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A Beautiful Captive- The governing principles of A Beautiful Captive (ABC): A Beautiful Captive is a volume of texts and images that explores visual and contemporary culture. It considers itself both as a physical and theoretical space. In an age where exhibiting art is still largely dependent on the commodity of space via overbearing capitalist principles, A Beautiful Captive forms a site of resistance. The document does not exist on the Internet; it takes the form of an object. This is a crucial and deliberate decision, the book provides a site where the editorial process can mimic that of the art curator, establishing dialogues and connections between articles- intended to forge new interpretations through carefully considered orientation. A Beautiful Captive is a playful archive that simultaneously collects and reclassifies its specimens. Art theory, philosophy and social anthropology both monitor and effect art production. A Beautiful Captive provides an interface between these dialogues and intends to turn them inside out by refuting limiting categorizations. The volume wishes to include a vast range of contributions, from artists, writers, scientists, psychologists, mathematicians, architects, Tom’s, Dick’s and Harries. However broad the thematic umbrella spans the volumes will follow a strict and systematic structure, erecting a robust and diligent set of building blocks in order to spark a generative system. A Beautiful Captive playfully examines the building blocks of language, meaning, representation, translation and interpretation - The Alphabet. In ABeautiful Captive the alphabetic system provides the sequence and structure to the volume and also incites the possibility of intellectual and thematic chaos. The influence of the alphabet after its first flowering in ancient Greece on the development of western civilization and cultural patterns is intended to form a playful back drop to A Beautiful Captive. A central theme is the notion that the medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities. The Alphabet Effect is a theory that claims that a great level of abstraction is required due to the economy of symbols in alphabetic systems, and this abstraction and the analytic skills needed to interpret phonemic symbols, has contributed the cognitive development of its users. The development of phonetic writing and the alphabet in particular (as distinct to other types of writing systems) has made a significant impact on Western thinking and development, precisely because it introduced a new level of abstraction, analysis, coding, decoding and classification. The use of the alphabet has created an environment conducive to the development of codified law, monotheism, abstract science, deductive logic, objective history and individualism. Another impact of alphabetic writing was it led to the invention of zero, the place number system, negative numbers and algebra. The development of the alphabet and hence the written word has also effected the impact of emotion. Marshall McLuhan believes that to translate a beautiful picture into words is to deprive it of correctly articulating its best quality’s, therefore suggesting the written word has actually muted both images and objects from a level of emotion with which to express their exact appearance. Each volume of ABC is structured in the same way. Contributors are invited to create an essay. Six of the essays will take the form of the written word the other six will be image essays. The title of each essay is any single word that begins with a stipulated letter in the alphabet. The first volume of ABC is titled ABCDEF. The contributors can respond to this any way they wish and the essay can be about anything. The volume can be taken both as a document for a show that may or may not exist and it also generates a proposal for an exhibition that uses a variety of semantic and aesthetic structures and systems to provide the audience with multifaceted possibilities of interpretation. Many contemporary exhibitions are curated thematically promoting categorizations; ABC wishes to question the role these categorizations play in the discourse of contemporary art and present itself as an aesthetic, sociological, anthropological, and psychological experiment. The alphabet effect- This theory was mainly developed out of the Toronto school of communications in the 1950s and was developed further by Robert K. Logan ph. D. who wrote a book “the Alphabet Effect” 1986 published by William Morrow and Company, Inc. NY LYDIA CORRY Editor of ABC email abeautifulcaptive@gmail.com A LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS FOR THE FIRST VOLUME TO BE ANOUNCED SHORTLY |
A BEAUTIFUL CAPTIVE
IS A PLAYFUL ARCHIVE THAT SIMULTANEOUSLY COLLECTS AND RECLASSIFIES ITS SPECIMENS
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