I'm currently reading my way through a book called "Debt: The First
5,000 Years". It's an interesting read so far. The author has some
axes to grind and there is a bit of ivory tower feeling to some parts
of it, but area it succeeds hugely in is reframing the entire
(western) concept of debt and what exactly it means in terms of human
relationships. It's a big idea to wrap one's head around, and I'm
still reading through it and processing the ideas.
Today I also worked on collage art. I picked several books from my
bookshelf that I'll probably never actually read, and started the
process of decomposing them down to raw material. I usually start by
cutting all the pages away from the spine, so that it's just a bunch
of loose paper. Then I go through page by page with an exacto knife
and try to separate any paragraphs or images without cutting *through*
anything on the page. This is tricky because I don't want to cut
through anything on either side of the page. Separating things out
like this decontextualizes it, so when I go through the paragraphs
later I'm just reading snippets of text and I don't get caught up in
the story. The next step is a continual one, reading through the
paragraphs and slicing out any sentences or words that stand out.
Finally, I'm left with a lot of "swiss cheese" pieces of paper that
contain a bunch of really boring sentences. I haven't decided how to
use these yet, but I think they would be cool layered on top of each
other as a background or something.
Here's an example of a collage poem+song I did recently for
WINDOWSNINETYFIVESECONDEDITION:
https://www.extropicstudios.com/psyche/ceo.html
