Tag Archives: art

The Most Significant Full Stop. (Part Eleven).

Yesterday I extrapolated a full stop from a text of writing, and then using screenshots, managed to magnify it to such an extent that it took up nearly the whole screen.

In doing so I was imbuing the full stop with far more significance than it might otherwise have. The next step was to print off the full stop on to some A4 paper, and affix it to an ordinary wall on the back of a shop, down an alleyway, in Paignton, Devon.

The full stop was certainly striking and again this imbued it with far more significance than it should have had. After all, this was just an ordinary full stop taken from some text, typed with no idea that it would be such a statement of intent, typed merely to aid the comprehension of the text.
Kafka’s father said that he was ‘morbidly preoccupied with the insignificant’ and I believe I understand what Otto Kafka was alluding to in the sudden elevation of this full stop.
The next part of the project was to reassign the full stop with its original intent, that of aiding in the comprehension of text. By taking photographs of the full stop as it hung on the back of a shop in an alleyway in Paignton, I was able to stand further away and keep on taking photographs, until the full stop was just a dot again.


Using poster making software, I coloured in the photograph with the exception of the full stop.

 I then added the full stop back into some random text, where it once again functions as a full stop, and not as a statement of insignificance. Can you spot it?

The Most Significant Full Stop (Part Ten)

The ability of anybody with word processing equipment, smart phones, tablets, computers, laptops and anything else which types, to create grammar of their own concoction, grammar of their own conception, means that there are more full stops now in the world than at any one time. One of the reasons for this is the short attention span of people used to sound bites and social media updates, Twitter accounts, website addresses, snippets of news and information. Sentences are now shorter. Like this one. This means that there are more full stops than ever before, less semicolons and commas, less brackets, except when using text speech.
This never used to happen in the days of Marcel Proust.
The paragraph at the start of this passage contains five full stops. Of those five full stops, one of them means a lot to me and idolise it. Can you guess which one it is?
As an experiment I have screensaved this page and magnified the full stop to its fullest extent. In the normal run of things, it would have been completely missed, a psychological notification, almost subconscious as they eye scans over it, picks up the necessary information. The next stage of this project will be that I print off the full stop and post it somewhere in the town in which I live, (Paignton, Devon). How many people will then see it?
This might very well prove to be a very exciting line of inquiry. 



The most significant full stop (part eight).

I asked my assistant Lars to write a full stop on a pebble and place it somewhere on the beach underneath the pier. (See fig A). The pen used for this was the same Parker pen that I’ve used every day since my Grandfather died in 1995. Because of this I thought I might be able to spot the pebble with the full stop on it immediately.

I was very keen to find the pebble with the full stop on it, but alas the search would be in vain. I like the idea of something so insignificant being there, unknown to almost everyone, yet very physical and real. A destination, in fact. Since I was a kid I’ve loved airports, so I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of destinations. I’m now away from the beach but the pebble will still be there and there are a few miles between me and it.

This reminds me of everything that has been lost over the years, and that makes me feel quite sad. 

The most insignificant full stop (part seven)

I asked my assistant Lars to write a full stop on the table while I was out of the room. My job was then to find it and eradicate this.
If I hadn’t found the full stop, the knowledge of its continued existence would have given it a significance far beyond its actual worth.

Or I would have begun to doubt that Lars had drawn it in the first place.

Or I would have begun to doubt the existence of Lars.

You can watch the video here.
https://youtu.be/9TDkQN-tbuI​

The most significant full stop (part six)

Today I have been attempting to make the most insignificant full stop disappear completely, and then bring it back. I’m doing this because I’m sure that everything that has ever existed has a memory of sorts, even if that memory resides in the minds of those who utilised it or witnessed it.
Electronically, it’s a whole different matter, as the insignificant full stop exists only on an electronic plain. Having spent time zooming in on it and magnifying it through the editing processes of my IPad, I’m now doing the opposite and zooming out to see if there is any representable essence of the full stop left.
I then zoomed back in again to see whether or not the iPad in question could then find the almost non-existent full stop.
The results are viewable below.


And then the magnification  process began anew.

I think this demonstrates that the reality will always been superseded by the memory of an event, as the full stop exists now more as a memory than a visual certainty. What does this say about the world?

