Confluence: Grids, Ecology, and 99-Character Statements

Todd Gilens

doi:10.1353/ect.2020.0043

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Confluence: Grids, Ecology, and 99-Character Statements
Todd Gilens (bio)

For a public art project called Confluence I am developing texts and testing reading processes, with the goal of installing mile-long writings along streets where waterways have been hidden underground. A step in this process is to explore the cadences and sense-making of reading as script takes unusual forms. I also knew the writing would need to conform to lengths of city blocks and distances between driveways, so practicing a strict adherence to character count was key. In these works, connections between letters are opened and gaps between words closed, creating arrays reflective of early alphabetic writing and of the grids fundamental to scientific sampling and analysis. The poems, each ninety-nine characters in length, were developed during field work with Mary Toothman, David Herbst, R. Bruce Medhurst, and other biologists surveying streams in the Sierra Nevada of California. Their form invites readers to reassemble meaning, just as ecologists do when interpolating data from samples back into the coherent systems from which the data were derived. To establish equally factual poetic and scientific statements, the poems were vetted—or at least argued over—with the biologists. The lettering is in my hand.

Unmarked, a grid is an open field, a place before history where everything still happens everywhere the same. But the size of the squares shows a bias, like a net—a capacity to let some things through while capturing others. And their side-to-side, up-and-down orientation gives grids a hierarchy. So perhaps already a lot is determined and even grids without labels can be read for their creator’s intentions. Truly empty pages are like diagrams of a universe pouring in undifferentiated; no wonder the fear of them.

Grids are backdrops for particular, unique conditions: the data points expressed in colors and shapes representing events within a field. Only later do lines connect the points, restoring the continuity of living processes that flickering consciousness and the limitations of data collection miss.

Writing also is grid-based. Each letter is an event, distinguished by shape and position, assigned a value through place [End Page 89] and sequence. Letters clump and morph into words, are set in rows and sculpted by punctuation and paragraphs. Words and sentences connect, like dots on a graph, into a sensible whole. Words, lines, images and ideas make a skein in which readers’ thoughts hold and register. Page by page they layer into stories.

As I draw, I slow, and almost reverse, how meaning forms in writing; reading turns archaic in personal and collective ways. The format refers back to Greek and early Christian-era writing, before punctuation and word spacing were common. These drawings also reflect people’s own learning time, when letters and words were awkward shapes, effortfully made and matched to meaning. And like scientists, who isolate phenomena to study them, I break apart the cursive letterforms that naturally want to flow and connect. My grids entangle letters, but let words and sentences through.

In Many Free, shown on page 95, the phrase “variable disturbance and stability cycles” refers to ecosystems’ dependence on overlapping, contrasting processes. Like ecosystems, language requires both cohesion and fluidity in its structure. Good writing and healthy ecosystems have in common that underlying structures (grammar and spelling, landscape connectivity), and particular expressions (sentences, organisms), are consonant: they sound together. Writing appears docile and predictable, but shows its vitality through disturbance. [End Page 90]