Again, Again
Metadata
Highlights
- If I had a motto, it would be: no new things unless they’re old*.* The world is overfull, brimming with junk, the kind we can hold and the invisible kind that saturates our skulls. One could argue that everything we’ll ever need, besides maybe food grown in the earth, already exists. But for better or worse, our drive to create is innate (Vonnegut summed it up this way: one “flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”). This syllabus explores a humble solution: to make new but only by way of (relatively) old. It asks: what if our ingredients were only or mostly sourced by chance or accident, pre-existing, created for a different and often distant purpose? Can we satisfy (and spur!) our productive impulses while rescuing forgotten shards of history and labor from the landfill of time? (View Highlight)
- I’m concerned instead with work that treats found material as raw even when fully cooked, from people moved by the constraints of rules, who through searching, gathering, rearranging, accumulating, reconstructing, composing, and renaming, abstract old until it is undeniably new. (View Highlight)
- My own exhilaration in working with found material lies in the promise of far-flung destinations I’d never reach if left only to my “own” devices. I link arms with the stuff, led by serendipitous juxtapositions and discoveries instead of muscled conceits. There’s a reason we’re bewitched by dreams—all the matter of our waking lives, tossed around and churned into plots we’d never purposefully construct in a million years. (View Highlight)
title: “Again, Again”
author: “Rachel Meade Smith”
url: ”https://syllabusproject.org/again-again/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Again, Again
Metadata
Highlights
- If I had a motto, it would be: no new things unless they’re old*.* The world is overfull, brimming with junk, the kind we can hold and the invisible kind that saturates our skulls. One could argue that everything we’ll ever need, besides maybe food grown in the earth, already exists. But for better or worse, our drive to create is innate (Vonnegut summed it up this way: one “flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”). This syllabus explores a humble solution: to make new but only by way of (relatively) old. It asks: what if our ingredients were only or mostly sourced by chance or accident, pre-existing, created for a different and often distant purpose? Can we satisfy (and spur!) our productive impulses while rescuing forgotten shards of history and labor from the landfill of time? (View Highlight)
- I’m concerned instead with work that treats found material as raw even when fully cooked, from people moved by the constraints of rules, who through searching, gathering, rearranging, accumulating, reconstructing, composing, and renaming, abstract old until it is undeniably new. (View Highlight)
- My own exhilaration in working with found material lies in the promise of far-flung destinations I’d never reach if left only to my “own” devices. I link arms with the stuff, led by serendipitous juxtapositions and discoveries instead of muscled conceits. There’s a reason we’re bewitched by dreams—all the matter of our waking lives, tossed around and churned into plots we’d never purposefully construct in a million years. (View Highlight)