Mimetes

Strange Totem

Three photographs for a fiction-based ethnographic project on people who, when it becomes necessary to remove a tree from the yard (because it is encroaching on the foundation, or the sewage system, or because it threatens to fall on the house in a storm), decide to leave its trunk standing.

All future photographs, as well as interviews and critical studies on partial tree owners will now be published by an imaginary person on her blog, the Yard Totem Project. Updates will not be posted here.

One extra, added despite a lack of ethnographic information on the residents of the house:

Smiling Lessons

Seen on various telephone poles throughout town.

Concerned Citizens' Campaign

Personal Ad

A scanned page from yesterday's Boston Messenger. The top left ad is in the name of an imaginary person. The others are worth reading as well.

Doing Hans a favor

Someone describes his encounter with the word "'glad' to Hans. Left taped together, the two papers are meant to have obviously taken different amounts of time to prepare. Why leave a design with a handwritten note?

Though many people describe the repetition of a word as having the effect of making it no longer seem like a word, this person believes it reveals that word's essence.

Anecdote for Hans

Email sent to the wrong recipient. Intended for someone random, but instead I picked someone I know so as not to deeply upset anyone. Sent from a newly made up address.

History of Trains

A page from an imaginary paper on the history of trains. Left in a library book on the history of trains.

Dust jacket for a missing book

Click here for a full-size version.

A dust jacket for a book about an imaginary genius. Cover flaps contain excerpts from the book. Quotes and publishing company are fabricated. The musical phrase on the cover is nonsense. The ISBN does not have the mathematical integrity of legitimate ISBNs. Left in several libraries. Where volumes of similar size are available (6"x10"x2"), left wrapped around them.

Meant to cause the anxiety of not recognizing the name of a famous person.

Transcription Graffiti

The anxiety to communicate the threatening situation to someone spills into the future (onto the future reader), and the particular medium (the wall) is available accidentally and employed in a foreign manner: the present-narrative/transcription mode of discourse is uncommon to graffiti except in statements like "I am shitting". It is like writing a note in something not meant to be ink (you could use ketchup). This (like all) accident creates verisimilitude.

Øren Bjrnstrnd, Suicide Artist: One Page from an Imaginary Academic Paper

(Click to read)

Page 45 (footnotes 61-65) from an imaginary research paper on performance arts which require "remote and politically neutral venues" due to their controversial nature. To be left in a college library book on contemporary art.