Project: Return to Sender "Top-Level" Development

Back in Fall of 2017 I started work on Return to Sender¹. This was to be a very short comic that I would incorporate into a larger set of comics as part of a personal project. I won't go into the details of that project here (perhaps another post), but instead I simply want to detail the development of what I refer to as the "top-level domain" within the comic.

Some background is perhaps in order though. Return to Sender is an idea for a short story I came up with: a visual narrative of a woman coming upon a lab not intended for her eyes, discovering tanks with brains hooked up to computers and having the startling and unnerving realization that if those brains are simulated people then she too might be simulated, and on and on. To illustrate this I intended to depict four different levels of reality: that of the woman, a lab environment above her, an industrial environment above that, and finally a seemingly alien environment as the top-level domain.

Project: Prototype Illustration Books

Having successfully completed several process/art books for my assessment in spring (here), I decided to follow-up two of those books with more complete ones. One book was a collection of watercolour and ink location sketches, and since my assessment I completed several more sketches that I wanted to add to the set. The other was a collection of my life drawing sketches, but only covered the period of concern for my assessment, and not wanting to leave my earlier life drawings stranded, I felt that incorporating the bulk of them into one book would be desirable.

In addition there were a number of issues with my previous books that I wanted to correct. For one the stitching was poorly done as I was very new to the process, in a rush to get them done at that point, and using a much too fine string (although I didn't know it at the time). The end result was that the books were loosely bound and would unsatisfactorily slide around in the hand. The books felt always on the verge of falling apart. The other problems included slight page alignment errors (front and back printing) and the vertical misalignment of a few pages in the figure drawing book. New books then would correct these errors, bringing forth more complete and less error-filled revisions.

Little did I know what difficulties I would encounter on the way...

Project: Spitmap

Spitmap is the name that I ultimately gave to my end-of-year project at Camberwell College of Arts. The project was my contribution to the "PITCH" collaboration between Old Spitalfields Market and the college which occurred on June 11th-13th of this year. I experienced the project as a series of successive failures and frustrations, so documenting it here may help me to take some lessons away from the project.

Project: Making Sketchbooks

Following on from my completion of process books in May of this year (here), I undertook to make some sketchbooks that I could use with my newfound skills. These I completed in late May and early June to tag along with me as I did some travelling around Europe.

Unlike a "proper" book, there turned out to be a lot of advantages to making my own sketchbooks. I needed a new watercolour sketchbook, and when searching for such a book that is affordable one becomes quite limited in terms of paper selection as well as format. It is also rare to find a sketchbook that will lay flat without resorting to a hideous spiral-ring binding. Combining all that with a hardcover? Apparently out of the question.

Project: Making Process Books

As part of my end-of-year assessment at Camberwell College of Arts back in May of this year, I undertook to make some process books as a means of presenting some of my work. I was dissatisfied with how I had previously collected and presented my work and I determined that a more formal approach was required if the process was to be of much value to me. I started by scanning a series of on-site location sketches that I had undertaken starting in March. As I went over the sketches, I recognized that I could make some notes about the development of my approach and technique and so the book format suggested itself to me as an appropriate fit. While I was at it I decided to make two other process books: one covering the figure drawing sketches I had done earlier in the year, and the other covering the major course project, the development of which was scattered across loose sheets and several sketchbooks.

In Search of Philip K. Dick's Authentic Human

Reading through Philip K. Dick's speech How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart in Two Days (Dick, 1978) back in September I realised that I had read it before. Not recently, as I know that I read portions of it as referenced in N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman (Hayles, 1999) (or even more recently just before in excerpts detailed on Maria Popova's blog (Popova, 2013)), or as detailed in the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode on the subject of Dick's exegesis (Molinsky, 2018)¹, but deeper in the past. In some forgotten corner I had sought this out by Dick and had consumed it, letting it lay dormant in my mind. It occurred to me to ask myself whether in some private thoughts I may have merely recapitulated ideas I had read from Dick, having forgotten the attribution, and mistaken them for my own? This process, known as cryptomnesia, whereby one experiences a memory but mistakes it for something genuinely original or inspired, pressed especially on my mind because of Dick's own accounting of his experiences, experiences that led him to some bizarre beliefs.

On Reading More and Reading Better

Throughout 2017 and continuing through 2018 I have attempted to drastically increase the quantity of reading that I do. For both years I have kept in mind a general goal of completing 52 books in one year - one book per week. This is a common challenge as any Internet search will quickly reveal. The reasons for wanting to undertake such a challenge are numerous: as a means to expand one's vocabulary, improve one's writing through familiarization of different styles and techniques, to increase one's knowledge and understanding, and as a way of improving organization and scheduling skills. That last one is important; despite the vast amount of time that is doubtless consumed in reading this much, the argument is generally made that it can be safely taken away from all the time that we generally waste in a day: the idle Internet browsing, the Netflix binge-watching, playing games or fiddling with apps. While I believe I've benefited from significantly expanding my reading, I have mixed feelings about the project.