mine is yours

“But slowly the phosphorescence of the springlike snow became dulled: it vanished then, giving way to a thick black darkness preceding dawn. Some of us fell asleep in the warm snow, others went groping in the dark for the doors of their houses and walked blindly into the sleep of their parents and brothers, into a continuation of deep snoring . . . . ” –Bruno Schulz in the short story “Cinnamon Shops” (published in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin 2008)

This experiment simply focused on placing quotes from fiction into the environment. In this particular version, the correlation between quote and situation is quite direct. It labels the snow as warm, according to Schulz’s quote above. Another direct correlation is that Schulz grew up in Ukraine, which was once part of Poland. In this picture, “warm” is written in the snow covering the park that rings Krakow’s old town.

Does painting the environment with a quote make the reader’s experience of an author’s idea more immediate?

Writers Bruno Schulz and Thomas Pynchon both muse about the life of inanimate objects in their works of fiction (see “Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies” in The Street of Crocodiles by Schulz and V by Pynchon). This investigation tries to carry such anthropomorphic notions from the book realm into the real world, by using labels to bestow alternative meanings on objects.

Can these labels help change our perceptions of objects? Can they make everyday life a richer place for imagination? Or do they inhibit imagination?

Taking this mini-project further might involve making kits full of labels that people can stick onto whatever objects they choose. There must be other ways to push it as well…?