Norma Cole

Scout

ISBN 1-928650-24-4
$15.00
CD-ROM

Norma Cole's multimedia CD-ROM, Scout, might be a memoir without the même or the map of a place in memory not yet come to. "The surface of the earth buckled. At that point you / thought of the fault as an error. These are the / necessary conditions. You are the error." Beautifully photographed in San Francisco and Toronto , and with voiceover narration by the author, this release also includes a series of full-size images of the artist's book that accompanied the first performance of the text in the year 1999. Scout writes, speaks, and sites personal history not as the stable ground that guarantees present experience, but as a return to a field like that of Robert Duncan's imagining, "a made place" that shifts the borders of possible locales as it shifts among them. Each act of navigation through these terrains of mid-century childhood ("...the projection of the inevitable end was still not obvious to the child. Korea and the fear of strontium 90. Sunny morning, bells tolling"), lives written out or written over ("the half-burnt notebook stuffed into the ceiling or into the wall"), and the practices of writing and art that _take place_ among them ("Three dimensions with color is all. We could eat the shapes they left on their plate. A landscape dissolves into another people...") remakes a present of book, image and song that simultaneously offers itself as a common ground and registers the often terrifying withdrawals of historical distance. “In theory one can have access to any book in history without moving. And then there is the person who wants them to be more separate than they ever were, for old time's sake.”

--Taylor Brady