Process notes
Week 02 produced the △2 written response and the online archive taogcd.github.io/out-of-the-picture: 39 comparisons linking Geminus’s plates to 107 source pages from three libraries. The site presents copies as copies (paper tone and colouring belong to particular volumes, not to the composition), and users can drag, crop and combine images, so the archive itself becomes a rearrangement.
Tutorial feedback (22 October)
In the tutorial on the written response, the tutor pointed out that the writing mostly applied Benjamin to my work — he says this, and I have done this — without showing where the work goes beyond him or challenges him. Three prompts stayed with me:
- Benjamin measures reproduction by loss. What might be gained? We live in a world where nearly everything is reproduced and repurposed; a sample or a bootleg can add value rather than only remove it.
- Benjamin was writing about mechanical reproduction in the early twentieth century. Reproduction now includes models that are themselves built entirely out of reproduction.
- The OCR-B direction needed a purpose: tracing how others used a typeface is a starting point, not yet a question.
This feedback fed directly into the ∆3 draft (△3 week 01). There, Benjamin’s measure of loss is turned around: every image I touched was already a scan of one printed copy, a product of translation rather than a damaged original. The question shifts from what is lost to what travels with an image into a new situation, what is left behind, and who decides.