When
I'm walking along the streets of a town, I'm imagining the
houses are
huge letters, while the streets are spaces between the
lines, words
and letters, the yards are empty interiors of the letters
...... So,
if we made the houses flat, if we pressed them down, and
the whole
town shrank to the size of an ordinary sheet of paper,
then we would
get a page of text.
When I'm reading, I imagine that I'm wandering among the letters and if these letters were enlarged several thousand times, they would be like houses, while myself, also miraculously not enlarged, I would sneak among them, along and across interlines, like an ordinary passer-by in a hurry ......
This is the way the author, Dorwałas Oknowawski, presents his inspirations, his way of thinking, in the catalogue of the exhibition. But he does not explain whether he is the one who has written the above phrases, or maybe only read them somewhere and they penetrated his mind deeply, stayed for ever in his memory, and now he considers them his own opinion not even trying to find its source; maybe he himself wrote it many years ago. Doesn't matter.
This is the map of Łódź city. Not of the whole city. Of its part, hard to say which one. Maybe it is Księży Młyn. Maybe it is the area of the Piotrkowska street. We don't know why he has chosen this very city. The author says nothing about it, we will say nothing, too – sometimes the reason is so trivial, discussing it has no sense at all. What this map is like – this is the problem worth discussing.
Like every other map, this one can be folded. When folded it looks exactly like a book, though not very typical. Each page contains one block, or the buildings located within the area limited by four streets perpendicularly crossed ||= this town, or at least a part of it, has the structure of a chessboard, so typical for American towns, thus the notion of a “block” should be quite clear =||. The patch created by the houses has been transformed into a letter, or into a group of letters, a syllable or a word. This big letter is composed of hundreds of small, tiny letters (like a wall is composed of bricks), or is just a piece of text. The folded map has been cut in a way enabling turning pages like it is in the case of a normal book. Thus we have to do with almost a normal book, whose pages are joined in a special way, so that this book can be unfolded and spread like a huge map; only when this map is spread out the text composed of big letter-pages can be read.
Writing a map doesn't mean to give up drawing – drawings appear from time to time, but the text is absolutely dominating; there are places where it's really hard to distinguish writing from drawing – well, whatever can be said about a letter, it is also a picture, and a picture is a drawing (at least sometimes). More, some of the blocks are a kind of book in a book: a block is covered with a pile of leaves, either leporello joined or pamphlet stitched.
So, we have both a kind of a road atlas, where each page is a part of map, and the map which can be spread out and hang on the wall or lay on the floor, because with no doubt it is 2-3 by 2-3 metres big.
This is so in the case of the paper version of this book-art-work.
It's easy to imagine an electronic version of this work; this version is not presented in the Page Art Centre, because of very banal reason – the electronic version does not exist. We don't know, either, if it is going to be prepared. If it existed, then each block would be one screen. The hypertext technology allows practically endless penetration of a block, building up texts and images perpendicularly to the surface of the map.
If the paper version is, by its nature, finished, closed (although some leaves can be attached to it – nevertheless technical problems would be great obstacle; after some time the map would be a monstrous object very hard to handle and almost illegible; just imagine an addition which must be placed UNDER the map... in the case of hypertext there are no problems of that kind, since ABOVE and UNDER exists only in our imagination), then the electronic version can be an infinite version. Maybe in due time it could transform itself into a sophisticated game...
If there is a map, there must be also a treasure.
The starting point is very simple: we don't know where the treasure is and we don't know what this treasure is. We have but descriptions at our disposal. General and detailed ones, even minute ones. Poetical, metaphoric, allegoric, with-plenty-of-unnecessary-hints-allusions-interjections-allegations, direct and indirect, fantastic, boring, beautiful, misleading ... descriptions .... And this is where GAME begins, because a description is only a description, it is never a thing it describes ..... So, can we really find what is described using as indication only the description?
When I'm reading, I imagine that I'm wandering among the letters and if these letters were enlarged several thousand times, they would be like houses, while myself, also miraculously not enlarged, I would sneak among them, along and across interlines, like an ordinary passer-by in a hurry ......
This is the way the author, Dorwałas Oknowawski, presents his inspirations, his way of thinking, in the catalogue of the exhibition. But he does not explain whether he is the one who has written the above phrases, or maybe only read them somewhere and they penetrated his mind deeply, stayed for ever in his memory, and now he considers them his own opinion not even trying to find its source; maybe he himself wrote it many years ago. Doesn't matter.
This is the map of Łódź city. Not of the whole city. Of its part, hard to say which one. Maybe it is Księży Młyn. Maybe it is the area of the Piotrkowska street. We don't know why he has chosen this very city. The author says nothing about it, we will say nothing, too – sometimes the reason is so trivial, discussing it has no sense at all. What this map is like – this is the problem worth discussing.
Like every other map, this one can be folded. When folded it looks exactly like a book, though not very typical. Each page contains one block, or the buildings located within the area limited by four streets perpendicularly crossed ||= this town, or at least a part of it, has the structure of a chessboard, so typical for American towns, thus the notion of a “block” should be quite clear =||. The patch created by the houses has been transformed into a letter, or into a group of letters, a syllable or a word. This big letter is composed of hundreds of small, tiny letters (like a wall is composed of bricks), or is just a piece of text. The folded map has been cut in a way enabling turning pages like it is in the case of a normal book. Thus we have to do with almost a normal book, whose pages are joined in a special way, so that this book can be unfolded and spread like a huge map; only when this map is spread out the text composed of big letter-pages can be read.
Writing a map doesn't mean to give up drawing – drawings appear from time to time, but the text is absolutely dominating; there are places where it's really hard to distinguish writing from drawing – well, whatever can be said about a letter, it is also a picture, and a picture is a drawing (at least sometimes). More, some of the blocks are a kind of book in a book: a block is covered with a pile of leaves, either leporello joined or pamphlet stitched.
So, we have both a kind of a road atlas, where each page is a part of map, and the map which can be spread out and hang on the wall or lay on the floor, because with no doubt it is 2-3 by 2-3 metres big.
This is so in the case of the paper version of this book-art-work.
It's easy to imagine an electronic version of this work; this version is not presented in the Page Art Centre, because of very banal reason – the electronic version does not exist. We don't know, either, if it is going to be prepared. If it existed, then each block would be one screen. The hypertext technology allows practically endless penetration of a block, building up texts and images perpendicularly to the surface of the map.
If the paper version is, by its nature, finished, closed (although some leaves can be attached to it – nevertheless technical problems would be great obstacle; after some time the map would be a monstrous object very hard to handle and almost illegible; just imagine an addition which must be placed UNDER the map... in the case of hypertext there are no problems of that kind, since ABOVE and UNDER exists only in our imagination), then the electronic version can be an infinite version. Maybe in due time it could transform itself into a sophisticated game...
If there is a map, there must be also a treasure.
The starting point is very simple: we don't know where the treasure is and we don't know what this treasure is. We have but descriptions at our disposal. General and detailed ones, even minute ones. Poetical, metaphoric, allegoric, with-plenty-of-unnecessary-hints-allusions-interjections-allegations, direct and indirect, fantastic, boring, beautiful, misleading ... descriptions .... And this is where GAME begins, because a description is only a description, it is never a thing it describes ..... So, can we really find what is described using as indication only the description?
