Works
Micro Public-ation
&
A Book of Plans
Micro Public-ation is an installation that creates a small public space through the device of a hypertrophic self-produced book.
A Book of Plans unfolds in space, decompressing the lines and signs contained within to demarcate small reading rooms and places for conversation. It takes on the project of defining publics in both senses of creating an audience of readership or discourse and creating a public realm of space. The 720 pages of the book use their printed “words” and material physicality to produce a lightweight and flexible definition of space, aligning the book’s form and content. The “plans” within are both metaphorical and concrete—potentials contingent in their realization.
The installation gathers associated objects to show how the self-produced book can draw together other things to define a small world, bridging among the one and the many. The playful elementary forms serve as bookcases for the reading room, and they house a personal selection of self-published print matter to demonstrate their importance in calling together various communities, defining both social spaces and spaces of action.
The title itself, Micro Public-ation uses a play on words to conflate ideas of publics, public space, and publishing through its key suffix -ation which “forms nouns of action” from verbs (Oxford English Dictionary). It proposes not just “publish” as its verb but “public” as one too, requiring action and taking space.
By bringing together familiar words, forms, and spaces in unexpected ways, Micro Public-ation is an investigation of how to create new relationships among people, places, and things—if only for a moment.
Micro Public-ation exhibited at the 2019 UHI Alumni Salon: _plan.
A Book of Plans was designed and produced for an interdisciplinary SOAA seminar with UC Regents’ Scholar Lars Müller.