Progress

A passage from Tisdale's "Three Years Behind the Guns" (part 1)

A passage from Tisdale's "Three Years Behind the Guns" (part 2)

Working on patterns as backgrounds for the banners...

Tisdale's book tells about his experiences serving on the Olympia. I've been mining it (and other period writing) for text to encode on the banners...

Why do we quote?

Homework!

Bullhorn politics

So for some time I've been compiling research on how racist groups communicate their messages in the public sphere. I've spent a lot of time on the SPLC website, on the ADL site, and even a few hate groups I have tracked down. My assumption - valid until this election cycle - was that publicly displaying one's racism was a risk to these people, and that the symbols they used to telegraph their views was an essential adaptation to a world with which they are out of step.

Boy. Am I an idiot.

This has been driven home as candidates on the right have abandoned the dogwhistle for the megaphone. There are a thousand regrettable examples, but I want to just looks at this one for a minute. I don't know journalist Tom Cahill's work at all, or follow usuncut.com, but I appreciate his eye. In a story that ran on March 17, 2016, (picked up by Gawker...I know, I'm still in the depths here, but that's where this stuff happens some times) Cahill pointed out that PBS Newshour ran a story on Trump's popularity in the south on March 15 in which they spoke to (and photographed) a person named Grace Tilly and members of her family. Cahill (and others) observed that Tilly  had some prominent tattoos - one of a Celtic cross and another of the number 88. In certain contexts these signs are associated with white supremacist groups. Tilly, according to PBS, denies any white supremacist or Neo-Nazi allegiances and claims, "are connected to her family’s Celtic religious beliefs".

Is this some form of plausible deniability? I think it's hard to imagine - based on the data in the story - that the Tilly family represents a model for racial tolerance in 21st century America. Another member of the Tilly family interviewed in the piece, Pete, complains about, "all these protesters and all this stuff, and people saying [Trump is] racist" and specifically goes on to mention Black Lives Matter, before performing the signature move of racists everywhere and denying the value of race as a subject. Ms. Tilly's claim about her Celtic ancestry may or may not be true, but it tracks terribly close to the going mantra of 'heritage not hate' behind which hate now tends to hid.

So what we have here is someone who waves the (coded) flag and, when confronted on it, refuses to take responsibility for the message that's being sent. (I have considered the possibility that Ms. Tilly went to get tattoos that would celebrate her cultural identity that she thought had no meaning other than the one she intended. That is a very remote possibility given the popularity of number codes like 88...which, so far as my research has gone, has nothing to do with Celtic myth and are widely known among tattoo artists).

And this is a parent who kept her 11 year old home from school, "so that he can see democracy in action."

Grace, for the love of God, let your kid go to school. Don't do us any more favors. Please.

Concordance table

"Oh the discrimination of flags and pennant! Some day [...] I will go to the flag locker [...] study them out and write a descriptive poem about them. A flag that means yes at the main truck means no on the after gaff."
L. Tisdale, Three Years Behind the Guns, 205

Abbreviation	Text	1917 Code
BTW	By the way	HAD, HAS, or HAVE (the person indicated) he not...
FUD	Fear, uncertainty, and doubt	Bandit
IRL	In real life	Cistern
OMG	Oh my God	Handspike
SOL	Shit out of luck	At (the time indicated) we were off
TMI	Too much information	Plates (crockery)
WTF	What the F*ck	By steamer

Maybe we're getting some where...

I still think it needs to be clouds of text...

Working...

I started thinking of the composition as one long banner after visiting the Olympia a few weeks ago. My original suggestion for a site wasn't workable, so we are now on a lower deck, near the captain's cabin (and its large guns...)

As I have tried to hone in on a message, I have been increasingly overwhelmed by the range of the codebook. It seems some how not fitting to have a single message...or even a single code. I have been peppering these latest images with Morse.

Here there are texts at various scales and saturations of color...I like the way the gray carries the white of the hull up on the upper decks...

This one is getting a lot of different messages into the mix...I'm not satisfied with the organization of it, and may go back to the units defined by the stanchions of the deck rail.

All our cities

Text messages as signal flags...

Some images of popular text abbreviations rendered as signal flags for the Artship Olympia project...

IMO (in my opinion...)

OMG (oh my God...)

POS (Parents over shoulder...)

TBH (To be honest...)

WTF (What the f*ck)

Another avenue for this is still to use the old signal flag code books to compose a story of some kind. I have begun to try my hand at a pre-colonial form of writing from the Philippines called Baybayin...I think it would be interesting to have a subtext in that script...

Manilla Location flags with Baybayin subtext...

Where in the world?

