fake sophie calle

http://www.sophiecalle.net/

work in progress

no

cut

first draft of new font

this is a new font removing the legs of font

The Stalk

1230 got onto tube at Hampstead station, i had decided to stalk a bloke as they would find it less threatening and would be more likely to confront me rather than ring the police! i used my phone to write notes as i though it would look less suspect than just using a notepad as i could just be texting someone. Found person in black suit and three-quarter-length jacket, started trying to photograph him. It was quite difficult to photograph without looking obvious. He was reading a dictionary. I found that the suspect was sitting next to a friend dressed in a white bomber-jacket and they were both Italian. not to be disuaded i thought id continue even though there was two of them. I was forced to keep back when they got on escalator to avoid suspicion and cotinued to do so where nesissary through out the process.
1245 exit Warren Station tube walked for 25minutes. They looked at only one shop on the way, a camera shop. I kept on having to photograph signs to avoid looking suspicious towards them and speed up and slow down accordingly.

1310 they went into Goodge Street tube station had to hang back when they went in because it’s a small station and they were getting tickets. I followed in because I was losing them and needed to know which line they were going to. They spotted me going thought the barriers and I think they recognised me because they looked at me for a long time. The fact that I started in the same carriage with only six other people (at Hampstead) probably didn’t help. Perhaps if I picked a target before the day it may assist in my anonymity throughout the pursuit. They were waiting right by the entrance to the platform so I attempted to walk past pretending to read my paper but they clearly stared at me. I was uncertain how far to carry on going with this, as I am ok with research so long as my face doesn’t get smashed in! I continued to get on tube with them but it was clearly obvious to me that I couldn’t keep up the pursuit, as it was impossible for me to be far enough away to not be seen but still see when the suspect got of the tube. I tried but was spotted again and decided to leave the tube the next station.

1320 they got off at the same stop as soon as I did! Not certain if it was a coincident or not as I managed to lose them easily.

gadsby

http://www.spinelessbooks.com/gadsby/index.html

quick tests

is a man, or even a woman, a mere consumer now?



I
Am
The
Best
Thing:
Always,
Forever...

Gadsby (novel)

Gadsby is a novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, written around 1939. It is famous for not containing the letter 'e'.
The lack of the letter 'e' makes Gadsby a lipogram, or an example of constrained writing. Wright explains in the introduction that he had to tie down the 'E' key of his typewriter to avoid mistakes.
The story tells how the main character, John Gadsby, transforms his home town of Branton Hills into a bustling city by tapping the vigour and original thought of youth. Quoting from its first paragraph:
"If youth, throughout all history, had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn't constantly run across folks today who claim that "a child don't know anything." A child's brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult's act, and figuring out its purport."
The use of odd punctuation, contrived language, and disjoint air carry on throughout the book.
As well as having to avoid common words such as 'the', 'he', and 'she', Wright made the task particularly hard for himself by setting Gadsby in the past tense, while avoiding the verb ending '-ed'. He also made valiant attempts to include objects that ordinarily require the letter E, such as a horse-drawn fire engine; he achieved this by describing the object without quite naming it.
Wright never saw his work in print - he died at the age of 66 on the day it was published.
A similar lipogrammatic book is Georges Perec's La Disparition (1969), which was later translated into English by Scottish author Gilbert Adair as A Void (1994).

