Notes Page 4

A plotting of regular journeys around the supermarket using shopping lists as orientation. (What is the frequency of the journeys/walks? The inclusion of time along with movement would add a 'vertical axis'.)
I use a rough map made from memory of the store and then draw the route on this according to the shopping list (this acts as the score) taking a print from carbon paper underneath to arrive at the documented linear journey.
These results are simplified lines representing the route (as documents/records and/or non-maps)
I've overlaid some of them to experiment with repetition. (I'd like to expand the visual experimentation)

A direct response to the route. (As...... subway drawings)  The body is absent in the process and there is no dialogue between the ideas and the materials. it's printed so the gesture (see notes on embodiment/gesture - Avis Newman) is 'distilled'
There is no sense of movement (the walk itself) from the original activity and the non-maps.


As a functional drawing of words to assist memory - it's interesting to see sensitive mark/composition (who to evidence this?) emerge from the printing, a technique I wanted to employ to dissolve authorship and interrupt touch. Drawing locates me, anchors, grounds me with connection (pencil meeting paper in this case) with the/a material world via touch and is confirmation of my existence . So using print -and photocopying- to interrupt this can interrogate why: the point of connection being the plate and the surface and a certain amount of mechanisation is in action, the emphasis on the aesthetic seems more important than the embodied experience of drawing.

Is there an emotional language beyond the grammar of drawing, in the line itself?

When I look at the resulting drawings I feel something - and I don't believe it's my subjective autoethnographical? memory of the walks/journeys.

I'm beginning to use my invented word pseudocartography.....

In tandem to this is the shorthand piece I am investigating.  I commissioned my Mother (a retired secretary) to write, in longhand, a description of the view from her picture window and then transcribe it into shorthand. I have experimented with text as mark before and wanted to explore it further. I wasn't sure how this might relate to the shopping lists and worried I was reaching for familiar territory and repeating old work, but this revisiting has been important, is giving me insight and is not tangental but insightful.
It relates to Ingold's theory about text being linear.  The shorthand is like a cuneiform - each word or phrase is closer to being read at once, face on rather than in a line although it's still read left to right and makes a linear sentence, the characters are almost like phonic bursts and closer to ideas than words constructed in longhand. Looking at Mum's process like this and the lists with non-maps side by side is giving me more ideas but also insight into the way my non-linear thinking is operating.  I was trying to organise my development by forcing a linear iterative development from piece to piece but this has danced about and reflected back (mining old work) and forth and round and up etc.  Gyroscopic and (flat ontology - DeLander) rhizomatic (Delueze).