Screenshots dictionary (second part of the earlier draft)

The dictionary born as a side-project to my second individual exhibition at FNDesigns gallery(2016).
It started as an attempt to explain it, to verbalize it. It came therefore to my mind the idea of a dictionary, or a book of meanings, the ultimate object of understanding, where the pieces were jus explained one by one. It was inspired by the book "Khazak Diuctionary" of Milorad Pavic.
The initial plan was to produce a mock up of this for the exhibition, but time got short for that.

Here is the link to the first part of the project, which I hope to resume soon:
https://blogdegermanfernandez.blogspot.com/2018/04/screenshots-from-first-edition-of.html

Here a work I made for an exhibition that I plan to use as a cover for the final project, and also some screenshots of some of the pages designed in a very simple manner.
















H

Headless city man

(see City)

A figure related to the image of the city as a person, to whom it plays the role of a companion in the procession across the cemetery. There are usually more than one, and usually are depicted as musicians. The features of this characters are mainly two, that under its clothes there are little figures hiding, and the second one is that from the upper part of the torso, where the head is supossed to be, erupts a dark liquid of unrecognizable substance, going out with such a force that is practically a explosion, hiding some flowers gowing timidly from within


Heart (see city)

Starting point from which the City grew to become the universe. Currently the City has many hearts..


Hidden places (see City)


Hours

The city, people has found, has places for each hour of the day.


I


Icarus


Imagination

Lets say

Lets say I invented a name.

Lets say is J. Kablietz.

Lets say that such Kabletz is a musician.

Musician classical music. And famous.

Then, let’s talk about his works.

Of his style. What it represents.

Of the actitudes he takes.

Of how his critics criticize him.

And how their fans flatter him.

And why.

Of his family, his wife, his children, and his many trips due to concerts. We do not have guidelines, we do not want them. We can establish a canon, which we say is renowned and respected. Then, of course, slaves to our words, we have to evolve into what we have said. But perhaps our characters do not. Sometimes they are like a friend who we tell you to do something, and it does not. Or does exactly the opposite.

Say, too, that there is a certain K. Sebastiano, which is acute critic of Kablietz, and whose works are the antithesis alive the musical sense proposed by the first.

Young and active, he gives his pieces a new twist of musical fashion. We can speak of his followers, how your vision is opposed to our first character ...

The stories allow us to put ourselves in the role of many others ..



Installation

See Also Paintings, Map, Structure


Title: Hypothetical reconstruction of the map of the city, which is the world


Hypothesis 1, digital:A map, a mannequin, some canvases, a screen and a projector, two tv sets, two tablets. wooden structure and fabric hanging in a more open set up


Hypothesis 2, digital, the same elements, placed inisde a big wooden framebox - only the structure posts-with some division along the borders, where the tv sets are placed in a parallel plane to the whole structure, so the rectangular shape is not distorted.


Both version have instruction s for assembling and dissasembling, pieces are numbered over a general diagram.


For the rest of the elements check “-on the installation “ entries


Installation Brief


The duality of box /mannequin also remind us of the cartesian pair of mind/body or the “ghost in the machine”(but for us more than a body /mind duality it is more about the individual and the artifacts -mental or physical - used to get grips of this world which seems to th individual basically understandable; we learn to play in the world , but not necessarily know why or how the world works)this machine is the city, and every construct we use to interact with the worldBoth the dress of the mannequin and the structure has areas that represent the people alive and the dead. The work tries to be beautiful in some sort of way. The tv sets represent different aspect of the dictionary and the main actans(power,beauty,etc). A plastic painted with black paint is extended inside the framebox , and then another one, forming screen that although painted, let the peopls see trough them. This alludes to the different layers of meaning in the communication. A message in the form of a plane belt comes out of the mouth of the mannequin, representing its attempt to comunnicate-which probably are doomed-, and from the mouth it expands to float around. It is a black belt, with some words written in it. The tables allow certain type of interaction; those can be touched by the public.




