Collecting Stories

"lush"    click to view

On the upper right of Z page "lush"  is an excerpt from a now long gone magazine article that Jennifer cut out and collaged into ZBOOK.  These words are like a sound bite of a story, a voice from an experience. Reminds me of the "partial glimpse" that artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris mentions in his TED talk about collecting stories.  Jonathan has always been interested in stories, using all kinds of mediums to capture them, and now is using the tools of computer and internet to create living documents about current human kind through collecting their on going stories.  This is from his FAQs on his website:

The intersection of storytelling and computer science is unusual — how did you arrive at it?
I have always been interested in storytelling, which I see as the soul of human life. As a kid, this meant writing my own comic books. As a teenager this meant keeping sketchbooks. In college, this meant starting a magazine of personal travel stories. After studying computer science, this meant finding a way to use the web to re-imagine what storytelling can be. At each step, I try to use whatever tools are available to me. When the tools change, I change.

In this TED talk (below), Jonathan talks about the sketchbooks he has always carried with him that he fills with his paintings, writings, documentation, and found artifacts from his days.... sound familiar?  He then began collecting found objects from which he became interested in the "partial glimpse" of people's stories, rather than the whole, because with a partial glimpse one can then fill in the rest with their imaginations.  Much like what I've been exploring with my recent art.  He goes on to more recent work also in which he now uses a camera to snap up stories, frame by frame, moment by moment, glimpse by glimpse.

It became clear to me about 5 years ago, that ZBOOK is a story of stories.  It is essentially a collection of glimpses from our lives -traces of our thoughts, experiences, creative whims- mixed with glimpses from the lives around us, via found objects and gleaned pieces of print, stickers, tags, and other "junk" (treasures).  As a forever kid who loves to find things, it has been so fun to have a place to play with and re-activate these found items of life.  For whichever stories unfold, even if created from a bundle of "partial glimpses," are a source for personal reflection and thus a potential opportunity to gain some fresh perspective on my own narrative.  Stories, "real" or imagined, are bridges for our communing with others and ultimately ourselves.

∞ ceci
6


ps(l): check out Jonathan Harris' sketchbooks ! ...exquisite.