This whole project came as a spur of the moment thing. I don’t know where it is going and where it will take me. And that’s okay. The ideas I have been percolutating for a long time. The ‘stream of conciousness’ is an accurate description. Each post are only marked by a time stamp without a title. That was intentional – an effort to strip the text of any meta-data that describes its semantic structure. The genre of a blog was also intentional, as it presents the ideas in reverse chronological order by default. I have not been an avid Tumblr user at all, but my guess is it attracts a certain audience and has a slightly perculiar feel to it (I don’t know what it is and can’t say I understand it much). Instinctively I thought it would be suitable platform for the project. The template is also a bit ‘default-looking’ which kind of works. Georgia was a concious font choice, what I usually write in (as I am writing in Georgia now in Byword). The fact that this template doesn’t show a full timestamp was semi-intentional – having the time as a relative measure (eg 30 minutes ago) makes sense as well.
I sort of half-intentionally don’t make the text polished (hence the use of contractions like ‘don’t’ instead of ‘do not’), and leaving typos uncorrected. I tried not to go back to edit past posts, but have hopelessly failed. The typos still bother me.
As for publishing, every post is in effect ‘published’, but also evolving. But I have also been exploring other dimensions of publishing – fixing the text in a PDF, ‘designed’ (whatever that means), making it available for buying on lulu.com as a print-on-demand publication, and leaving the text published yet ‘open’ as a Google Doc – are some of the experiments so far. Representing the unedited, unpolished text with a ‘designed’ look was to raise the question of ‘when does a draft become a published “work”?’ Because sophisticated typesetting technology is now available to everyone, the boundary between a draft and a published work has dissolved. This might have something to do with the loss of the author’s ‘aura’, or their ultimate ‘death’. The RGB colours were intentional, playing upon material/non-material.
Let’s see what other ideas I’m going to toy around with.
(written in Byword in a small restaurant in Shamshuipo)