posted by jibarburuena83 at 5:23 am | 0 comments links to this post

saturday, november 21, 2009



In this sense the relationship with the paintings works as a reference; the reality that is struggling to be built in reality is totally realised in the canvas, where there are no constrictions. So the paintings bring to life a narrative that only is evocated by the installation, also a kind of metaphor of communication, in two ways, in the Sausurean way: the installation is something like the “langue” , meanwhile the paintings are most likely something like the “parole”, or put in another terms,a general concept with its different avatars, because the installation comprise the general idess of which the paintings are just partial glances. Other way of seeing it, is in the terms of media or material, where an physical inanimated object, namely the installation, evoques a lively narrative (the paintings), as this are full of dynamic characters depicting some kind of actions, that are recalled trough the memorabilia of the installation. Like the diorams or display windows in museums, there is a little plate where the position of the objects are numbered and labeled, as a key in a map or graphic, recalling the mechanic of a museum, which works in similar way, objects that evoque a certain knowledge.



K


King monkey

The king monkey, as the general, is the one in power in the world of the city. His throne is made of old television sets and he offers court session each morning to the rest of the animals and monkeys to see the business of the day. The crown of the king monkey is a kind of medieval crown which is an assemble of many crowns that represent its numerous functions and attributions in the world of the city.


Knowledge

The question remains if knowledge is possible at all.


M


Machinery (theatre)

The devices that make the city work, and also the theatre.


Mannequin

The mannequin is masked, and that is important because a mask is a face superimposed in yourself as a definition and not by chance, you mean it, is an intent to define the inner reality as well as the map is a way of define the outer world.


Map

Device made to understand the world. There are many types of maps. There is said, a map depicted in the back of the big turtles.


-In the installation.


In the map of the city are displayed the options and permutation possible among its elements, giving as much as possible meaning. Is an open work, a opera aperta, that estimulates, or try to, generate diverse readings. It plays with time and space.

So there is a map. most possibly in the floor. This map delineates a shape of the city ressembling also a brain. Therefore , the city s divided in two halves, at one of which stands a mannequin, dressed with a fabric that depicts a landscape and houses, being this a representation of thee city-man, city-woman. So this is the spatial representation. This space is surrounded by big canvas that depict group scenes where all the characters of the city appear.




Master of the House

And the master of the house was just shouting among the guests, all crowded and disordered among the old walls of the house, merrily laughing, around some music played spontaneously by some musicians among the group, The drinks were coming and going, delivered by the romanian hostesses, some canvases depicting sme heroic scenes were among the paraphernalia floating around the walls. But more music, let the dialogue begin slowly and packaged in short words, and in mimic faces. In crescendo, the voices, going along the sounds, intermittently chorus of a chaotic lyric, a lively lyrics formed to disappear almost drowned in the laughter.


Mask


Masked man

See mannequin


Monkey

The people that agreed to be governed by the monkey king.


Musicians

They are equivalent of the chorus in the antiquity of the Greeks, as been told by references referred.


Murakami, Haruki

The city as mind, as intimate space. The melancholy of strange places, oniric in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (El fin del mundo). Attach personal meanings to the physical world.




N



Nigth

And it is in the rest of the crowd where the solitude host herself, hidden within the multiple faces of the anonymous. And is in the weirdness of the charming smile where your intriguing gaze expects the surprise of those terrible nights.


The night, the night.

Dark and blue, dark and grey, keeper of secrets.


O


Old cars

Transportation machines that were big, and probably powerful as well.


Outdoors

Areas and regions outside the city in the times when the city was not the universe. They call those places with many names, among them nature, field, country, rural landscape.


P


Paintings

-In the installation


The paintings have a thematic, as we just said, lively and somehow spontaneous in the scenes depicted; characters (animals and women) depicted in daily life scenes, such as a restaurant in the night, contrasting the darkness of the exterior to the light environment of the inside trough the window glasses, or seated on the benches of a mall, or just walking trough the mall (that also represent the city). Characters are not necessarily centred but can be cut by the margins, in not so classical fashion, bringing somehow to mind, photographic approach. Not all the paintings depict environments as background. Some depict patterned walls as it, replicating pattern pace over the paintings, by the plastic sheets. And because also, when we talk about structures that allow us to interact with the exterior world, we also can say that of our clothes, that, therefore, are a kind of architecture of the self.

