Terra Incognita Codex

“Terra Incognita” is a hand-made, 24 page, bound, fabric codex that uses photograms of broken glass over type-written pages to explore the relationships between persecution and writing, desire and value, consumption and democracy. As the argument moves from a discussion of  the situation of philosophers in authoritarian societies, to the  politics of market economies, the pages become increasingly obscure, and  the words begin to fragment and disappear, demanding more of the  reader,--more effort, more thought, more imagination. While closely associated with (and, indeed, emerging from) “Vitrea Fracta,” "Terra Incognita" represents a stand-alone volume. Nonetheless, I here recall the artist statement I composed for “Vitrea Fracta”: 

Writing an intentionally unreadable book may be a pointless task. No, worse than pointless. While it is pointless to scrub an already bleached and spotless sink, the time and effort consumed is minimal, easily forgotten by body and mind. But this codex required more. Each page carefully composed, manually typed multiple times (any error was fatal), in short, curated for beauty and sense—then buried beneath the chaos of shattered shards and hammered panels. The words are, sometimes, beyond recognition. Some of the sense has been permanently corrupted, I admit. But I also must contest my own branding. Nearly every written page in this series can be deciphered. Fault lines and impact craters distort some characters, conceal others, but meaning is there to be reconstructed. Such a reconstruction demands much of the reader, perhaps more than seems warranted. But here, the form this argument takes is also part of its content. If distortion is a kind of corruption, then reading necessarily corrupts any text it apprehends. Reading is always a decipherment, but the key to the cipher shifts based upon geography, identity, purpose, and politics. The emergent sense is rarely (if ever) an accurate transcription of the author’s original intention. While authorial voice informs meaning, that voice interacts with the reader’s positions and projections, producing a fusion which, at best, creates an interpretation greater than the sum of its parts. The formal qualities of these codices make this dialectical process literal and material. 

These images are based on photograms of broken glass over typeface on onion skin paper. The broken glass and typeface/onion skin were exposed on a large format negative, for hand-made reproduction using alternative/historical chemistry and processes. 

April, 2025

Bibliographic Note:

I have previously examined some of the themes animating this codex, though in a quite different context, and a radically different form, thus necessarily producing very different results. See Graham Cassano, “Critical Pragmatism’s Status Wage and the Standpoint of the Stranger,” in Daniel Krier and Mark P. Worrell (Eds.), Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation, and Critique. Brill, 2016. And, while the arguments in "Terra Incognita" are original, I am not alone in noting parallels between Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen. See, for instance, Matthew Watson, “Desperately Seeking Social Approval: Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, and the Moral Limits of Capitalist Culture," British Journal of Sociology, 63:3, September, 2012: 491-512. Finally, I want to acknowledge the work of Isidore Isou and the Letterists, who I discovered by way of Guy Debord. Both "Terra Incognita" and "Vitrea Fracta" are variations on the Letterist metagraph. "Metagraphics or post-writing, encompassing all the means of ideographic, lexical, and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible and escapes oral labeling..." Isodore Isou, "The Force Fields of Letterist Painting (Excepts)," Lettrisme: Into the Present, Special Issue, Visible Language, 17:3, Summer, 1983, p.77.