a foam table mission statement

... Three dots. The punctuation of an omission. Three points that, neither by nature, nor by definition, can point at that single thought, omitted from the act of speech and by speech I denote as much the inner, ongoing process of writing, as the communicated imprint you find here for your interpretation. And to explain how this form, from the first to the last paragraph, surprisingly perhaps, can be called speech, I invite you to take a closer look at those little spheres of ink, absorbed by the fibers of the paper. On the one hand, if the text here being red, is a record of some form of speech or performative communicative act, these three dots may be the discreet marks, the only trace recorded on this page of a passage in that act, the passage which sidestepped speech. Thought unformulated. Pure sensations of the writers inner life. It is a mission-thought, a thought emitting only its intangible place. But just the right amount and organization of space. Allowing for an exegesis of punctuation, which perhaps tries to reach somewhat beyond the evidence, the following variation come to mind: A little more separate and the dots span rather a suspension of thought, the stop for a moment the flow. Even more and the syncopation of the white line turns to rhythm. More white and three dots would start to resemble three final stops. As if three phrases have been left out by an inventive editor. Three dots telling only about three moments at the ends of these lines, the moment when you -the reader- would first try to make sense out of them. Marking a space on the page. A spot for someone to speak, if they could only address you. Or a place for you to continue from. But these variations do not mix in the case under your eyes here. On the other hand, the sign of omission may be engraved in the second surface that constitutes this transmission: not the sweep of thought, but rather the paper fabric of the act itself of recording, in its operation table. It works best when the reader is explicitly brought to feel the presence of an editor engaged in the act of recording. One could say that the three marks are then a warning at a crevice, at a gap in the character of the text. The mark, in that case, is the announcement of an event space that is waiting to be met by the moving front of formulable thought. Somehow it represents an absence of thought, and is thus clearly the opposite of the space described above. What space is to be discovered in these marks? I note this other practice where the same typographical mark figures. It is situated at an other place in the spectrum of symbolic black and white, further to the writing side than the versions mentioned above. The three dots are indeed sometimes an index to the act of virtually inserting a detour through a library, used commonly in quotations for instance. A measure of censure, but only local; or a matter of abbreviation, perhaps even a sign of respect for the original, which contains more information then relevant at the place of the quote. There is no omission in that case, merely a reference to an imaginary, infinite margin that serves to avoid overpopulating the paper one. And as an impulse to the curious, a path to that other context where the quoted thought evolved. This note hopefully goes to assure you of the spectral character of what I'm trying to lead your gaze along. Even though, by risking myself on to the traitorous path that separates thought from speech, I'm forced to make an omission, a real one, for the simple fact that I do not at this point have the knowledge to elaborate on this, neither the space to ask your attention for the problem of this threshold. But I suspect this division possibly offers a parallel to go along, for palpating the difference between finding and searching (vinden en uitvinden,...)

to be continued

overview? space?time, no no, I actually have to get into this, or brush it over and away? from Orwell, 1984: For all his skills, though, Winston doesnt know the half of it. As Syme, one of the countless people working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary, points out, far from his job being to invent new words, it is to destroy words, hundreds of them every day. In cutting the language down to the bone, the whole of language is being put into reverse: Dont you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. (1954/1949: 45).

a foam table mission statement

But in a third case that interests me, three dots mark in typography a dead end of a labyrinth of thoughts and visuals. Imagine they are three walls telling you without a sound, the only way on, is to turn back. The picture of a labyrinth, in reply to the three dots, says Nobodys there. No editor, no author, no speaker in habits the fibers of this sheet of stationery. The dots This dead end is perhaps the Latourian science. have been replaced by a corridor that leads your eyes away from the Description without framing is after all a task screen. The black mark was there to lure you away from itself and away that feels quite forbidding of all sense, let alone from the text. A secretive omission seduced you to find out for your self, any movement forward. Like in a mirror about what is omitted. So there you are already, in the center of this palace, it gets one laughing a little hysterically, statement. For a moment you might forget the lines in front of you and feel this dead end. surrounded by a fragile silence. Or remember a soft white noise; a random signal. Or even closer to the typographical image we have been staring at for the time of one page's reading: imagine running a video tape with the negative of snow, that longlost phenomenon from analogue TV ages. Look very close to the upper left corner of the video screen. The three dots have become a nightmare. Anyway! What topological operation is needed for three dots that exist only within the flatland called 'a page', to be transformed into the walls of a three dimensional dead end? What material obsessions led me to redesign a smoothly printed surface and obtain a randomly woven sponge of cellulose. I guess you'd better start folding! But that would be to easy an explanation for the awkward corner this omission occupies. Why hesitate at the exact moment you take a breath in, with the full intention to catch the thoughts of those you address? For that clearly is the tenure of speech as it is occupies this space here, written, public. Indeed this text undeniably asks for your attention. An inscription of the most simple form takes the place of the first phonemes: ticking of seconds, one, two, three etcetera. Or is it on the contrary a countdown? So it is to allow this reference to inscription and let it work at the front of this mission statement, that the message itself seems to stay in suspension. It is to emphasize that fundamentally writing also comes before speaking. A tiny repetitive mark opens a space, as a reminder of a structure that was there before anything could be said. A repetition stakes out the space of a first meeting. If in this tangle you are reading again, going over these words, and you have come so far, its perhaps because you are still wondering, or wandering, Where are we? Where are you and the words, and the space between. These dots which sit at the top left of this page, are not a opening to an origin, to a time before the beginning of this text. On the contrary, they constantly remind you of where you began your own story. They are a point of contact. If not like for the fingers of the blind, reading Braille, than at least like the vibrations of a voice. They touch your skin and the space and bring them together to structure what lays in between, producing a labyrinth of echoes bouncing back and forth. So -if through these small black holes we want to unearth such a basement as our voices live in- what to say about the apparent contradiction between the places given here to the voice and inscription? It is this voice, as the sound of a space that we want to put back into these words. No, it is not a filling up, certainly not with meaning, this gesture of putting back into. It is a mere touching to put back on the map the scars that remain, after the carving out that is part of each word pronounced. The carving out of a new space. That is where we are. That is the place for this meeting. Here is an invitation to find a nest inside these dots. To inhabit the three walls of the labyrinth. Not to stay in the place they delimit, but to penetrate their perfectly round space... Imagine three over-scaled bubbles(code coordinates- inflate from ... to ooo by co, coo, ???) And so doing create another labyrinth of passageways, that is now contaminated with the darkness of these inky marks. So now you will have to feel your way. Reading has become impossible. Like an illiterate, the only thing left to you is a meeting between the impenetrable real and the fragile imagination. Together with the leading along of these lines, youre invited to inscribe a space beyond them.