The images are surrounded by belts that float in the air.

But most importantly, many aspects of the subject in each of the painting do not have, should not have, or must not have, according to each one’s point of view, a specific, determined symbolism linked to the overall scheme that goes further than the ones we just talked about; that does not mean the interpretation is constrained to what is written here, but on the contrary, that they are part of the general scheme, but they are also more than that, in the same sense that any communication attempt, has meanings or interpretations that escape the general structure of the intention for which it has been made.


- - - - -- -- - - - -- - - - - - - - -


For what is concerned about me, I was fighting against the day, running against the sun, trying to stop the time, even when everybody knows that the clock never stops, not for money, emotions or feelings. If you run against the time, you lose.



_ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _



People

Is a nebulous concept that comes to life when individuals of different nature are together or are considered conceptually as a whole. Commonly referred massively to the inhabitants of the city


Person

The city as a person feeds itself from the pantheism and the concept of the apus, or mountain goods in the ancient pre-columbine Peru, which under the spanish rule mixed with religious and baroque imagery like in Our Lady of Copacabana. The mountains come back again to represent the new nation in the contemporary days; the capital is surrounded by lively suburbs built in the mountains that circle the original valley of Lima. Also as we can see, here appears the question of gender, because mostly the males are represented as animal-headed as well as sometimes the women are depicted with human faces. This subverts the narrative of anonymity of women in historic accounts. The women, however, have the faces covered by a pair of hands, so they probably still have no voice. The women are taken as a representation of many sectors that are considered in the society of a lesser grade, subconsciously or consciously, by any criteria; they appear at the sides. Sometimes we make the women warriors, subverting these narratives, and other mere spectators, just asserting that very same way of seeing.



Plot
Samples of plots. Sunday, march 21, 2010

I

The three pigs

1. Map of the pigs' route. The pigs.
2. Structure of the pigs' houses.pictures, sections and plans.
3. Wolf's plan to destroy pig houses.Pros and cons
4. First house fall.Visual textual analysis.reactions.
5. Second house fall. Reactions. Analysis
6.Third house. Preliminaries. What people expect.
7. What the pigs expect. 
8. What the wolf expect. Cutouts,

distributions, timelines, and commentaries. analysis of probabilities. statistics.
Words of the actors.



II

Snow White

-Confessions of a dwarf.
-Poem of the third dwarf to Snow white, in the silence of his room.
(here is the idea: the text on the screen, going in moving lines, waiting to be clicked)
-Context.
-Letter of the dwarf to the impossible son he dreamed to have with Snow white.
-The real business of Snow white.
-The Iranian princess and why gold is gold
-Story of the first dwarf
-Story of the second dwarf
-The court of dwarves.
-And when the last night arrives.../Scherezade-Snow White

I am bad girl- she said

The end. A farewell is a farewell is a farewell.


III


The city and the festival of King Poro, a defeated's story
the masquerades. detailed structure of the procession, the meaning of each feature
map with the route of the procession.

the football game. the teams.
the time of the game and the procession

The real reason behind the time chosen

What she said. What she was actually doing

What he said. What he was actually doing

the clash. The idea of a big tremor like the climax of the plot

some kind of a judgment day




Procession

Music, music, music everywhere, the drums, the cornets and the flutes coming and losing themselves in the carnival of the street.But that is only a part, because, the procession at its core, is solemn, as it wants to grasp the unfathomable and ethereal, that is, the communication process. Do we really communicate? Or do we mean what we say? Or what the other believe we say?.




R


Rabbits dancers


Railroad

Like any other paths, they are arteries, but a very specific one, which happens to appear everywhere around, always in the background. You could say it is the backbone of the city. The train, that has a fish-like shape(including the neutral, dead eyes) goes and comes trough the tall, skeletal structure.


