Mimetes

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.

Illegible Handwriting

The idea of this project is to leave illegible writing on the blackboards of local colleges.  The object is to give the impression of actual words (I do not write them with any words in mind), so that those who see it engage in their own creative speculation about what it might say. Legible punctuation gives the text structure and suggests particular semantic content. Flashes of legibility in the words themselves, properly executed, may increase the intrigue. This one, written on a board in the Mount Holyoke library, is a question followed by a single word in parentheses. Is the word the name of the person who said the quote (in parentheses to remind the reader that she probably should have already known)? Is it an answer to the question, proposed in parentheses for the sake of gentleness?

A possible reading of the last line: "In short—Autumn?" (not intended).

Imaginary Controversy

A follow-up to my November 27th post "New business moving in". The sign I put on an empty storefront downtown to advertise an imaginary business was taken down last week. I assume it was the proprietor's doing. I put this letter where the sign used to be.

A good way of creating controversy is convincing others that controversy is already occurring.

The habit of referring to a demographic/population as a "community" suggests that it could be addressed as one. "Dear Leather Community".

I do not see Futura as a leather-shop owner's font, but I do not mean to generalize. I am not familiar with the leather community. Producing something other than expectations, perhaps, increases verisimilitude.

Color Samples #3

Another set of color samples with dramatic names, though some of them not more dramatic than actual commercial color names ("This is it!" by Sherwin-Williams, for example). To be left in the hardware store.

Very enthusiastic wine review

(Click to read)

Is the rise of connoisseurship a mass attempt to penetrate the purely symbolic experience of something like a bottle of nice wine? To begin, by careful training, to respond viscerally to our food instead of accounting abstract gratification from the knowledge of having consumed it?  Like a character in Anna Karenina says, a cigar... there is pleasure... no, not pleasure, but the mark of pleasure. Writings such as the wine review above suggest that we are unfeeling towards good wine et cetera not because we have yet to cultivate our tastes (we would have too far to go, unless they're faking it), but because there is something wrong with us. We are simply not of the species who live with such intensity. Though I have never read a wine review with this sort of frantic zeal, in a way they all sound like this to me.

 

Posted in the Whole Foods wine section, above the Prima Toro. Tex submitted to various wine review publications.

New business moving in

(Click picture to enlarge)

An imaginary leather shop advertising its opening on the real window of what used to be a restaurant. I doubt the town of Amherst would actually allow this type of place to move in, if it can be judged by its neighbor Northampton, where last year a group successfully campaigned to prevent a porn shop from opening. Until the sign is taken down, passersby might think things about the possibility of a change in the atmosphere of the downtown area.