season on the Cook Inlet.
I'd like to tell you about jigging for cod over this time, on a small boat in high wind and waves, but I find myself interested in showers, and their locations, scarcity.
FIELD NOTES : JACOB PERKINS: From the Cannery, Pt 2
Straight from Kodiak -- our second installment from poet and artist, Jacob Perkins.
Here's an excerpt from PT 1 - to contextualize the images and drawings below. More words are incoming... he's on a fishing boat in Alaska, after all!
"Myself, I am Alaskan born. Summer is the season of the sockeye. For others it is re-shingling, re-siding, decking, painting, some kind of hometown gig you begrudge seasonally, out of that season. For me it is sockeye, and a gillnet, and a boat.
Whether or not you’re leaving your medium; the palette, the sound equipment, the studio, the computer; or if you’re lucky enough to bring them along, one thing is clear: summer is time to get down to some hard work, psychologically, ideologically, literally."
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A 45 pound Lingcod we caught in Kodiak[/caption]
EDITORIAL :: FIELD NOTES and the RHIZOME : the series grows wild and free
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"from the seemingly random the rhizome develops" - Bob Holman, June 23rd, 2012 @ Naropa SWP | intuitive responsive visualised field notes by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson[/caption]
Since the inauguration of the Field Notes series there has been a great rumbling -- not only of interest in the project [on deck: filmmakers, musicians, programmers, visual artists, activists...!] but also in the expansion of its attentions.
Given our proclivity towards community collaboration we eagerly sop up the runoff of creative juices that gathers like dew on you all in the morning! So, naturally, to the question, "could we also include ____?" the answer is, why NOT?
If you're new to Exit Strata, this is a good time to introduce you to our commitment to PROCESS: as much or more than we are excited to share and celebrate the products we create, we thrive and exist around the notion of creating community together via an intentional desire to the work of art. That is to say the WORK that is art, and the collaborative acts of craft across many disciplines that make this work so rich. We are not interested in what is NOT. We are interested in IS. Human attention, human questioning, universal energetic wanderings, coding, mathematical formulation, scientific inquiry, yoga, chanting, dance, film, music, sound, translation, fiction, poetry, prose, aphorism. Is it ART? is it art? is it Art? This is an interesting question for another time, but also a different question than it may appear to be. For our purposes, we are more interested in "does it inspire? does it help me and my community grow/think/learn/be better?" and to look at how the creative people (which doesn't necessarily mean "artists") in our midst use their notes to grow themselves and their work.
Above, you see a responsive notebook page of mine that ebbed and flowed, responding to the rhythms of a poetry reading that was introduced by Bob Holman, who spoke the words above: "from the seemingly random the rhizome develops." Something perhaps I never would have shared before this series, which brings some questions to the fore, for all of us:
What does your field-note-book look like?
FIELDNOTES: Jacob Perkins : From the Cannery, pt 1
Field Notes: From the Inlet 
June 5th, 11 pm
Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, NY
For starters:
Talk of caliopes. Caliopes. Stray cats mewling on stoopfronts and dumpsters, borne into alleys panting. The incoming exodus of pushcarts and their ices, spokes pumped with Mets cards, their winter quarters unknown. Hydrants relieved and their fittings revealed. New streams clearing out trashjams on the G line. Someone saying “someone painted something on some building and did you know?” Big talk about how soon and how bad and how long and how hot. Flat tops and tattoos and everything cut sharp for sweating. Piedmont creeping up from the south and backsweats drickling down.
If you haven’t heard enough of this garbage, just wait. All sorts of things are said about summer in the city and frankly, I will not have it. Whatever intrigue maintained the attention of your Alaskas, your Seattles, your Portlands and Minnesotas has surely dried up by the time you hit June, and if you’re one of them, and you’re lucky, it’s time to hit the road for a few months.
Myself, I am Alaskan born. Summer is the season of the sockeye. For others it is re-shingling, re-siding, decking, painting, some kind of hometown gig you begrudge seasonally, out of that season. For me it is sockeye, and a gillnet, and a boat.
EDITORIAL :: NEW SERIES ANNOUNCEMENT: "FIELD NOTES"
"None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.
From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense."
- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
“...writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.” ― Doris Lessing
