易
Welcome to a preview of n Line & Changing, an ongoing project that will grow and change as material gathered over the past eight years continues to find form in lines, photos, sound collages and documentation and critical reflection.
Coming months will see new lines join the System Poem, new Station Poems added to the Stops on the Map, accompanied by photos and blog posts as well as video and audio content — all drawing from eight years of algorithmic walks in randomly selected neighborhoods in the vicinity of Shanghai Metro stops. I’ll be returning to Shanghai in the spring of 2024 to carry the project onward.
The project:
- Ride the Shanghai Metro system to the end
- Write the Shanghai Metro system to the end
n Lines and Changing draws upon practices and projects of preceding experimentalists (termed, variously and to various degrees of seriousness, psychogeographers, flippists, randonauts, surrealists, situationists, oulipians, and students of 易 — best known in English as the I Ching or Book of Changes — and other methods of using apparent randomness to arrive at arrangements in the present that otherwise would have escaped awareness).
Conceived of originally as a traveler’s anti-guide that would generate irreproducible excursions and experiences by use of an easily reproducible method, it has become an ongoing engagement and experiment that, on one hand, is rooted in the age-old human modes (those of walking and of writing) and that on the other hand extends and dissipates into the digital froth of our contemporary moment, one that draws deeply on our planetary and collective human past to generate a present which appears as a seething welter of possible post-Holocene (or, if you prefer, Anthropocene) futures.
Moving forward, n Lines & Changing will feature new Station Poems (Stops) created from materials gathered over eight years of conducting algorithmic walks in Shanghai. It will also feature critical reflections on the poems, process, and questions of if and how this work — as well as poetry and other modes of composition and critique — can contribute in useful and meaningful ways to conversations arising from a time in which humankind and the innumerable species with which we have co-evolved are experiencing accelerating rates of change in all areas of life, and to degrees that threaten to radically alter or even end much or all of life as we know it.
