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wordpress 2.0 has been installed! ongoing upgrades of features will be listed below for interested parties.
tagged: news, site-updates

as you know, i care very much about the endeavours of the wrk.grp and i want it to persist and grow and become more fruitful. i would like to initiate a discussion through the lens of roosevelt, which is not complete yet, about why the first phase of this project failed, which it clearly did, and how our working methods, our communications, and our expectations of one another can be tailored to make our productions satisfying to us and productive to the community we are seeking to contribute a different voice to. i know you all have both concerns and goals, share them.
tagged: collaboration, hacks, island, rant, roosevelt, staged



the great fire of london
jacques roubaud
the great fire of london is a text in place of a text, a text in place of a project, a text in place of the life it consumed, it also makes possible the things that it replaces, the text that it replaces, that failed aspiration, is in fact contained within the text that laments it, it is nominally invoked, a luminous plasma that birthed the failure and also maintained the failure long enough for it to expire and leave a ruin, which is what we find in it, the project and the life that sought it are made palpable only through the humanity of an obscure ethos, we are assured by the failure of the author because it ensures that he was indeed there, a spectre, why trumpet success, success is an end, yet through his abandonment of the text it becomes ours, and happening across its ruins in mid-october i spun together greater yarns than could be supported knowing the fecundity of reflective failure.
acquire this text: powells.com


on these bound blue lines, with such clear definitions, on this stack of cards i will write, in words, what could not be writ in the haphazard lines and shades of the draughtsman’s pencil, the cad jockey’s click, at least not by fragments of people, barely speaking, and not over the months that eclipse into earlier darkness, when they arrive home to their desks in darkness to cough out shapes, not so quickly as those craven predetermined rote forms, i wanted to see architecture itself, as a practice, ruined, and what it wrought ruined, and i wanted it to slide onto the paper in such a way as to belie its infancy, i wanted it immediately ancient, with us erased, so that the ruinous history given to the people all at once could be immediately claimed by them, broken down, individuated, owned by anybody but me, i wanted this nightly sacrifice of my own time, my sleepless hours, my self worth to be pushed toward so much nothing that i could not be blamed for it, all of these years working out backwards why i should not have the power to put something before you, but done in the only way i know how, through perpetual creation that now continues in these cards where i sift through the ruins of an aspiration that never got to the point where it could be broken down again, by time, and by someone other than me, i give myself two weeks.