Real Estate (elevator)

The girl in the elevator just stands beside me, and the two men just beside her, they were mute for most of the time, until she breaks the silence

-You told me it has a nice view

_Which one? This? No, not this, the other one, I will show you.

They were real estate agents.

The elevators come and go, up and down.


River

I


Back to the river where all we came from

the life runs, the time walks

that’s not new

it's just like nothing

so just like you

Its waters are tumultuously

smiling with a crowded face

far away from any age

a coloured urban depression

just a little sad lost connection

Going back to the river

where all we came from



friday, january 28, 2011




Long faces all around

running fast as our remembrances allow

the night has come and the day has gone

and our life with that all

Cartels, lights, sounds and

all nothing but long in the time

The grey tale has no happy end

and has no form

We wake up and realise that we must return

Back to the river where all we came from


II


Unhidden holes

ruins showcased as new

the broken buildings these are

submerged in the thousand shadows

where the lights are turned off

somewhere along the main street

spurious tales of the nights

Where the proud hero sells his honour

were the villains maintain theirs

rising and crying no more


The dreams had taken a rotten route

and your face will take that for true

then your bones will be there

as now is your flesh

and nothing more

when you come back

to the river where all we came from


III

The hand that sewed that line

the fabric where this has been engraved

the long story

the short life

where do you thing all came from?

is it real? is it right?

there is no reason to take it for

as you did when you found

the singer in the roof

the musician in your front door

Stay, and that said

sing a song of something wrong

tell how to do well and yell

after and then, after and then, after and then,

and then,

right and now.




S


Soundboy

A probable depiction of the bambino, specialists argue. It is depicted as a child, mounted over a big, bold sound system, surrounded by floating belts. The figure is wearing headphones and has an inexpressive face. The background is blue, but otherwise, can be crowded or can be yellow or red or whatever colour is suitable.


Singer

(see beauty)

There is a view, partialized, of course, which say there is two approaches to the beauty in most of the beings. It is a product of your skill and knowledge or is inherent to you.



Ship

Where the bambino travelled across the sea.

________________


Innocuous small ship full of flowers, sways on the pillow, yellow, purple, green,

pink fabric covers

and bird feathers keep it

fluffy, elevated, turgid

a beautiful bed in spring

and on it, full of flowers

roses and sunflowers,

you bled to death

you frays in crimson lines of

the colorful shade, beneath

the beautiful noon,

betrayed by your wrist and

your grey smile, by

the knife on your bed,

on the beautiful quilt

with orchids and apples,

fabrics and cushions of

placid lap, a spring not dreamed of, your hair will be so red when it was orange?

do not die, at least not until tomorrow’s night.


-----------------------------

A ship in the bay,

the stagnant fog

your resilient soul

the unexpected call


the coldness of the breeze

the emotion that you breathe

the joy in your smile

the melancholia in your gaze so blue, so neat, so true.

So economic, so in debt.

Of many revolutions and parades.

Of streets and passages,

nights and days in the city.



Sky

The sky has cracked, broken,

, purple, but where is that piece, the piece that has fallen?


The soldiers are searching

this winter muddy night

with their white guns

with paused pace

with mild-manners

interrogating the past

for the red silhouette

of that missing piece


The sky has cracked, broken,

blue, but where is that piece

, the piece that has fallen?

The minister, gray in the box house has decreed

a general strike,

cardboards will be given, because

it can not be

, lost that piece,

what will be the sky

above our heads

and what will be of our heads

under the sky,

the minister has decreed

that it can’t be


The sky has cracked, broken,

but where is that piece

, the piece that has fallen?


The reporter
asks the chef
you know the piece


Theatre

A structure that is similar in its concept to the city, that is , the universe. The main function starts every day at 5.45 am and the timing of the subsequent ones differ from day to day. It never closes, as neither does the city.