There are philosophical and even religious proofs definable through the certainty through memory process. The full stop existed at one point, and now it no longer does. Yet there was a definite physical act in pressing the symbol on my keyboard which resulted in a full stop on the screen. The creation of the full stop by me, that one fleeting moment, was the ultimate performance act.

The most significant full stop (part five)

A few years ago I flew from Vancouver back to London having just caught a train from one side of Canada to the other. It was an amazing time with a lot of travelling and a lot of connections. With about ten minutes to go before the boarding was announced, I went to the toilet in the Vancouver terminal and, while I was enjoying a wee, I noticed a very small dot on the otherwise spotless cubicle wall. I remembered thinking, ‘That wall is not spotless’. But then I came over all profound and thought, ‘I will never see that tiny dot again. In a few hours I will be thousands of miles from that small dot. That insignificant dot’.
And do you know what happened? The plane developed a fault in one of its own toilets and we all had to get off and wait four hours for a new plane. I went for another wee a couple of hours later, and saw that tiny insignificant dot once again. Which meant that it wasn’t quite so insignificant any more. In fact, of all the dots in the world, it was now probably one of the most significant, because what were the chances of me ever seeing it again?
Here I am writing this at Manchester airport waiting for a flight to Exeter. It’s a 25 minute flight and it’s just been delayed by three hours.
I don’t want to repeat the significant dot experiment again because I don’t want to take precedence away from the dot that I saw in Vancouver, yet my mind is not so developed as I’d like it to be, and I’m seeing significant dots everywhere. Just look at this floor. It’s full of them.
This brings me back to the significant full stop experiment and how elements of the Vancouver Dot have been playing at the back of my mind these intervening years. Im wondering, of course, what has happened to the dot and whether the toilet in the terminal has been redecorated. It’s quite possible.



There. That one. There. 

The most significant full stop (Part four)

This evening I searched through my notebooks to find the most insignificant full stop that I had ever written. The results were somewhat disappointing because all of the full stops that I’ve written have been insignificant, except for the occasions in which I’ve purposefully written a significant full stop. I wrote one at the end of my dissertation at the end of my postgraduate degree, and I did another one in my last A Level exam.

Every full stop has been insignificant, and as such significant only in their insignificance. Which made me free to choose any at random.

The one I chose came from my scribblings where I have been trying out lines and ideas for poems.

I have photographed this full stop with my iPad and I have magnified it several times, each time taking a screen shot. The results do not look as exciting as the electronically generated full stop, perhaps the lighting was all wrong. The full stop was written in ink by my Parker pen, the same one that I have used for writing every day since 1995.

The thing with full stops is that you never realise you’re writing them. They come easily and they are dotted on to the page with abandon and little thought. They pass like moments forgotten. 

I would like you to take part in an experiment, but I must warn you that it is very dangerous. I have come up with three words which will alter, or perhaps even ruin the rest of your day. If you are willing, able and un afraid of the consequences, then feel free to click on this link and see these three words for yourself.

The most annoying three words imaginable. – Robert Garnham https://robertdgarnham.wordpress.com/2016/06/11/the-most-annoying-three-words-imaginable/
I will then monitor the page where these words appear and see how many of you have been brave enough.

The most significant full stop (Part Three)

It was murky today, delightfully so. The day dawned with a thick set fog which loomed down with a strange intent. And this was weird because I’ve been looking at the full stop again, the fact that it exists, zooming in and trying to focus on the exact place where the full stop ends and the world around it, the non-full stop, starts.
Which makes me wonder if there really is any boundary in life at all. Because the more I zoomed in, the foggier it got, until it began to resemble the weather itself. Indistinct, a place with no form, no substance, no being.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with insignificant moments. I remember once my sister walking down the stairs. She got as far as the landing and banged her hand on a book shelf, she said, ‘ow’. But she continued walking down the stairs and by the time she got to the bottom, she had forgotten that she had banged her hand. The banging of her hand had been such a monumental event at the time that it warranted an ‘ow’, but seconds later she had forgotten that it had ever happened.
How much else in life do we forget? I asked her if she remembered banging her hand and she said no, she wondered what I was talking about. Life is full of insignificant moments which we forget, just like those tiny dots 

The boundary between one facet and the next is often so hard to define that it cannot be successfully declared where one thing ends and another begins, even with a full stop. Rather than worry about this, perhaps it is just better to wallow in the present moment, and not care too much about such boundaries.