SPORK PRESS
sporklet 6

Notes

Shuta paints with duck tape and expanding foam and mannequins and Pringles cylinders. Siken paints with a saw, in wood, on the floor and the stoop and in the bushes by the bong shop next door. The asbestos, encapsulated and harmless now. The binder flaking like skin, curling like skin, the way the desert shrinks and cracks like skin, and we sweep it up daily.

We’re late. We’re late with everything.

We changed how we do things. This didn’t work out as well as we hoped. Drew thinks maybe we were misinformed about the grain direction on the paper. It’s supposed to be grain short. Nothing is behaving like it’s grain short. So he stares at the books, these “improvements,” and he gets angry.

Our people come in, they ask what’s there to be done, and Drew says Wait. He says I’m figuring this out. But he is slow and unreliable and we’re quietly stepping around him while he presses his face to the worktable and mutters to himself about knots.

 

Our whole of everything is a crust of unreality built upon a surface of lies and familiarity. This does not need to be said, but Siken says we must define our terms. Drew says everything is marketing and everything moves too quick and that only the shallowest and most attenuated snippets of pseudo-meaning can travel fast enough and insert themselves into the feed. Shuta says that’s the form and the milieu and he can’t believe that it’s taken us this long to catch up.

What is meant, here, is that things here (for now) have been stripped, of process, of system, of external input, no dynamic or instantaneous or responsive anything, and the CSS is written by hand, the CMS abandoned, the HTML written by hand and there isn’t much to S and we don’t know WYG until our FTP places it and the server serves it back and we then decrease the line height by another quarter em and upload again.

Design is a scaffold of lies, a sleight-of-hand integument implemented with varying skill and success, there to suggest and maybe imbue, qualities the thing itself may or may not actually possess. Language too is a scaffold of lies which we implement to shape meaning. Our present method is to work to minimize the layers of obfuscation and implementation, to give the words the visual bandwidth in the hope that we can thereby limit any attenuation of meaning. We are probably wrong in our thinking. We are happy to be wrong. To be thinking.


Spork Press started in 2000.