Title
Suggestion for a title: “ letters for a son from his impossible father”, this should be, and can start from, for example, an explanation of the world, according to diverse perspectives, and regarding different topics; God, the man, and the men, which is not always the same; love, society, so, that is, one direction to what is concerned from the man to inside ( an insight) and the other from the man to outside.



Traveler
A young figure, connected by some experts to the bambino figure, as an evolution of the self.
The old stories, the ancient tales, tell us about the hidden and special nature of the travel, the secret links it has with the life, and therefore with the death. The stories tell us about travelers that magically remained young while abroad, just to find when they come back that everything they knew when they left was irredeemably gone; that is the secret fear of everyone who left their home, wherever it happen to be.
So the traveler is seen as a later stage of the figure of the bambino, but also an incomplete one as long as it continues traveling.


Train of progress
It is linked with time, and also with the city. Consist of several cars, one of which is the one that put the whole thing in motion, being the one where the motor machine is. This one occasionally has the shape of a big fish. The rail track it uses is a big network make of wooden scaffolds that rise as high as the taller buildings in the city. Being as extense as it is, it has an almost omnipresence in the imaginary of the inhabitants of the city and can be found depicted in most of the images of the collection, although in small and minimal detail.


Television
A device, that opposed to other, can offer thousands of images in time. A box, a window, like the paradigm of the academic painting in the western tradition.
A noise in the room, a succession of colors, the screen, talking and talking. The flat box, the plastic box, the light canvas.
An television night, a fluorescent light, full of plane colors, squared shirts and coloured photographs,a dream of modernity and rock and roll, a dream of magazine advertising, of cadillacs and wigs, of car cinema and cigarettes, just gone with the movement of the fingers trough the bottoms of the remote control. So remote as the reality in the screen, not much of a control, as the life living to this side of the tv set seems to lack.
Positive: Entertaining
Negative: Hypnotising.


Time
(see clocktower)
Is the order per excellence. Everything has a specific place in time, where can be specifically, definitively located. Time has its own structure for this very purpose and therefore has an answer for everything.

Time(line)
The timeline conception. We tend to see the time as space. Space, in the sense that specifically, a path is the metaphor of time. If you go forward in the path-time you are living behind the past and approaching to what to your present standing-point, known as the present, is the future


Tourists
The story starts with those three brothers (one sister and two brothers actually) that made tours to old wooden houses in the cold weather of Canada,-were they many houses, or just one? the one I remember was dark because of the intense color of the beams, a roof like those made for rainy seasons in those regions, like a big, heavy triangle over the small structure that held the human life. Dark against the snow, surrounded by more houses like it but also some more gracious, which is contrast highlighted the sternness and heaviness of the wooden rectangle surrounded by small gardens and pavement.
They made these tours for people from the surroundings I guess, and they made a living of it, but nevertheless I always remember it as somethings pretty dangerous, or at least edgy.


One morning and this is the stuff of dreams, I remember walking with the tour, as they ask me to help them with some packages they need to carry. The sister, the leader, carry the lead as guide, and enter with most of the people into the darkness following the first steps of the concrete stair. Those stairs I have sen in many buldings, particularly in one tropical hotel built in the 60s with many hidden corridors behind the common areas, where I played a lot whn younger. The walls, here and there, were uniform, but at detailed view, of a minimally uneven texture, most properly recognizable as of the installation areas than of a main household.


Two birds, two songs. A chimney, and a fabric, a dead tree, and clouds of purple and red.


As soon as we enter, I was worried of the darkness, but they were not, at least at the beginning. The other two brothers place themselves in two lapses in the stair, to maintain communication. I stay behind the one who stood at the small entrance of the first steps, looking forward to the depth of the path the others had taken.

------------------------------------


W

Wall

The wall is gray, with amorphous shapes product of dust and grease, over paintings of different colors just falling day by day. And the water running trough the night and the days as the same water is not twice in front of us. Take a knife and write in the sand that memories do not last, let the letters came awash and disappear in the waves.


