Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2014

‘The Nucleobases’ is a modular, acrostic poem, written according to a burdensome constraint, in which the molecular structure of the nucleotides in DNA determines not only the selected lexicons (which, in this case, consist only of nine-letter words), but also their arrangement in the line. Each poem maps out a molecule, while conveying a pastoral sentence about the bees (doing so in honour of Virgil, the first of all poets to have a line of poetry enciphered into the genome of an organism...).

Flocks of books open and close, winging their way web-ward. A reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space veined blue by lines of longitude, of latitude, of graph, of paper. The horizon extends far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating this space (with track pad, touch screen, mouse or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean paragraphs. These fluid texts are continuously recomposed by JavaScript files calling upon variable strings containing words and phrases collected from a vast literary corpus – Deleuze’s Desert Islands (2004), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Bishop’s Crusoe in England (1971), Coetzee’s Foe (1966), Ballard’s Concrete Island (1973), Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries (1598–1600), Darwin’s Voyages of the Beagle (1838), and many other lesser-known sources including an out-of-date guidebook to the Scottish Isles, and an amalgam of accounts of the classical and quite possibly fictional island of Thule. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of islands. In this constantly shifting sea of variable texts a reader will never wash ashore on the same island twice… and by islands, I really do mean paragraphs.

This text uses methods drawn from psychoanalytic free association to organize a series of modular aphorisms. It references a number of discourses, including sound poetry, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and cultural critique.

Poet Frank Davey demonstrates how paratactic syntax can be used in combination with visual images to create hybrid artworks that occupy an ambiguous position between writing and visual art. The foundation of his work here is the Edwardian postcard with its often unlikely foreshadowing of twenty-first-century history. These postcard poems are part of his larger work in ‘propositional poetics’, in which since 1982 he has been punctuating poems or composing them entirely of propositions, which cannot all possibly be ‘true’ in a referential sense but which create a field of contrasting or clashing meanings and assumptions.

Visual reiteration can be thought of in terms of linguistic translation. As well as similarities between these two areas – attention to detail and the development of a rich vocabulary – visual reiteration inevitably falls foul of the same ‘deforming tendencies’, proposed by theorist Antoine Berman in his essay ‘Translation and trials of the foreign’. The act of translation/redrawing also seeks to represent a source, plotting a trajectory away from that source, while never quite escaping it, and acknowledging the gap between precursor and product in a way that replicas deny. This article, which accompanies and contextualizes images made as part of the research, outlines how a modular approach to the making of a particular work of art widens the scope and clarifies this enquiry.

Potent Object Project (POP), designed by Patricia Fancher and Brent Pafford, is an ongoing multimodal participatory art project/pedagogy that uses the modular form to facilitate, as they say, ‘experience, connection, and shared meaning’ amongst communities in and around Clemson University’ (Fancher and Pafford 2014). In the first stage of the project, the designers created 500 mugs, tagged them with QR tracking codes, then shared them with 500 students and professors across the disciplines, particularly, though, first-year composition students; each participant wrote a short story about his or her own life, recorded it, and then represented it visually by drawing a message or icon on the mug, either on the lines painted onto the mugs or over and outside of the lines (Fancher and Pafford 2014). Over the course of the next two weeks, they took the mugs out of the classroom and used them in their everyday lives, effectively transforming a public project into a utilitarian object (Fancher and Pafford 2014). At the end of the two weeks, participants took ‘selfies’ with their mugs then shared them with other members of the community, in addition to submitting the audio and images for POP’s digital Mug Archive.

The project’s cyber spaces (WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr) allow anyone who has found a mug to share a story, an image, and interconnect, so while mugs were moving and cyber connections were made, two installations took place in disparate physical venues, effectively reaching those who wouldn’t otherwise reach out. The first venue: the campus’ art gallery, wherein attendees could enjoy the sight of the mugs and participate by offering their own stories (‘Acorn’ 2014); the second: a digital media lab on library’s main floor, a central campus location, wherein previous participants could re-connect with the project and explore the narratives projected on the walls and newcomers could take part (‘Brown’ 2014). Whereas some participants couldn’t part with their mugs, others passed them along to strangers or those closest to them (Fancher 2014; Harris 2014). The project remains ongoing. Fancher explains, ‘This thing has legs beyond me and Brent’s control. We’re really excited to see how/where this brings us, where our mugs go, and what we learn by letting the mugs and the students lead the way’ (2013).

‘Tall Tales’ consists of a series of fictional, modular narratives that accompanied artefacts shown at the Danish prehistory exhibition in the Danish National Museum, during the summer of 2012. The exhibition built on Merete Helle’s study of archaeology and on the Museum’s attempts to interpret artefacts by constructing fictional narratives about them. These photographs and texts document how Helle’s humorous narratives question the interpretative language used in museum exhibitions.

An extract from Kivland’s continuing transcription of the footnotes from Marx’s Capital. Volume I, in which the main body text no longer appears, and a beguiling photograph of nicely shod women (their feet only, of course) is added.

A self-reflective consideration of remixing, reconsidering and (re-)presenting live a previously written collaborative book chapter on Brian Eno’s collaborations and his use of Oblique Strategies cards. The piece also considers the presentation in relation to other papers at the Modular Forms conference at Roehampton University, and was written in response to randomly drawn Oblique Strategies cards.

This article discusses a curatorial approach to authorship as a model for thinking about what I describe as an iterative modular poem, a poetic text composed of appropriated segments. As a response to contemporary proliferation of literary and artistic works created by iterative means, i.e. through acts of appropriation, remixing and remediation, the article is an attempt at putting forward ‘the curatorial’ as an emerging paradigm of writing for the twenty-first century. The article approaches established paradigms of authorship, creativity and originality as inadequate with respect to contemporary experimental poetic practices to suggest a shift from creating to collecting and curating as a possible alternative model for thinking about instances of iterative creative writing. The argument focuses on Robert Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum (2011) as an example of an iterative modular poem and a text emblematic of such curatorial approach to authorship.

RUSL explores the potential for ecolinguistic activism to act as a gateway for experiential learning via the generation of site-dependent artwork related to place. Autoethnographic methodology demonstrates the effectiveness of pedagogy focused on transformative action, and documentation of art-making processes offers repeatable models that may result in action competence with the power to alter a person’s notion of herself as a place-maker and of her interconnectedness with ecosystems in flux.

This article introduces The Point of Publishing, a modular contemplation of publishing. The Point of Publishing was published on a WordPress template as short daily posts at http://pointofpublishing.com from 1 September to 29 November 2012. This article explores some of the stylistic and thematic origins of the text; provides an exemplary excerpt and creates new modular abridgements of the text; and gives details of the work’s development, production and reception. Approaches to writing and publishing merge in the process of creation and dissemination, and are presented as structured creative output using a modular approach, which leads in turn to further adaptations, abridgements, and the possibility of new projects.