HELLO I’m back. As far as I can make out the Modern Art Oxford book didn’t acquire a Brooklyn twang while I was away. (Now I think about it another project has, but that’s separate.)
Today I’m at my desk drawing roughs for the book. It has a title now: olololo. All lower case so it appears as a series of circles and lines that you can read or look at or both.
I’ve just finished making a quarter-size second mock-up from printer paper and one of those brass paper fasteners. The 24 pages are all splayed out in a circle and I’ve been drawing circular lines across all the pages to work out where to put the slots, tabs and perforations.
In my first mock-up the pages are cut in no particular order apart from a general increase in complexity as the experimentation gathered pace. It’s not bad. But I’d like some kind of visual storyline to emerge as you work through the book, so that you can see the movements your pencil has been through even though the paper rather than the pencil has been moving. I’d like all the slots to line up continuously when the book is all opened out, in the way that the pencil is in continuous contact with the book despite the turning of pages.
Another change is that all the pages are going to rotate left like script leaving a nib, rather than rotating in either direction according to the direction of the cut. It restricts the range of slots I can use, and restricts the way the slots can visually connect once they’re all splayed out in a circle. But I think it’s an important way to emphasise the relationship between drawing and movement in the book, so the restrictions will be worthwhile if I can get it to work.
So that’s the plan for today. That and working with the radio off. I switched it off earlier and all the lines I’d been drawing snapped suddenly into focus, and I saw little relations and imperfections and scratches that had been drowned out by all the noise.
