Abstract
The expanding potential for the dissemination and archiving of aphorisms is explored in this practice-based research thesis. An aphorism is a short statement that communicates an insight about the world (and can sometimes function as a guide to action). Eric McLuhan, interviewed in Signs of the Times: The History of Writing (Goëss Video, 1996), suggests that the future of the book is the aphoristic statement. Aphoristic knowledge has traditionally been transmitted through texts and through libraries, but this project brings into play various modes of recirculating aphoristic texts using contemporary distribution networks and digital media such as moving image, projection on to urban screens, artists’ books, archival digital photography and glazed ceramics. Texts ‘virally inhabit’ a number of sites and languages in a series of works situated in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary text art and artists’ books. The sayings rejoin the cultural river of ideas in local and international incarnations. Practice-based work (80%) and exegesis (20%)
