Other Bodies is a series of roughly one hundred large prints that combine text with diagrams. The prints have you imagine yourself momentarily occupying the bodies of others.

Other Bodies presents its short texts in the style of manuscript notes and drafts with corrections, additions, and marginalia. Accompanying visual notations do not illustrate the texts so much as they diagram their processes, associations, and relationships.

The project makes use of proprietary software systems similar to those we’ve created for moving imagery, now adapted for the page. This allows us to render the page with new kinds of control over typography and diagramming using the latest iteration of our point-line-plane AI graphics system.

I wrote the texts for Other Bodies when I was laid up for six weeks following foot surgery — a fitting task for the circumstances. I’d been planning to write it long before, and had already dog-eared many book pages and written many notes, but it took the forced concentration of bed-rest for me to bear down on the task. I would scrawl repeated drafts of each short section in a spiral notebook, then complete them on screen in a page layout program.

The illustration shows one such page as a completed screen draft: it has not yet been rendered properly to screen, and will no doubt be changed considerably in that process.

For the visual style of manuscript mark-up, I was inspired by two sources that I’d long admired: Valerie Eliot’s facsimile/transcript edition of The Wasteland and Richard Hamilton’s English rendering and “typographic version” of Duchamp’s Green Box. In the same way that we used to explore “drawing as performance” — that is, drawing considered as an act unfolding in time — I thought this style of manuscript mark-up would let us explore the redrafting of a text over time.