Wind

There is no mistake here, the wind said. And the desert sands follow him, across the horizon. There is no one to blame, he said in a softly and almost inaudible voice trough through the clean sky. How long is the distance I have walked, he said, that I almost have lost the path to my past. And with careful movements, the sands of the desert just laughed. Why you laugh, he asked, do not you believe me?. There is no one to blame, the dunes reminded him. The sky was really clean then, and there was no more purity in the most transparent water than the one the light blue was showing there, blue after blue, sky inside the sky, and not anymore. Purity. And the light of the sun was the absolute condition in which all the elements merged themselves.




Women

Depicted as warriors or mere spectators, they are some of the few characters portrayed with human faces. Mostly, their mouth is covered, so the faculty of expression and voice are alluded by its absence. The mouth is covered or blocked, in some cases by clothes and in other by hands that are part of their attire


------------

II
Slow your pace and your silhouette, quiet, both walking together,
Silence, piling up in the gate of your mouth,
Lone gaze that alone agonizes
Slow your pace and your silhouette, together the loneliness and your wait


III
purple petals in your hand bleed
red thorns that the soul gird
august lord that gloomy judges the golden slivers that
your heart inflame


IV

The sea rests in you, its horizon which in the night sky is lost devouring eternity
claiming the infinite, your lost shadow and nothing more


----------------------------------

I
And in my years of oblivion, when in the midst of the forgotten, of this world in nostalgia immersed, you, that now are gone, will be back to be with me then

II
With me in the mist, showcase of dreams, appearing in the early mornings,
doing what we did, as if nothing had ever happened


III
Will be again to see your picture, of willful gaze I will be once more captivated I should be, that will, by that nonsense, of wanting you always love


IV
Will be then that dominate me your eyes, which is my true purpose and final place, then will be that your face will be to my eyes, not more a memory nor weak remembrance


V
And we can talk again and I can ask you each morning what is the world made for.
Fugacious.


_______________________

Related images: the sound and the color, the silence.




Addenda

Actans

Power

But at the end, the power is the city, and nothing more. The power, thus, being the city itself, is faceless. Usually, is not seen as polite to talk of power.

The very elusive notion of power a is unavoidable. It is intruded in every relationship. Some people fear power and other fear a power vacuum, and others fear power struggles because the notion of power is so internalized that is difficult to imagine one relationship that does not have a say in how power is distributed in said relation, from family life to the city itself. In other interpretations, power is the paternal figure, stern and rigorous, as opposed to the city, which is the maternal figure, immense, and embracing, but these interpretations have long ago been discarded. Power has many avatars, changing over the years, changing along the paths, winged, armed, charming and sometimes without warning, we could say, but no many faces. Among the characters of this dictionary, there are many power relations, that sometimes change according to circumstances.

The winter comes and goes, the summer shines and die, but power only evolves, going and coming with the fallen leafs, with the dark and distant clouds over the house on the lonely hill, like the shadows of the strangers over the bridges that break themselves over the nervous ripples of the tumultuous water. Power smiles and has no eyes. Images of the power are the storm, the earthquake, the fire, the sea.

Positive: Transformative

Negative:Transformative


Beauty

(artisans)

The main quality that artisans maintain for an equivalent of the good. This idea is based on the attraction human beings have for beauty, and the irresistible impulse they have in possess it, by means of its interpretation, or discovery, or contemplation.(see artisans). However, not all of artisans agree in what beauty is when speaking of concrete things. On the other side, to define one what a concept is, people need first to define what that concept is not. So if there is beauty, there is the no-beauty, or ugliness. Again the very idea of the perception of these two concepts can be very subjective from time to time.


Then, comes the vacuum. Have you felt the vacuum? Is just something missing inside, but you do not know what it is. It can be best described as a mild compression inside you, that pull you inside your own, I don't know.
-Excuse me?
-It is ok, I don't mind
-For sure you don't mind.
The first floor, the second one, and so on, gone are they, you are just moving through the skeleton of the building. Where does this idea come from? I forgot I could not remember. I don't know.






End (temporary) of the Dictionary of Interpretations

Comments