backword-to-i-dream-of-ching

Books, especially where embodied as marks on paper, are a living substrate. A physical book thereby expresses organismal Intention. By the operations of oral transmission, manual transcription, mechanical reproduction, varied translation, reference and cross-, redaction, commentary, collation, open interpretation, and spurious interpolation books can develop a kind of intelligence. The intelligence of books is slower than that of the book’s progenitor, the brain, and far, far slower than the intelligence of the book’s offspring, computer code. Though slow, this lettered intelligence moves with great inertia and wild force, subsuming great thinkers and outliving empires. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the oldest work from the Eastern tradition, the Book of Changes. At once a formal mathematical system, a magickal practice, a manual for statecraft, and an orientalist phantasm, the ancient classic speaks to us as a non-linear, churning, oracular mind. As an act of love for that particular lettered intelligence, let i DREAM OF CHING add a layer (however thin) to this tissue. A kind of aesthetic commentary, a wry reflection, a fevered and unkempt gloss.Upon the pages of i DREAM OF CHING are marks of ink forced through a risograph stencil spinning at high speed. The soy-based ink, as organic substrate, remains active for the life of the book allowing the left- and right-hand pages of each spread to imprint further reflections on one another. Recto and verso cast dueling shadows; leaves talking amongst themselves.