Haikus Without Prescription: Reconstructing an Essence

Haikus Sin Récipe (“Haikus Without Prescription”) is my cousin Luis Felipe Blanco’s blog. He began sharing his poetry in it in 2008, and worked on it with some regularity for two years, until his sudden death in November 2010. It contains 163 text entries, mostly poetry, in Spanish, English, and Spanglish (there’s lots of that). My project for Living Collections: Memory had two stages: first create an archive of the content of the blog, and later create a booklet with a selection of poems that would be accessible to my close family.

Servers, devices, and books all have expiration dates. My cousin’s blog, confined to the digital, rests on the safety and the policies of Blogspot, and so it was my choice to migrate the content to my personal hard drive. The booklet that I designed later is meant to facilitate access to the poems in a way that a computer cannot: a book is a physical object that prompts a person or a group to create a ritual of reading alone or aloud, or browse, undistracted by other elements, and without having to rely on a device. Some studies suggest that when content is stored away online it is often as though it disappears, since people are less likely to revisit it; digital technologies, when off, are opaque, black, and not readily accessible.

My editorial and aesthetic choices at the moment of designing the book were made purely out of instinct and personal taste. It was very challenging to complete a project within an Academic environment in which I had no other framework than myself and my relation to the material. However, as intended use had determined the format, approachability did influence some aesthetic decisions. For instance, I tried to overcome any possible barrier of taboo or literary distance between the reader and the content by hand-binding the booklet, using craft paper, and hand-writing the introduction.

The final product contains only a selection of poems by Luis Felipe and is subject to be revised and re-made in the future using different texts. It does not reference a particular historical event or site, but instead groups together fragments of a person’s creative output -which poses the possibility of reconstructing some sort of essence of this author, or his personality, or his character. In that sense, the booklet is also a memory probe that serves to trigger unique processes of memorialization of individual experiences with Luis Felipe that other readers, although related, may not think of or even know about.

Narratives of Selfhood: Project Summary

Narratives of Selfhood is a project that explores the the role of autobiographical memory in weaving the narratives of identity through displacement. Investigating this through multisensory media and design led research probes, the project juxtaposes the narratives of three Iraqi friends through their childhoods in Iraq, their forced displacements from their fatherland, and their subsequent migrations thereafter. Adding to the narrative’s complexity is their opposing social, cultural, and political affiliations at the time – One is from a Shia Iraqi family that struggled with Saddam’s regime and suffered plenty of torture, cases of missing persons, confiscation of land and business, and murder. One is from a sunni family with ties to the Baath party and Saddam’s regime, and therefore, an allegiance to him and his leadership. And one is a kurd and therefore part of a people who suffered immensely under Saddam’s regime and who fought endlessly for self governance and secession from his rule. Together, they form the triad of tension that has defined the Iraqi social scene for decades.

 

The project is comprised of video projections and overlaid audio. Three projectors were used to reflect three videos simultaneously. Each video represents one of us, remembering her childhood and her sense of belonging and identity in relation to those memories in Iraq. The three videos represent my and their fragmented understanding of what those memories mean to us, but when experienced together as an installation, the fragments are unified through the timing of the videos as well as the enclosed space within which you watch the videos, and in a sense, this created one, layered, portrait- that of an Iraqi child in the 90’s, of Iraqi childhood.

For the web, I’ve compiled all three videos together in one longer version – This is not how the project is meant to be experienced, but it gives an idea of the mood and footage.

 

 

Video here: https://vimeo.com/150382669

Project Summary and Highlights

My project was based around the objects, audio, paper ephemera, photos and color zerox’s of my brother Marc Slivka. These things have been stored in boxes since his death in 1982. Through video footage of me unpacking the boxes cut with audio of his recorded music and still shots of his artwork, I hope to show just split of a chip off the tip of the iceberg that was Marc’s creative life and though him a slice of life view of downtown NYC creative and underground culture from 1979 – 1982.

