"Man is a being of distances, a restless energy, whose poles are the futurity of her project, the freedom of the instant, the world, and other persons." __Martin Heidegger

www.splace.net/ScrollViews/

This 9' scroll was type-set in wood and lead type, and then letterpressed on stark white Japanese cotton paper in 1994 as a limited edition of 14 scrolls. The format cellebrated the recent discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls near the border of Jordan and Israel, but it also has the spirit and innertia of an ambitious project such as was Jack Kerouack's own endless piece of paper on which he typewrote his classic novel "On The Road".

Scrolls have always been a source of intreague as a format and as the perfect metaphor for chronology or linear narrativity. By way of influences from the 1960's minimalist and experimental music realms, artists such as: Steve Reich, Meredith Munk, John Cage, et.al., the piece also references a pianola scroll with its seemingly random yet programatic array of punched holes, only this is type.

'i' scroll unravels with an acrobatic arrangement of words an letters, the prior commenting on the acts of 'creating' and 'existing' in-the-world, the former mimic the gutural sounds of Meredith Munk's noise works and are arranged as a random system, a tip-of-the-hat to John Cage's 'chance' compositions--having been set with all the available lead type of a font's drawer, a commentary on the finite character of 'old-school' typeseting in the wake of the recent integration of the computer as a more dynamic typesetting tool, where actual letters can be typed at infinitum. The chance availability of the lead type dictated the composition.

The horizontal thrust of the piece evokes the chronologic notion implicit in Heidegger's quote, which runs as a single line along the distance of the scroll (life/existance), the quote is set in Bouer Bodoni type *(Lead), in contrast with the rest of the piece's compositional elements (words), which are set in a variety of styles from the original Grothesque family (lead and wood type).

The word 'Man' is the very first word in the long composition and one of the only two elements to be printed in red ink. The other red element is one letter 'i' which is at the other 'end' of the scroll, alone, and laying on it's side. The color connection closes the connotation that 'i' is the 'ego' of 'Man'.

The rest of the composition aludes to a 'trajectory' full of quetions and dilemas possed at contrapunctual relations to the creative 'acts' or 'stages' ('instants') in every one of the composition segments.

*Bodoni is a modernist conversion of the classic serif fonts, characterized by its square serif endings and sweeping parallel lines. These Grothesque font families are emblematic of the origins of the more simplified, modernist sans-serif typestyles.