Tree of Hands and Schurink's Universe

Last week the Society tried its hand at a new constraint, the "Tree of Hands." It was inspired by a sculpture on Second Street in Park Slope, just off Prospect Park West (below). Fashioned in bronze, it consists of two trees twining about one another and then extending branches with human hands sprouting from them. The hands are gesturing in the various signs of the American Sign Language alphabet, and thus this tree can be read. To know what its message is, you need (besides a knowledge of what letters the signs represent) to work out the sequence. Is it to be read from root to twig? Are the two trunks separate words or sentences? Which way does the reading proceed where the branches fork?

As a compositional constraint, it could hold different signs, emblems, images, a sort of ramifying Tarot. If the branches were to cross or interconnect, the system might be constructed in a less arborescent manner, more like a subway map with intersecting lines, and in fact some artists have created variants on subway maps by giving the stations new names, as Simon Patterson did with the London tube map in "The Great Bear." To see a detail click here; the stations are given the names of philosophers, musicians, and so on, and the "lines" are thus categorical. (See a "rude version" here.) The concept is actually better than the use Patterson made of it. His map is a "constellation" filled with "stars" — that's his joke, though even so one would like the stations where two lines cross to be given a name meaningful in both sets, so that Rock Stars would cross Saints at (I suppose) Kurt Cobain. But Patterson has not really understood the use some subway riders make of the system maps to trace imaginary journeys, even with the names the stations really have. A thoughtfully named map could inspire any number of narratives required to pass through a set of stations and take instructions from their names, while a lavishly branching and intersecting system would grant sufficient choices in the story-making.

We didn't think of the subway-map concept in time for last Wednesday. Some of us tried to make trees with armature wire and a large collection of rubber stamps, or just created hieroglyphic system with the stamps on the paper, placing the images so that various directions of reading were possible. We talked about world trees, the Norse Yggdrasil and the Mayan ceiba, and Erik Schurink FWS was inspired to create a universe (above left). Erik's tree, made from a camera stand and a coil of armature wire, represents the middle-earth by a sheet of paper with the four cardinal directions on it: feast, worth, qwest, and south. It is upheld, like the real universe, by a turtle (visible to the left).

Next post: Cooperider's Expansion.

(PS: The published post looks nothing like the preview. If someone can tell me how to size and place images, I'd be grateful. Apologies for the messy layout of this post.)