Background
In his work Camera Lucida (La chambre claire), Roland Barthes introduces the term punctum to describe a kind of meaning derived from an experience. It is found beyond the meaning derived from a relation of the experience to typical topics and issues in society (Barthes calls this studium). My reading of punctum is that it is deeply personal and perhaps entirely idiosyncratic. In the words of Barthes, it "wounds" and "stings". It dwells in the details and the unintended. It is initially unexplainable and unintelligible. To me, the idiosyncratic behavior of persons is a punctum. I am always captivated by the uniqueness of gesture that each individual exhibits. This behavior is rarely perceived consciously yet is somehow still incorporated into one's impression of an individual, implying that such behavior is in fact perceived, although not always consciously. I inquire: can the exposure to, and perhaps the conscious perception of, idiosyncratic behavior be elevated through a relocation of the focus of the perceiver? How might this be accomplished? Would a successful relocation of focus cause a perceiver to derive more punctum, more meaning from the behavior of a person and thus the person itself? I wish not to simply speculate on the answers to these questions; I must also, in some sense, live out the answers. Thus, the culmination of this project will be a manifestation of its content—an enactment.
Idiosyncrasies of Us
I entered this fellowship with the urge to do or make something; this was my non-negotiable, the anchor for my project. My initial proposal was to make a short film where several people took turns sitting in front of a camera, doing nothing, for a challenging period of time. This was an intuited idea (one that “comes to you” fully formed). I was quickly confronted with the limitations of film and other media, as well as the difficulty of resolving terms such as ‘authentic’ and ‘natural’ in terms of human behavior. In an attempt to transcend these issues I intuited the idea that was eventually realized on 7 July 2020 as the in-person facilitation. After conceiving of this facilitation I was faced with the necessity of articulating the idea and its contents to the Building 21 community, a task that I was not quite adept at accomplishing. From here on my fellowship became an inquiry into how to accomplish such a task, turning my investigation to the nature of intuited ideas and the creative act, as well as the act of differentiating the contents of an intuited idea. To achieve this end I compiled my complete, unedited journals made during over the course of the fellowship, totaling seventy-seven pages, into a document alongside an introductory essay.
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Montreal, Quebec H3A 1E3
