The role of publisher/designer/bookmaker naturally puts one in a strange and strained relationship with the role of the author. One spends a great deal of time and energy making and distributing work that is not necessarily one’s own. That is not completely one’s own. That can be very much one’s own.
Traditionally the designer and printer of books is supposed to hide their work, and let the author’s text be communicated as clearly, quickly, and cleanly as possible. Multiple voices of authorship are noise in the channel. Noise complicates things. Noise makes for an impure experience. Noise is the murmuring of the crowd, or the grinding of the machine, or both. Noise is confusion. Noise is public. Noise is the penetration of the world into the hermetic realm of art.
Noise is figure/ground ambiguity. Noise is far worse than figure/ground ambiguity, it is work/frame ambiguity. One never leaves, the ringing in the ears persists. The experience of the work does not stay within the reader’s interaction with the work, does not remain separate from, or other. Noise cuts right through to the receiving subject in body, space, and time. Noise speaks to the individual as one individual among many.
Silence is a myth.
The body is a noisy machine, always present.
20110531
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