Inscriptive studies: Toward a Field Articulation

Inscriptive studies: Toward a Field Articulation Paul Benzon (bio) and Rita Raley (bio) ❖ 1 the Road: machine-generated novel written by, in, and with a “WordCar” during a four-day journey from Brooklyn to New Orleans. Cadillac, GPS, clock, camera, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and custom training corpus. Curated output published by Jean Boîte Éditions, 2018 (165 × 236 mm; 146 pp). Ross Goodwin, with the assistance of a friend, family and Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Group, 2017. ❖ ANNEX: invented and freely downloadable font based on activist graffiti in Istanbul, used for common political slogans rendered illegible by countermarks, geometric shapes, and jumbled arrangements. North Adams, Massachusetts; 30 cm (letters). Neon, Turkish alphabet, English alphabet. Aslı Çavuşoğlu, with font design by Özer Yalçınkaya, 2020. ❖ Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band A Militia: desert billboards along the Gene Autry Trail documenting the haunted history of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Cahuilla Territory, Palm Springs, California; 33.852444, -116.506083. Billboards, archival images. Xaveria Simmons, 2021. ❖ decomp: multiple copies of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species left to decompose in different biogeoclimatic zones. British Columbia, Canada. Codex, photographs, poems, ecosystems. decomp, Coach House Books, 2013 (9 × 6 in.; 144 pp). Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, 2013–ongoing. ❖ Future Library: repository of individually authored literary works that waits unpublished for a century. Nordmarka and Oslo, Norway; 59.986689, 10.696737 and 59.912965, 10.75099169. Cultivated forest, print manuscripts (one added each year), library reading room. Katie Paterson, 2014–2114. ❖ Grobari [Gravediggers]: a stack of 3,500 sheets of paper, printed on its sides with images of smoke from fires set by Serbian nationalist football fans and marking the imminent disappearance of the .yu domain. Paper, toner, PDF file, printer set to “borderless printing.” Aleksandra Domanović, 2009. [End Page 223] ❖ Ice Texts: words from Gretel Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice (2005) projected onto the base of glaciers during multiple Cape Farewell expeditions. Svalbard, Norwegian archipelago. Ice, digital projection, inkjet prints. Dave Buckland, 2005–2009. ❖ Print In Process [印刷中]: abandoned pieces of Chinese lead typeset in a geometric, pixelated pattern that is mirrored in paint. Hong Kong; 70 × 50 cm (painting), 31 × 22 cm (type box). Movable type, wood, watercolor and pencil on paper. Carmen Ng and Victor Wong, 2022. ❖ Truth Be Told: a three-word figure of speech covering the face of a building, so large as to be deemed hazardous. Kinderhook, New York; 25 × 160 ft. Vinyl building wrap, public building. Nick Cave, 2020. ❖ Untitled (2016): A sheet of paper, nearly four feet by five feet, covered almost entirely with three layers of marks, dense to the point of inscrutability: black on black on yellow. New York, New York; 42½ × 58 in. Acrylic and ink on paper. Dan Miller, 2016. ❖ Watering the distant, deserting the near IX: sand sifted through a fine stencil to form the words of poem, laid on the gallery floor amid memories and documents of public infrastructure and disappearing water stores. North Adams, Massachusetts. Sand, sodium silicate, carbon dioxide, memories, collected recordings, works on paper. Nasser Alzayani, 2020. ❖ WORKBOOK: single-channel video installation poetically defamiliarizing the spoken English language and thematizing the politics of language. British and American ESL workbooks, Text-to-Speech applications, Google Translate. New York; 7:24. Associated digital project, Triple Canopy, 2019. Jesse Chun, 2018. Shelley Jackson, writer: this appellation holds throughout the arc of her career, from her pioneering work of hypertext fiction, Patchwork Girl (1995), to her most recent novel, Riddance: Or, The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children (2018). It even holds for her ongoing project, Skin (2003–), a story tattooed, word by word, on the skin of 2,095 people who have agreed to have their bodies incorporated into this “mortal work of art.”1 But is “writer” a sufficient or even adequate appellation for the Jackson who originated the project Snow (2014), which consists of words of a story cut in book type into snow in locations around Brooklyn, photographed before they melt, and circulated on Instagram? “Artist” and “author” also have their limitations—the [End Page 224] former so broad as...

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