In in the International Code of Signals (1917 version), there is an extensive index of four-flag codes for locations...I am thinking of using them as I hone on on the text for the banners that will be on the Olympia this summer...

Boston 

Los Angeles

Manilla

Philadelphia

Olympia viewed from Spruce Street Harbor Park (Proposed)

Trying to get a feeling for what the banners I'm thinking of would look like from the park...

A few more code signals...

The International Code of Signals has a vocabulary for affirmative, negative and evasive responses...how incredibly useful...

I am not in a position to be able to form an opinion.

I do not know.

I think so; most likely.

Artship Olympia brainstorming...

I'm very interested in the call for proposals for the USS Olympia now available through Philadelphia Sculptors. I've thought about the Olympia for a long time, but never really as a site for art work. But it's been an important place for me for a long time, so I am trying to think of how to work with it.

The Olympia

A few weeks ago, I visited with my friend the painter who makes things, H. John Thompson. This seems made for him - especially after his last show at Napoleon. We looked around the Seaport Museum and were very helpfully guided through the ship by an employee who shared a lot of good info.

John at the place where the remains of the Unknown Soldier of WWI were placed en route to Arlington Cemetery.

I had been to the Olympia earlier this summer, with Carmina and the boys. We stood on the spot where Commodore Dewey began the Battle of Manilla - the spot where you could trace a line through American international relations from May 1, 1898 and the end of the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines to the 1960s and the immigration policies that made it possible for the Ocampos to come to this country.

On this most recent trip, I learned about change to the international signal flag system and was able to get a lead on the way the flags would have been used in 1989. Through the library at Temple, I got a hold of the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations - 1894 edition. My work with signal flags made this a natural course to follow...

Using old work for placement, to see how it looks on the rails

The signal book describes how three-letter combinations are used to communicate certain frequently used messages...much like three letter shortcuts are used in text messages (LOL, etc.).

A version using some simpler banners

Here are a few of the short versions...I am also thinking of making enamel pins of them...

Are you on fire?

We shall have calm.

Will you give me passage?

Clipping

Hanne Darboven wrote by hand, copied different kind of texts by transferring them into her own handwriting. Only in few cases would she have them copied by someone else with a typewriter. This personal aspect of her art-making is reminiscent of the practice of monks in the Middle Ages, copying the texts of the Bible day after day, writing the codex, and this is rather a contrast to the idea of the depersonalized primary structures of the prefabricated or mechanically created, mainly geometrical forms, being used by the Conceptual and especially the Minimal artists of the time. Darboven chose the medium of the book as the classical medium of knowledge of the early modernism, constructing a personal reading of history and time. She practiced cutting fragments of encyclopedias, literature and later of articles out of magazines and newspapers, transferring them into her own handwriting and combining them to form a new text, a privately hand written ‘cultural history’.

 Schoofs, Miriam. "Hanne Darboven: I inscribe by I describe nothing". Flash Art. Jan -Feb 2013, p.

More about care...

...trying to keep track of stories about mending and repair (less about curation, please). See an earlier post on mending.

Here's one, "Preserving what is valued", from University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum...reviewed by Allison Meier for Hyperallergic...

Recent research...

I have a couple or three shows coming up and I am moving away from the literary quotations that have been subject matter for a while...I am looking for new subjects in the argot of various groups. The idea of dictionaries that guide readers through worlds that are intentionally closed off by language is interesting...

This could get messy...

This brochure, produced by a detective agency around 1880, contains a section of the slang of Philadelphia's petty thieves. We are told that "You rarely hear slang form thieves over 30 years of age. Although all crooks are familiar with the terms, its use is chiefly confined to pickpockets, sneak-thieves, and the younger class of criminals, who take delight in mastering the language of their elders and in familiarizing themselves with its use." (21) 

Bruce Rodgers' 1972 book is as personal and idiosyncratic as these kinds of books tend to be. "Slang flourishes in the ghetto," he writes in the introduction, "Those who leave the ghetto shake off its language first, then decry its message. Slang is secretive, a form of protest and an expression of social recognition [...] yet this secretiveness is not snobby; anyone interested can break the code [...] when the secrecy in slang becomes and object in and of itself [...] slang stops being primarily a means of communication." 

More to come. These were found at Temple University's Special Collections Research Center (thanks!).

Further progress...

From the studio...

Some drawings coming together on the drawing board...

Secret Society

Interesting podcast of Fresh Air in which Jamie Barrett discusses his research into the 'dark web'. The importance of encryption is discussed.

Hand Lettering Workshop with Mike Meyer

I am so excited to be going to this in September! And more than mildly anxious...