Replicated Detritus
Letter writing is a lost art.
It’s a lost art because the world used to be a more physical place. A more textured, tactile place where paper was the conduit for information and emotion. These days, email has replaced letters and stamps; GPS is making maps a thing of the past; and the web is fast pushing books and newspapers towards extinction.
The 22-volume World Book Encyclopedia is a relic now, a dinosaur next to Wikipedia and Google.
The message is still out there and, arguably, remains unchanged. But the medium is different, and in some ways I think that’s a little regrettable. Sometimes the medium is just a method of getting that information across, but at other times it drives the entire tone and experience.
The world used to be a more physical place. Or, at least, a place where paper was important.
A few years ago, I had an idea for a painting. I collected old library catalog cards, glued them to a big canvas, and then dropped paint all over it. The result was awful, and after I got rid of it I was left with no painting and about a thousand catalog cards.
I used them as postcards, scribbling messages around the text and then mailing them to friends.
The reaction I got was interesting. No one really cared what I’d written on the cards — it was the cards themselves that peopled liked. They elicited a “Wow, I remember that,” type of moment.
The cards, with their ubiquitous off-yellow color and irregular typewriter font, are a physical reminder of a shared experience. They’re social detritus, sluffed off by progress. They are a physical bit of déjà vu, a flashback to a time when the experience of books and libraries was so definitively tied to the progression Subject/Author/Title.
Those cards, and that feeling, were a big part of the inspiration for this project.
The postcard images you're looking at are intended to be a couple of things. First, a whimsical homage to the scraps of paper I remember from childhood: catalog cards, stamp collections, maps, sets of encyclopedias, comic books. And it’s also a bit of wistfulness, a nod to a past when we were more physically connected to places farther away.
For the record, I’m not complaining. While technology doesn’t yet have us all working that elusive 20-hour work week, it’s done plenty of good. And if that good comes at the expense of letter writing, well, it’s probably a fair trade.
Certainly this project could never have been completed without 20th Century innovations like digital imaging, high speed internet and discount printing services. There’s some irony in using those tools to create an outdated medium, I suppose.
It’s a lost art because the world used to be a more physical place. A more textured, tactile place where paper was the conduit for information and emotion. These days, email has replaced letters and stamps; GPS is making maps a thing of the past; and the web is fast pushing books and newspapers towards extinction.
The 22-volume World Book Encyclopedia is a relic now, a dinosaur next to Wikipedia and Google.
The message is still out there and, arguably, remains unchanged. But the medium is different, and in some ways I think that’s a little regrettable. Sometimes the medium is just a method of getting that information across, but at other times it drives the entire tone and experience.
The world used to be a more physical place. Or, at least, a place where paper was important.
A few years ago, I had an idea for a painting. I collected old library catalog cards, glued them to a big canvas, and then dropped paint all over it. The result was awful, and after I got rid of it I was left with no painting and about a thousand catalog cards.
I used them as postcards, scribbling messages around the text and then mailing them to friends.
The reaction I got was interesting. No one really cared what I’d written on the cards — it was the cards themselves that peopled liked. They elicited a “Wow, I remember that,” type of moment.
The cards, with their ubiquitous off-yellow color and irregular typewriter font, are a physical reminder of a shared experience. They’re social detritus, sluffed off by progress. They are a physical bit of déjà vu, a flashback to a time when the experience of books and libraries was so definitively tied to the progression Subject/Author/Title.
Those cards, and that feeling, were a big part of the inspiration for this project.
The postcard images you're looking at are intended to be a couple of things. First, a whimsical homage to the scraps of paper I remember from childhood: catalog cards, stamp collections, maps, sets of encyclopedias, comic books. And it’s also a bit of wistfulness, a nod to a past when we were more physically connected to places farther away.
For the record, I’m not complaining. While technology doesn’t yet have us all working that elusive 20-hour work week, it’s done plenty of good. And if that good comes at the expense of letter writing, well, it’s probably a fair trade.
Certainly this project could never have been completed without 20th Century innovations like digital imaging, high speed internet and discount printing services. There’s some irony in using those tools to create an outdated medium, I suppose.
