cluster: Inscribe

INSCRIBE

The Inscribe process is a walk-the-path device, for exploring and building along the walked path to create something new, led by what is interesting at the time. It provides guidance for a process that shuffles between one’s logic mind and one’s design mind, as one also shuffles between the world of physical action and the world of imagination and intuition. My first test run of the process produced a “technological poem” titled “Magnetic Footprints” which has gotten positive comments from a wide variety of people over the years. Subsequent uses did not produce as acclaimed results, however, probably since the factors of each step were clear in my mind during the first test run, but that which was evoked by the Inscribe diagram thereafter was not quite the same. This suggests the need for revision of the diagram so as to more completely identify that which is to be evoked by each step along the path, redundancy and/or clarification. Yet there is a need for simplicity and compactness in the overall diagram, easy to look at as a whole. Another function is to imaginatively record into appearant physical reality, a newly chosen meaning for the physicality rather than merely the initial appearant significances. Thinking back to 1984 when “Magnetic Footprints” was written, I had an old disk drive in my view, and imaginatively inscribing new significant imagery into the disk drive as I saw it. Then, in something like this clustering process of Gabrille Ricco, suddenly the poem began to congeal in my mind, like condensation of specific words floating out of a 3 dimensional sea of widely separated words. I then wrote down the composed short phrases, an unfolding in my language mind as some other part of my mind was concurrently somehow exploring the overall pattern into a sequential flow of events. And there it was, a written composition that I later named “Magnetic Footprints” (from an initial name of “the Shugart ....??disk drive”) and gave the classification of “technological poetry”. The Inscribe process is a blueprint for building something out of what is physically found, imaginatively decorating it and reworking the physical initial meaningfulness to amplify that which is especially attractive about it and lacing evocative morphological equivalents together while walking the inscribe path diagram, impulsively choosing which fork in the road to take when a fork is encountered.in the shuffle from design mind to sign mind (using Ricco’s terminology for left and right brain, or wide view to narrow focus), directed by the pathway to pick a function to notice and then to describe. Each interesting part of the physical object blossoms out with a lacework of broader significances, producing a writing that is full of energy, a composition which appears to also be attractive to other people who read it.
James E. D. Cline 2001 12 12, 1342 hrs.