One of the challenges of this project was time: how do I show in twenty minutes the aesthetics and creative life of this young man. Even though I was mainly focusing on the two to three year period before he died, there was still a lot of material to represent him and his time in NYC. So a true accurate portrait was impossible, but a conceptualized version was.

This is where the art of storytelling comes in. I don’t think I had the skill to really represent all of the important elements that were at play in his life at that time (my video editing skills were practically nothing, the little skill I have was gained in this project) so I settled on a combination of video, slideshow and a performance sharing of one of the boxes contents in a collage style to tell the hidden story or the wordless story of his creative drive. I wanted the viewer to have a present experience of Marc’s creative impulse based on the activation of past elements. Hopefully this would tell a timeless story.

Below is a link to a small selection from the video I made.

Marc video selection

Progress Update – Charlotte

I have been working on editing about 20 minutes of video that is a collage of footage shot of me talking about some of the contents: mundane things like mail, phone numbers written on scraps of paper and photographs. I have mixed in some recordings of Marc’s improvised music and have experimented with fast forwarding the film during these sections. I chose the fast forwarding effect to show the viewer the experience of these materials but not to have to listen and embody all of it.

Editing was a little clumsy for me, I was getting to know the software for the first time so not all the sound and image pieces fit perfectly but this also occasioned happy and random accidents in cuts, which is ultimately the spirit of improvisation. Not all of it works, but when it does its good.

I created two timed spaces in the film for viewing slides and also for a live performance of the material, as of this morning I don’t know exactly what will happen in these spaces.

I have checked on the slide projector ordered for our classroom and it is a standard round carousel type that has a remote control and can hold eighty slides.

If anyone else has slides, this is a good opportunity to view them!

Progress Update – Rachel

I have been working on my memory probes and gathering materials that will lead to interesting and compelling data from my sister/cousins.

Currently (at this very moment, in fact), I am downloading video footage of my grandmother– meandering interviews with her, showing me stuff from around her house, artifacts and antiques from her trips to Israel. I haven’t even looked at the stuff since maybe 2009. I will cut some of this footage together for the probe. This will probably freak my sister/cousins out.

I’m also going to work on getting some of the more intimate ephemera from my eldest cousin, Steve. He has all of the original photo books and recipes, which are integral parts of my concept. However, he’s in Boston, with his wife and 1 year old, and he teaches at a middle school, so his time is tight. But, he’ll be coming to my house on Christmas. I am aiming to organize him bringing those materials; my sister will be there too, so it should be a really fun opportunity to dig into those materials.

My goal for my presentation will be to include some of these materials (textiles, photos, sound/video, etc). I would like to bring in a sample memory probe kit, and perhaps a fun probe exercise for everyone to experiment with.

Update 2

I’ve made lots of progress on my project in the last week.  The interview is done, my concerns about audio and audio quality turned out (thankfully) to be unfounded.  I think the final project will take the form of a podcast/audio presentation that mixes in the interview with my dad, atmospheric sound, and a script that I’m currently working on.   An extension of this could be to intersperse visual elements in a simple interactive website or as a physical curatorial effort.  

My primary dilemma is how and what to present to you.  

Do I present my research as a journey and the turns it took?   

Do I place it within other memory-works about family and societal change.  

Do I share the creative work?  

Do I focus on the methods and then what each method yielded?  

 

Dreams, synchronicity, progress…

Over the past couple weeks my project has taken multiple twists and turns, and is emerging as an undertaking I hope to extend beyond this class. Bear with me…

As I have been thinking of ways to include other people in my dream explorations and my desire to provide a space for others to explore their own dreams, I decided to do a small exercise with my roommates over Thanksgiving. Since I began this project many people in my life have noted that they are remembering their dreams more frequently, or more vividly. Taking this into account I proposed to my roommates that we take some time each morning while we have breakfast together to share our dreams with one another. One roommate already remembers her dreams quite frequently, so this was an easy and exciting proposition, the other however, rarely remembers her dreams and actually expressed discomfort with this exercise. She then shared with me that a couple weeks ago she remembered a dream for the first time in quite a while. It was a devastating dream that brought up emotional memories from her past that left her feeling deeply sad for a few days.

