For me, being at a party is a devastatingly strange experience that typically results in an anxiety lasting for a couple days, though often this anxiety is a productive sort of disturbance. I know that this feeling of strangeness is not always on the surface for everyone, but I think this is simply a difference in the way people read and respond to the ideological cues in their surroundings; I approach with a paranoiac’s studded Plexiglas shield (I can look through it still, at least, whatever distortions that may produce), others often do so with a manic need to embody the collectively desired form.
This piece is a visual and textual response, a facet of my hermeneutics of the party. Originally they were in the form of Facebook posts. Recently I made a small edition of books.
Like the party itself, the piece is comprised of ostensibly simple procedures that come together for the sake of a more expansive metaphorical state. The images are simply clip-art files (themselves an incredibly interesting linguistic development) warped by a single pass through the kaleidoscope effect of a free, browser-based image editor, with various adjustments to the settings, allowing for the choice of a correctly sublimating result.
When at a party, to what degree will we seek to attain the phantom images that play us over the scene, and what is the nature of our resulting, personal worlds?
These images consist in the manipulation of base images to achieve visual-semantic ends, the base images themselves already being a result of a similarly describable procedure.
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Tyler Green is from Dunedin, Florida. He studies poetry in the MFA program at Columbia University, is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of Columbia: a Journal of Literature and Art, and is a Co-founder of TAGVVERK Journal.
