Agnes Denes

Wouldn't it be a shame if mankind were beginning to understand its own mind and the nature of consciousness just as it was losing its humanity? If it became so mechanized that discovering what it is that makes it human were to become just another equation, a cold fact that no longer had any value except its utility in making a better machine?

Agnes Denes, The Book of Dust

Pascal's Perfect Probability Pyramid & The People Paradox - The Predicament (PPPPPPP): Agnes Denes, 1980

Rick Myers: Two Things, Quite Intertwined

“....with the history of Morse, the transmission of incremental visual language and sound, and notions of data storage and retrieval all having strong relationships with research and thought focuses within my practice, these signature vestiges of the Morse photocopier were perfectly in-keeping with the work. It was an incidental chance encounter that wasn’t repeatable, and a way to know that I'm in the right place at the right time in my life, and using the work as a way to navigate that. Honestly, it sounds a bit romantic, I hope it does, the practice of moving through the day-to-day and accessing what is already right in front of you, that’s really, really special. I think of it as my day-to-day job, maintaining that space.”

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“I write in Yaddo's Stone South studio once more, glancing out now and then over the autumn berry bushes into the familiar meadow and apple trees, now so richly laden that their dark trunks rise from circles of fallen fruit, the pale, clear green of sun in a curling wave.

When I stayed at Aunt Nancy's farm in Virginia as a young girl, it was my job to separate the milk every morning and evening. I used to marvel that all I had to do was to assemble, carefully and with very clean hands, a well-scrubbed device and turn the crank for cream to emerge.

I never understood how the mechanism worked; nor do I understand why the simple act of writing has so apparently effortlessly revealed to me the secret logic of my life. And, in that logic, a faith to illuminate my days.”

Anne Truitt, Daybook, 1982

Stone South 3, Acrylic on paper 1974

“Flipping through piles of photography books at the Brooklyn Public Library, I came upon a cyanotype by Henri Le Secq, entitled Farmyard Scene, near St.-Leu-d’Esserent, dated 1852. Through the blue murk you can pick out bucolic details. Roof thatching, a barrel, some crates. The building on the right appears built into the hillside, its roof indistinguishable from a rock that arches into the center of the image before disappearing into shadow. The shadow is large and blue and bores through the center of the image like a tunnel. It is supposedly a scene, but there is no activity, no focal point. Only this blind blue space between two buildings. Only nothing but blue.”

ben tapeworm, Photo Blues, 2025

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Photo Blues is an essay about photography during COVID, vis-à-vis various blues

Copies can be purchased here.

Photo Blues by ben tapeworm 

Magnús Pálsson and Gapassipi

“I first learned of Magnús Pálsson’s work while organizing a weekly community radio show during a residency in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. While preparing an episode on sound poetry, I was searching for some Iceland-based artists, and the first name on every Icelander’s lips, when it came to that medium, was Magnús Pálsson. But for an English speaker whose Icelandic is limited to takk (thanks), it was nearly impossible to find any recordings or audio samples of Pálsson’s work, most of which was in Icelandic and distributed via physical media. I have my own personal fascinations with obscurity, and so this unavailability, intentional or unintentional, was intriguing to me.”

Ben DuVall

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