Hearing this experience from someone I love hit me really hard and I felt the need to take a step back and think about what I am trying to do. We’ve discussed forgetting in class and how sometimes it can be a means of survival, or act as a necessary emotional defense, and I hadn’t considered this in relation to dreams. Perhaps there’s good reason why some people rarely remember their dreams. Do I want to intrude on that or trigger a painful memory when a person isn’t fully equipped to handle it? I think I have been overlooking this because I personally have learned so much about myself from my dreams, even when they raise painful, traumatic memories.

Needless to say I didn’t undertake the proposed exercise with my roommates, and instead delved deeper into research. I came across Swiss psychiatrist existentialist, Medard Boss. He studied with and under Freud and Jung, however, instead of interpreting symbols and employing a universal translation of dream analysis, he allowed for dreams to reveal their own meanings, giving much agency to the dreamer. This angle resonated deeply with me, particularly as my roommate just reminded me how impactful and exhausting recalling dreams (and their associated memories) can be.

This whole experience brought me back to the beginning where I first recognized and acknowledged how deeply personal dreams are. The thought of attempting to trigger dream experiences for others, or include others’ dreams in my project (at this stage) feels intrusive and forced. While I don’t want to interfere in the dream experiences of others, I do want to embrace Daniel’s request for “generosity” in sharing our journeys, and I want to open myself to the class in that process. I have been gathering all the dreams I’ve had since this class started alongside any journals, notes, and significant ephemera. I am editing them into a collection that will tell the story of this journey for me. In talking about my dreams and brainstorming for this project I have found my dreams, memories, and day-to-day experiences reciprocally affecting one another; this ephemeral collection will hopefully articulate this relationship. I want it to act as a kind of souvenir of this class.

As for my presentation next week… just this past weekend I had a very meta dream about this class and our projects that had distinct (and seemingly arbitrary) elements from our classroom, and actually featured two people from the class. Throughout my life it has rarely been appropriate for me to share a dream with the person who was in it. Most of the time it is too personal, however, this particular dream is not embarrassing (nonetheless wacky). I want to embrace this opportunity to not only share this dream, but also recreate it with/for folks who might feel a familiarity or synchronicity to it. I want to invite the class to witness my dream as I attempt to blur the line and connect the dots between waking life, dreams, and memories.

Progress Update

Hi everyone,

So far, I’ve done two pre-interview conversations with my dad in preparation for our dedicated hour this Saturday.  Although it felt strange to treat him a bit like a work contact (scheduling, understanding the why behind a project etc) it also feels more democratic than simply diving into to the collection of his memories and experiences.  On the last phone call we had he drew his map, the results according to my mother are nothing short of hilarious.  I am slightly concerned about the quality of audio I’ll be working with, but that’s nothing that I can fret too much over until Saturday.

As for the parts of the project that relate to understanding change in a city, site visits have all been done and I’m in the process of considering what a narrative around those places should look and sound like. A much more concrete shape will take place this weekend, but I want to be sure that I’m not pursuing structure for structure’s sake and embracing complexity when “handling” someone else’s memories.

 

Progress – Rachel

I tasked myself with taking photos of my grandparents’ now-empty house over the Thanksgiving weekend break, since the house was finally cleared out, renovated and sold. The key was being turned over this past Monday afternoon, and that day, I went back for one last time, say my final goodbyes to my grandparents’ house where I spent much of my childhood, and take photos that I could use for this project.

As it turns out, things became more complicated and emotional over Thanksgiving than I had expected, which threw a bit of a wrench in my plans.

