Wednesday Investigations: Station Identification

A project nears its end

Last January, I used the space of this newsletter to talk about two different projects I was embarking upon in 2023, each intended to last the duration of the entire year.

I didn’t complete the #Dungeon23 megadungeon room-a-day challenge. But I did stick to the other project—“53 Stations on the Highway,” a collaboration with the cartoonist DW, in which we add three panels each week to a long, unfolding landscape, which contains within it an oblique narrative sequence. Fifty “stations” have been posted to our Instagram over the course of the year. Each of these stations is divided into three panels, so there are 150 panels there for you to take a look at. The final panels should appear on Sunday, January 14th.

At the outset, I described the project as “one-third traditional oban landscape painting, one-third Krazy Kat, one-third hyperactive side-scroller video game,” and, as you might expect from that description, the panels do all link together, so the work can be read continuously, though you have to start at the bottom and read your way up, which can take a little getting used to. Try it, though, and you’ll see:

Really, though, the piece is best experienced by viewing it as a single continuous scroll:

There are a few challenges in the way of getting to see it this way, challenges of the sort that architect Bryan Boyer calls “matter battles” (Boyer’s definition: “an attempt to execute the desires of the mind in any medium of physical matter”¹). The first battle that presents itself is making a complete printed edition of the piece—the bit you see in the photo above is just a short fragment, produced as a proof of concept—and the second battle is finding a space to display the entire thing as a single 112-foot-long artifact.

The first battle is still, shall we say, in progress. We have won the second battle, though. The Rhode Island gallery Machines with Magnets has offered us their exhibition space to display the piece (provided we can coax it into existence). I guess this is a long way of saying, if you live in New England, please come to my art opening. Thursday, January 18th! In Pawtucket, RI, just a stone’s throw from Providence!

The scroll should circle the gallery space. Twice. Each panel is packed with frenetic detail that rewards close examination. I will humbly suggest that it will be worth seeing in person.

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Speaking of “seeing in person”—I don’t usually see enough new films in a year to make a stab at a meaningful “top ten,” but I can say that these are the films that motivated me to get to the theater in 2023, listed roughly in the order I saw them. Some are better than others, but each of them had their merits:

Skinamarink, Shin Ultraman, Infinity Pool, a Kurosawa repertory double feature (Stray Dog + Drunken Angel), No Hard Feelings, Fast X, Across The Spider-Verse, Asteroid City, Oppenheimer, Barbie (2x), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Passages, Dicks, Killers Of The Flower Moon.

2023 films I saw via streaming which had no significant theatrical release in the US: Shin Kamen Rider, The Mill, May December.

2023 films I didn’t see in 2023, but which I hope to see this month: The Boy and The Heron (which I saw yesterday), Godzilla Minus One, Poor Things, American Fiction, and possibly Ferrari.

—JPB, writing from Chicago, IL, in the week ending Wednesday, January 3

1. From my notecard index, here’s Tim Maly, with an elaboration: “Boyer warns that in the physical world, there isn’t an undo, that three-dimensional things can’t occupy the same space, that material is hard to work with, and expensive, and prone to breaking. There is a dark humour to the term—it’s an attempt to explain the behaviour and properties of the physical world to people who have spent so much time working in a virtual/digital context that they’ve forgotten how objects operate.”