The Outer Frame

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 3 December 2015.

The Interior of a Theatre, Northern Italian School

Regarding the last traveling zine, how would we proceed?

Here's a thought that isn't full fledged, but that is based on your book: what if this is how YOU become the outer frame?

That you and the ethos you espouse—NOT the satellite—are the final curator and caresser of content. I say this not to shirk work, but because you are the one who is actually achieving this feat. And you aren't just reframing, reposting, retweeting, and embedding like Carlton does. How strange to think that your lo-fi, subterranean ethos would encompass, enliven, and make art of the satellite!

Perhaps the satellite is the sphere in which we achieve what Irigaray considered the sterile recapitulation of ourselves and our projects—parthenogenesis, cloning, eternal recurrence, auto-birth. But it is still only by driving our roots down into the earth that we can flourish and proliferate as human beings.

I don't mind contributing my "mapkins" to the cause. If you send a journal or zine my way, I'll cut and paste some stuff into it, scrawl some hieroglyphics. But I think you're the one who has the power and skill and vision to make it all cohere (even if coherence amounts to nothing more than stitching and gluing things together). In some ways, you can do some of this already. In the same way that you've cut up books, you could print and cut up things from the blog, take a screenshot of or, better yet, trace, a YouTube video or picture, use any of these materials as you gain superiority over and bring salvation to our spiraling satellite.

I don't have any more time to write, but, to me, this is the perfect expression of the insights brought up in your book. The whole question of art vs. technology, the enduring importance of "terrestrial and tangible artifacts," the "laudible refusal to accept the speed and sanitation of contemporary culture." I feel like this could be the outer frame—and a benevolent one, not one that seeks to parasitically appropriate its existence.