Since the passing of my grandmother last March, my father and his brother have been at odds and my uncle was no where to be seen around the holidays. I had been hoping to speak with him about the project, but tensions were running very high and he never returned my messages. My cousins and sister are spread all over the country, so I wasn’t able to connect with them in person either.

However, I forced myself to see my grandma’s house one more time before it was officially sold; it was daunting so I waited until the last minute to do it. I had every intention of just wandering the empty house taking photos, and I knew I’d become emotional, but I didn’t really consider the impact. It struck me as I was there, really for the first time, that I would never, ever be able to go back to this house. It hit me like a ton of bricks, when all the smells, sights and sounds aligned and registered as “grandma’s house,” my other home, just 2 minutes from my home, where I could always go to see her. This was a very official ending of that part of my life, but I didn’t realize it until I got there.

So, I moped around the house, taking photos, opening ever drawer and closet, fighting back tears, but by the time I reached my old bedroom (it was my dad’s bedroom, then it became mine as a child when I stayed over), I really lost it. I’m not good with letting go of objects; I transfer a lot of meaning into objects and spaces.* A combination of seeing the space as a shiny, new blank home without her items in it, plus the weight of the significance of this being my last time ever to set foot in that house hit me really hard. I went to take photos, but I neglected the notion that I was really going to say my final goodbyes to this address, this space, this home, this safe place, this memory, this container of the memories and lives of my grandparents (and dad/uncles), this hugely important place in my life that I never gave much thought to until now.

When I made it through the whole house (ground floor, upstairs, basement, backyard), I sat on the steps in the backyard where there used to be a flower garden, a vegetable garden and a big apple tree– now it’s just grass. I was thinking/feeling so many things that I didn’t want to suppress, so I opened up Snapchat and started live video blogging (short videos in succession, 10 seconds at a time, with some still photos) myself while I reflected on what was happing. I was really unabashedly personal. I was a mess! Wiping tears and snot, etc. Mallory follows me on Snapchat and she actually got to see it. I started talking about what I was doing and why, and how hard it was to be there, but then I took the phone with me once more through the house, showing my followers the spots in the house that meant the most to me, describing how I used to feel there when I was little, encouraging people to connect with loved ones before it’s too late, saying goodbye and shutting the door behind me before I got into my car and drove home.

The thing with Snapchat and memory is interesting. Snapchat is known for being fleeting– the things you send directly to others (short video or photo) disappear in 10 seconds or less. If I post publicly, the story I create lasts only 24 hours, then disappears. Mallory and I chatted briefly about the Snap story I created, but I semiconsciously decided not to save those last videos of me sad and weepy, narrating as I exited the empty house. There’s a bit of irony in the ephemeral nature of Snapchat, a rare social media application that mimics the fleeting nature of time, that lets you capture and share moments, but only briefly. I didn’t save those videos, and I think it’s better that way. In a way, saving them would be holding onto mourning, which was not what I wanted to do. But to share that moment as it was happening, in real time, felt really good. I didn’t want to “suffer” alone, I didn’t want to contact people to tell them what I was doing in that private moment last Monday, but by sharing it with my followers on Snapchat, they got to see it in the moment and feel it with me (which, for what it’s worth, many people did feel it with me, and contacted me after watching to share condolences and/or cry with me, or at least thanked me for sharing a meaningful/private moment that was kinda of unexpected on a social media app).

What does this all mean for my project?

First, here are some of those photos and videos I did take, the ones I intentionally set out to take. I took some videos as well, to capture sounds and things in motion. These photos are indicative of the things I treasured about the retro 1960s style of the house, the dated and even anachronistic things, sounds, that I will miss. Each photo has a caption if you click on it.

The kitchen, retro yellow

The front of the house from the street, Kiwanee Rd.

Me standing in the dining room, wearing Rhoda’s coat, self-timer

Pano of the empty dining room, my favorite room because of the chandelier and wallpaper.