lipogram

Lipogram
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, "missing letter") is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is missing, usually a common vowel, the most common in English being e (McArthur, 1992). A lipogram author avoiding e then only uses the 25 remaining letters of the alphabet.
An example of a lipogram omitting "e" is this version of the preceding paragraph:
A lipogram is a kind of writing with constraints that consists of full paragraphs or books in which a particular symbol, such as that fifth symbol (which is most common in writing), is missing. An author must submit to an awful handicap, allowing only consonants and A, I, O, U, and Y. This is ordinarily a quorum of six fours plus half of two.
Another example, this time challenging the reader to discover the oddity:
This is an unusual paragraph. I'm curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it! In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is unusual though. Study it, and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you might find out! Try to do so without any coaching!
Writing a lipogram is a trivial task for uncommon letters like Z, J, or X, but it is much more difficult for common letters like E. Writing this way is impractical, as the author must omit many ordinary words, resulting in stilted-sounding text that can be difficult to understand. Well-written lipograms are rare.
Examples of lipograms include the above example, Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939), and Georges Perec's novel A Void (La Disparition) (1969), all of which are missing the letter E (the most common letter in both French and English). Perec was one of a group of French authors called Oulipo who adopted a variety of constraints in their work. Gilbert Adair's English translation of La Disparition, titled A Void, stayed faithful to the spirit of the French original by not using the letter E either, thereby restricting the writer from employing such common English words as the and me.
Another recent example is Lost and Found by Andy Went.
Another recent example is Eunoia by Christian Bök in which each chapter is missing four of the five vowels. For example the fourth chapter does not contain the letters A, E, I or U. A typical sentence from this chapter is "Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth." Lipogrammatic writing which uses only one vowel is called univocalic (McArthur, 1992).
The eponymous cycle of poems from Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing) by Canadian poet Mike Schertzer was created "by a prisoner whose world had been impoverished to a single utterance... who can find me here in this silence". The 4 vowels (a e i o) and 11 consonants (c d f h l m n r s t w) of this utterance comprise the alphabet for the subsequent poems.
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn is described as a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable": the plot of the story deals with a small country which begins to outlaw the use of various letters, and as each letter is outlawed within the story, it is (basically) no longer used in the text of the novel. It is not purely lipogrammatic, however, because the outlawed letters do appear in the text proper from time to time (the characters being penalized with banishment for their use) and when the plot requires a search for pangram sentences, all twenty-six letters are obviously in use. Also, late in the text, the author begins using letters serving as homonyms for the omitted letters (i.e. "PH" in place of an "F", "G" in place of "C"), which some might argue is cheating.
In Sweden a form of lipogram was developed out of necessity at the Linköping University. Because files were shared and moved between computer platforms where the internal representation of the characters Å, Ä, Ö, å, ä, and ö were different, the tradition to write comments in source code without using those characters emerged. Some also used this as a pastime to write texts using this restriction.

how im going to research

I am going to research this by practicing Oulipian constraints myself. I will play around with these ideas as well as touching upon the aspects of voyeurism and the idea of personal space. I may research this by photographs and words in a similar aspect to Calle’s depending on how comfortable I feel. I may play around with found objects and such alike to gain an idea about the occupant of it and thus a clearer idea of Calle's work. I shall first research literary constraints and voyeurism in books and libraries to get an idea of which one I would rather go into and start physical research on.

how im going to research

I am going to research this by practicing Oulipian constraints myself. I will play around with these ideas as well as touching upon the aspects of voyeurism and the idea of personal space. I may research this by photographs and words in a similar aspect to Calle’s depending on how comfortable I feel. I may play around with found objects and such alike to gain an idea about the occupant of it and thus a clearer idea of Calle's work. I shall first research literary constraints and voyeurism in books and libraries to get an idea of which one I would rather go into and start physical research on.

OULIPO

Oulipo stands for "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle", which translates roughly as "workshop of potential literature". It is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians, and seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members include novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, and poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
The group defines the term 'littérature potentielle' as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy".
Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec's "story-making machine" which he used in the construction of Life: A User's Manual. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms (Perec's novel A Void) and palindromes, the group devises new techniques, often based on mathematical problems such as the Knight's Tour of the chess-board and permutations.
HISTORY
Oulipo was founded on November 24, 1960, as a subcommittee of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique entitled Séminaire de littérature expérimentale. However at their second meeting, this first name was withdrawn in favor of today's Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or OuLiPo, at Albert-Marie Schmidt's suggestion. The idea, however, preceded the first meeting by roughly two months, when a small group met in September at Cerisy-la-Salle for a colloquium on Queneau's work. During this seminar, Queneau and François Le Lionnais conceived of the society.
During the subsequent decade, Oulipo was only rarely visible as a group. As a subcommittee, they reported their work to the full Collège de 'Pataphysique in 1961. In addition, Temps Mêlés devoted an issue to Oulipo in 1964, and Belgian radio broadcast one Oulipo meeting. Its members were, however, individually active during these years, and the group as a whole began to emerge from obscurity in 1973 with the publication of La Littérature Potentielle, a collection of representative pieces.
OULIPIAN WORKS
Some examples of Oulipian writing:
Roubaud's La Belle Hortense, a whimsical detective story, in which six princes, all brothers, are suspects. All six appear in turn, in a different sequence each time. One of the six breaks the pattern: this is a clue that he is the culprit.
Queneau's Exercices de Style (Exercises in Style ), in which he tells the same simple story ninety-nine times, each in a different style.
Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) is inspired by children's picture books in which each page is cut into horizontal strips which can be turned independently, allowing different pictures (usually of people) to be combined in many ways. Queneau applies this technique to poetry: the book contains 10 sonnets, each on a page. Each page is split into 14 strips, one for each line. The author estimates in the introductory explanation that it would take approximately 200 million years to read all possible combinations.

