On Note-Writing, 2024
- You write a note for future use. When you want to retrieve it, you are unable to find it. You wish you wrote down its location. A new note to be kept somewhere. Another note to be lost. Perhaps notes are not so much a memory aid. Writing notes enables you to forget, and focus on something new. Perhaps this is why, despite the frustration, writing puts you in a good mood.
- Writing notes unfolds time (it revolves with repetitions, interruptions, accelerations and associations. Due to its constitutive incompleteness, writing notes is production without immediate profit, an exercise in unlearning ideas of all-encompassing rationality, systematisation and efficiency. Transcending writing-as-information, it is a form of poetry.
- Squeeze the expressive, associative, and combinatory potential out of unpretentious descriptive exercises
- Objects, places, materials, plants and animals can have a “voice”, exercise the animistic faculty
- (Re)name places based on observation (an endless process of verbalisation producing multiple temporalities)
- Speak directly to the reader(s) (you are the author after all)
- On the use of the singular first-person pronoun I: it may well be a symptom of rampant narcissism but how else could I hold myself accountable for the content I produce?
- Insert stories within your story
- What is an anecdote What is a story What is a fact What is important
- It is ok to write (confused) lists
- Use fiction, use humour, make it useful, use the tools of satire, situate yourself (and your authorship) in time and space, use asides, address your characters, your audience and your real-time (?) companions, jump in and out of roles, selves, frames, screens, windows
- Focus on the plastic crudeness of the ever-changing present, rectify stone inscriptions on an atomic level, produce additional temporalities, ventriloquise past and future in a perpetual reconfiguration of fragments
See also:
- Wassily Chair Replicas Society, 2025