Artists' Books, Part 7

This was the final project for the Artists' Books class. My original idea was to publish ten Coptic bound copies of twenty memoir pieces that I have written during the last seven years at a Jordan District Writing Memoir class.  I was planning to title it Random Memory, because the memoirs are not in chronological order. The instructors said it was a good project for a different class, but not for an artists' book class. It wasn't "avant garde" enough. So I had to start over on my idea.

I wanted to keep the memoir idea and the title, but I had to think of a new way to present it. I happened to see an article on Inca quipos, the long knotted strings that were used as memory aids to recall information. This reminded me of the "book mobile" that I made several years ago to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of mount Jordan Middle School. The two ideas combined in my mind as the form for my final book. Long strings of photo cards depicting random events in the last 63 years.

The 50th anniversary book mobile, 2005.

As I progressed, the idea of computer memory, RAM -random accessible memory, came into the picture. I found an old slide set box with two cassette tape containers and some nonfunctioning pieces of computer equipment, and the idea became solid. Our school computer tech gave me some obsolete RAM sticks and I was set to put everything together.

I made 150+ photo tags at random and of various sizes from my photo collection and tied them on the strings attached to the computer pieces. On the backs of some of the tags, I printed exerts of the memoirs I had planned to print. In each of the cassette cases I put a folded blue print: in one a diagram of a computer memory circuit, and in the other a scan of the human brain. I retitled the assemblage: RAMdom Memory.