Vitrea Fracta Codex

"Vitrea Fracta" is the first in a series of codices that, together, constitute a single, unreadable book.  The term translates as "broken glass," but also "rubbish" or "trash."   

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. 

Note: These images are based on photograms of broken glass. The broken glass was exposed on a large format negative, for hand-made reproduction using alternative/historical chemistry and processes. The text in the codex was produced on  a manual typewriter. Each codex chapter has several, individually printed, 'variant' versions, using different contact printing processes (e.g. cyanotype, silver gelatin, gum bichromate). The version uploaded to this site is just one example of the codex chapter. Finally, all the glass used in making the photogram plates will be preserved and repurposed for a sculpture that will accompany this codex series.  

January-April, 2025