New ideas and some progress

These last few days have been rather productive when it comes to writing. Although I have been trying to work mainly on the novel, I was inspired to work also on a different project that combines writing with visual imagery. I used to do this already many years ago in quite a different and very minimal fashion. Back then I worked on this by taking pictures and adding a short statement to it, inside the frame. The statement might have been one word or just a half sentence, usually in German. Back then I was still writing poetry. Not particularly good poetry, I might add, but just the usual teenage angst type of stuff.

If you want to meet this old incarnation of me (and maybe understand a little German, although that’s not entirely necessary for the most part), head over to http://www.klickerklacker.info. I have to say that the UX is slightly off, since it was supposed to illustrate that the world is not intuitive by itself. If you want to get to know people you sometimes have to keep prodding at some issues, even if you think you’ve already reached the end of the line. So, after the pop up opens you can find more than one picture, just keep clicking on the pictures until the window closes. Nowadays I would probably use a different approach to typesetting on the pictures themselves as well, but a few of the pictures I still find quite interesting.

strange apparitions © Lilly Schwartz 2012

The project I’m working on now is again a combination of text and pictures, but this time with a focus on the text. The pictures I use are mostly public domain, old illustrations from long out of print books, historical photographs, or pictures taken from scientific sources. The idea is to create a study of how different lines of thinking flow together with the perception of the external world. By taking aspects of our visual culture out of context, we can easily create a view that is largely unrelated to what reality really looks like. All of this is based on the assumption that our perception of the world mainly depends on how we interpret what is happening around us from our individual viewpoint.

It is in fact also a quite personal project and might not even say much to other people, since within the project I take little things that happen to me and interpret them differently in a what-if kind of mode. Instead of the relatively down-to-earth type of person that I have become over the last few years, I take on a very paranoid, maybe even misanthropic viewpoint. Of course this can only make sense for anyone else, if I really go overboard with this and create an interpretation that is so absurd that everyone immediately sees how strange all of this really is. The weird thing is that this different interpretation might be closer to what my view of things would have been like during the chaos of my teenage years, of course without reviving the more naive aspects of teenage angst. It plays with melancholy, anxiety and a sense of doom that befalls us for no apparent reason, while working mostly with strange coincidences and focussing on disturbing aspects of the world around us.

So far I have no real clue, where this will lead me, whether it will be long or short and whether it will even reach a conclusion, since it meanders through every day thoughts, obsessions and nightmares. As I say, I’m actually concerned that it might not make much sense to anyone else at this point, but I think if done right this can also be quite interesting to other people. I will tinker around with this for a while and see whether it works or not.

On the novel front I have finally cracked the 70,000 words mark and added a scene after being a bit blocked for a while. I’m not sure how long it will still take me to finish, considering that I’m somewhat distracted as well, but it feels like I’m close to finally wrapping up the first draft. There are still at least 4 scenes missing, but I already know most of their details since I’ve been going over them a lot in my head during the last couple of months.