Spring Appears to Have Sprung
In Australia we don’t get a strong sense of the seasons. Even down here in Melbourne there is rarely a clear passage of change. Most of our plants are evergreen, we don’t get snow on the ground, and while summer is hot and winter is getting cold it is a long slow arc between them. You don’t walk outside one day to see a blush of green everywhere, or a kaleidoscope of autumnal riots for that matter. But the last week or so we’ve had a series of blue sky mid teen warming days. A real flick of the switch arrival. Gives a spring to your step.
So, I am sitting at my desk, the two year old asleep, finishing a draft hypertext essay on webbed video. Next up is to draft a seminar paper about the virtual and the actual in relation to a large atlas project I’m participating in, and this after knocking together something unfinished on digital archives. The last three weeks have been this continuing writing exercise of getting things roughly there, but not finished, just shaped enough to get by and then meet the next task. So, after the virtual actual one is done I have to go back and finish the final draft on an essay about hypertext teaching (now well overdue for Mark), then return to each of the above exercises and finish them. Realistically, I reckon that’s my year full. That sound are those other things I wanted to do passing me by.
I have been writing hypertext again, which I’ve really enjoyed. It lets me get a lot of words down, easily, and the linking spreading flatness of it just suits my writing and thinking. I relax into it, the writing slips between academic formalism and laconic asides, and I just build structure through not having a clear plan but just writing as a thinking out of the implications of a proposition. The particular essay I’m writing at the moment on webbed video is a good example. Here I’ve made (to date) six small scale QuickTime based videos and I am treating them as the key to the work. These are propositions and the writing is in response to these videos. What propositions are they actually making about video? What are the implications of this for video? Each video work is a response in turn, either to demonstrate a claim or implication, or test an idea. An iterative process where the video leads the writing. It’s going well.