projekts:
a digital interpretation of the document which was sent to pamphlet architecture has been assembled. our readers may view the pages online here; the page sizes are large, for each is a .png between about 70-120kb. those who don’t understand what that means might be better off with a paper version, you may download the pdf and print copies for yourselves and for dissemination amongst all y’all’s crews. final pamphlet pdf [6.82 mb]
for those of you putting together your own ex_nihilo pamphlets, we have provided visual documentation of its use, that you may discern how the item is constructed.
those not wishing to view the slideshow or download the file and procure the proper materials for assembly may choose instead the option of home/office/shop delivery of one (1) fully assembled pamphlet at the cost of $35 U.S.; contact for more information.
tagged: ex_nihilo, publications
does the submittal of binder necessitate a new banner for ex_nihilo? it’s funny that you are calling out the vietnam memorial; i saw a sidewalk this weekend that had ‘us out of vietnam’ imprinted into the concrete. i was impressed with a such a protest made with longevity in mind; presumably they did not want the vietnam war to last as long as the concrete.
does this new banner have a title? i propose: ‘publius learn’d me how to draw a straight line in clone stamp’
i was bored at the office on friday. i was revisiting the ‘your plans’ section of cnn.com’s world trade center coverage. there was one that showed a drawing of a skyscraper and had ‘vietnam memorial’ with an arrow pointing to somewhere next to the building.
thanks publius/3.
the morbid symbolism in those proposals astounds me. it is so strange that people would displace their mourning into such a figure as empty as a date or an acronym. i see this kind of person making a dining room table out of their grandmother’s corpse because she used to make thanksgiving dinner for them.
what depresses me is not the attempt by folk to infest cnn contributions with symbolism itself, but rather it is the vacuous nature of our society which elevates such arbitrary data to the status of ’symbol’. the repetition of ‘911′ for summing up a piece of an enormous geopolitical struggle, one of the few true wars of ideas in history, shortchanges both the localized grief of the participants and their relations as well as the magnitude of the sidetracks towards globalization. one has the idea that if the attacks had been a been a week earlier, ‘904′ would tell us just as much about the victims and our place in history.
does the fact that most americans are so detached from what goes on outside their hondas and town cars that they were surprised to learn that their actions anger other parts of the world that they are reduced to the simplistic certainty of numbers to help make sense of the mess?
our predecessors didn’t call pearl harbour day, ‘12/7′; independence day isn’t ‘7/4′; granted, the war of 1812 is a lame (and inaccurate) name, but the monuments to colonel jackson don’t spell out ‘1812′.
our contemporary age lacks a known idea; we are a loose network of fragments who consume the same prefabricated lessons, but we are not a whole that is moving consciously towards a goal.
there was a time when our presidents were not only intellectual, but they were progressive; they felt that the morality and ability of man could be advanced. now we are told that our president does not read anything more than one page long; this is not necessarily what makes him stupid and incompetent, but it sets an example for a disdain for curiosity and multifaceted thought. our ‘leaders’ may be only emblematic of this characteristic in our fellow citizens, but they indeed help perpetuate it.
the result is that there is no idea, feeling, zeitgeist that might explain us to ourselves upon which we may draw; hence, the submissions to cnn will be naive, pastiche, or otherwise shitty.