Constraints
Some Oulipian constraints:
The "N+7" method: Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." (from Moby Dick) becomes "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs.
Snowball: a poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer.
Lipogram: Writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, H, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z (it doesn't contain any of those letters.)
The prisoner's constraint (a.k.a the "macao" constraint) is a type of lipogram that omits letters with "legs" (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, and y).
Palindromes

sophie calle

Sophie Calle is a French photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist. She was born in 1953
Much of Sophie Calle’s work is inspired by the use of arbitrary sets of constraints, much like the French literary movement from the 1960s called Oulipo. She is also well known for her voyeuristic and sleuth-like tendencies while following strangers and investigating people’s private lives, but she has also allowed herself to be put on show. Much of her photographic work also includes text panels of her own writing.
The artist started in the 1970s after traveling the world for several years. Her first simple photographs were of graves marked ‘’mother’’ and ‘’father’’.
Some of her notable works include:
. In “Suite Venitienne” (1979) she followed a handsome man she met at a party in Paris to Venice, where she disguised herself and followed him around photographing him. The series includes photos and her text of the pursuit.
. In "The Sleepers" (1980) she invited 24 people to occupy her bed continuously for several days. Some were friends, or friends of friends, some were strangers. She photographed them while they slept, and served them food.
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. In “Address Book” (1983) the French daily newspaper Libération invited her to publish a series of 28 articles. Having found an address book on the street (which she photocopied and sent back to the owner), she decided to call up some of the various names in the book and to talk to them about the owner and to this she added photos of the man’s favorite activities, thus creating a portrait of the man through his acquaintances. Unfortunately the actual owner of the address book (a documentary filmmaker named Pierre Baudry) threatened to take the artist to court for invasion of privacy and, as Calle tells the story, the owner was able to unearth a nude photo of her which he demanded the newspaper publish.
. In "The Blind" (1986), she asked blind people what their idea of beauty was. Their words are accompanied by her photographic interpretation of that idea, and a portrait of them.
. In “Hotel” (1980s), she became a chambermaid at a hotel in Venice where she was able to explore the objects and writings of the hotel guests.
. She served as the model for the character of Maria in Paul Auster’s novel Leviathan (1992). This mingling of fact and fiction so intrigued Sophie that she took it upon herself to undertake the works of art that Auster ascribed to Maria, including a series of color-coordinated meals.
. Paul Auster was also responsible for imposing on her the ‘’creation and maintenance of a public amenity in New York’’. The artist decided to take a standard phone booth and to enhance it with a note pad, a bottle of water, cigarettes, flowers, cash and other items. Everyday she cleaned up the booth and restocked the items.
. She has created elaborate display cases of her birthday presents through the years. This process was fictionalized by Gregoire Bouillier in his novella "The Mystery Guest."
. In 1996, she released a movie called "No Sex Last Night" that she made with photographer Gregory Shephard documenting their road trip across America, which ended in a wedding chapel in Vegas. But this was no ordinary road trip or romance, more a conceptual art project and precursor of reality TV designed to see what would happen if a man and woman who barely knew each other embarked on an intimate journey together.
. In “Room with a view” (2003) she spent the night in bed at the top of the Eiffel Tower and invited 28 people to come to her and read bedtimes stories to keep her awake through the long hours.
In 2003 she had her first one-woman show at the French National Museum of Modern Art – Pompidou Centre (Beaubourg).
In 2004, her text Exquisite Pain was adapted into a performance by Sheffield-based group, Forced Entertainment.
At her gallery shows, she frequently has suggestion forms for people to furnish ideas for her art and she sits beside them looking coolly on.

Research Project

SOPHIE CALLE