I wanted to make a piece about the accessible and the inaccessible. The premise of the piece was that I would make twentysix 9 x 9 x 9 inch wooden cubes. These twentysix cubes would be assembled to create one larger cube measuring 27 x 27 x 27 inches that would surround a twentyseventh 9 inch x 9 inch wooden cube on its interior. The twentysix cubes would be disassembled and sold, given away or simply abandoned. I would keep the 27th cube.
For a number of years I meant to make that piece. Somewhere in the process I remembered that the English alphabet contains 26 letters and realized that all writing is an attempt at delineating some version of the twentyseventh cube. From that point I began collecting children's alphabet blocks to be my cubes, my alphabet, My Writer's Blocks. I scanned the blocks and wrote a script to "write" the text in children's alphabet block images. As I transformed different texts I found that different characters were missing and so I created block images with punctuation, currency signs and different color blank blocks. The first piece I made was a compilation of Marcel Duchamp quotes.
The following links are renderings of classic Western documents in Writer's Blocks. The images create somewhat of a field painting. Meant for the slow read:
The Declaration of Independence
The U.S. Constitution (Original)
The U.S. Constitution (The Bill of Rights)
Benjamin Franklin on the Constitution
JFK on the President and the press
All of the images contained in these links are original images by Timothy Palmer.
Reproduction of these images is by his permisson only.