Process: Macroblogging

Working with the Web everyday, I find I spend little time on Facebook on my off hours. I resist spending more time on the computer after work. Yet, if I really wanted to limit my screen time, why did I choose to blog?

It is of course a forum to express views and tell stories, a tool to communicate, to start a dialogue… We argued the potential of the blogging medium as a new writing tool in grad school. Its underlining structure, much like the journal, depends on chronological entries, of postings in time. While the discipline and rigor of writing regularly could only help improve one’s craft, the inherent qualities of the blog, like thematic cloud tags, interlinking and multimedia, could arguably provide new ways of writing, even stirring up new ways of thinking about the creative process itself. The format of the blog has adopted Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept of the rhizome: multiple, in-between and non-hierarchical.

My own social networks (Facebook and LinkedIn) are indeed rhizomatic in that they are on the surface and widely spread out. The communication style is staccato-like and sporadic. Some would say concise, especially when referring to microblogging — the 140 characters that constrain the tweet. As an artist however, I am more interested in the opposite. Would it be macroblogging? The sometimes rambling but usually exploratory writing exercises that allow me to develop my ideas in depth. A tool to help me to reflect on various themes from placenames and personal mapping, to visual representations of time, memory and knowledge.

I also chose the blog for the documentation aspect, after the fact. That is, the postings can be mulled over and written anywhere and recorded later on line. I don't always subscribe to the myth of the mobile worker. I’ve found that trying to work on the train with my laptop is a trying exercise: not enough elbow room, bouncy, vibrating screen and frustratingly intermittent wireless connection. Better to jot down my notes on paper and re-transcribe later. We do not always have to be connected, working at breakneck speed and multitasking to death. I’ve become almost defiant about working offline at a slower pace. It is a delight to sit in a park with the breeze in my hair, to take the time to slow down, to reflect and write; to enjoy a coffee in a bustling café, where the murmurs and voices stir up thoughts and help shape their written form and cadence.

In this way, the blog has effectively freed me from the screen as reflective off line activity is just as much part of my process. Though I could update the blog remotely using RSS feeds and a handheld device, I chose the low-tech approach. I enjoy the messy capture of intrusive, spontaneous thoughts on whatever is at hand, collecting random scribblings on torn newspaper, napkins, VIA rail paper bags and beer coasters that I amass while on my various commutes – from the short stroll to the compost heap or grocery strore, to the long, dreamy metro rides home.

The piecemeal aspect of the blog also intrigued me in terms of my subject matter: pieced together notions of time and place, unreliable tidbits of memory, flashes of insight, parts of the whole. Responded to this description of time by Michel Serres and Bruno Latour (1995) cited in “Some new instructions for travelers: the geography of Bruno Latour and Michel Serres” by Nick Bingham and Nigel Thrift (Thinking Space, 2000):

time does not flow according to a line. … nor according to a plan but rather according to an extensive, complex mixture, as though it reflected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration (rendings, gaps) – all sown at random, at best in a viable disorder (284).

With Tongue Rug, the last line would read more like:

time is all sewn at random, at best in a viable disorder…