The view of the front hall leading into the kitchen, with the lantern style light fixture

Vintage wallpaper, vintage dials and switches in my grandparents’ bedroom

Gorgeous silver and blue patterned wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom

My favorite place to hide: behind the railing of the stairs, looking into the new, shiny living room. The room used to be carpeted white.

Me, sitting outside in the backyard, before I began Snapchatting my impromptu monologue

Empty backyard, where the apple tree used to be

The basement, in my grandfather’s home dark room. For some reason, these photos were still tacked to the wall, despite everything else being emptied out.

The wall of the basement laundry room, notes that were written likely 20-50 years ago.

I would still like to pursue the idea of sending memory probes to my cousins and sister. They are creative and would probably be into it, and it would be a sentimental/bonding thing to do.

I still want to pursue the greater project of recreating her memory in this space, the home, her home, and keeping the sadness/memorialization/death/loss aspect far away from it. I want to stay on task with my original intention of having a “grandma’s house” interactive that anyone could walk through, experience, and enjoy.

I’m just not totally sure what I should do as my next step; it’s a bit daunting.

*When I was around 12, my parents replaced our old refrigerator with a brand new one and I was so distressed that I cried, because the old one was so familiar to me and I felt a loss.

Elvira’s Project: Progress

So far in my project I have focused mostly on the contents of the book. After copying and pasting all the contents of the blog in a Word document, the process of selecting the poems I wanted to include in the book was long (there was also plenty of content to assess), but coming up with a certain “curatorial” line to follow happened quite spontaneously. I focused on the poems that I felt most said something about him -more about him and less about his relationships. I would say that about 50% of his poems were about friends or girlfriends and the rest were concerned with more intimate issues, opinions, fears, hopes… So even though I was tempted to reproduce that 50-50 proportion in the book, I thought it would be more meaningful for the intended readers to have a few more that could offer a more intimate ‘window’ into his character or his thoughts at the time. I also decided to leave in the “problematic” poems; I felt that it would be true both to the spirit of what I am doing and to his own spirit, as it was his choice to put these words out in the open *cyberspace.

Design-wise, I have attempted to keep the look of the book very simple. I had been very fixed on the idea that the design had to be somewhat true to the blog, but I have been reflecting on this. I think the fact that the blog had such a standard, minimally tweaked theme might mean that my cousin honestly didn’t care how the site looked. And now looking back at the frequency with which he posted, considering he put up more than half of his entries during the first month of the blog tells me that he was just excited to ‘empty’ all of his old work into this site and perhaps the look of it was not a priority. I am fully assuming this, of course, but I think that ultimately being faithful to the Blogger theme is not important. What I am keeping is the spacing and the alignment of the poems, because they are inherent to the text and represent aesthetic choices he made. I am also keeping the images he posted and I will be including screenshots of the videos he shared on the blog.

As I honestly don’t have the means to have a “nice” book printed at this time with the quality it deserves, I am going to print the booklet in regular white Letter paper and sew it together by hand. I am undecided about the front cover. The cover of a book is usually what “sells” it to you and I am not sure that this particular book needs that, so I am considering using plain paper, perhaps black or another color. I don’t know if plain black will just make it a gloomy object. I’m not sure about this part.
I enjoy the process of designing the book, but I still want to be able to add something of myself to it. One thing I want to do is write a foreword and perhaps add a photograph of us together -is that inserting myself too much in the book itself? Another thing I definitely want to do is record myself, either only my voice or a video, reading some of the poems, and upload this to a separate site. I want to write the link to the site in the book and have it be a complement. I like to visualize it as an asteroid to the bigger piece -the book with the poems and then a smaller homage. This is not only cathartic for me -I think it would also be interesting and exciting for my family to feel curiosity, and then listen to the poems being read aloud (something that perhaps they would not immediately think of doing). We have been reading so much about performance and the power of repeating things, and enunciating things… it just seems natural that in order to breathe life into something that is currently “gathering dust” online I not only bring it to the physical realm in form of print but also animate it by speaking it.