field guide

field|guide is a collaborative multimedia art project that explores the liminal spaces between visual art, poetry, essay, sound, and silence. 

The project blends fragments of the past with our shared sense of the present, merging scientific formal structures with esoteric wanderings, untangling and re-tangling the familiar and obscure.

In this edition, the curatorial team (Aaron Michael Smith and Jordan Kokot) bring together writers and artists from many traditions and backgrounds to explore the bubbling, silent potentiality of space, time, and action.

field|guide explores subjects that reach into the deep oscillations of our shared immediacy: the ontology of noise, metaphysical silence, and the quiet energies of communal language.

This first issue is dedicated to experiences of silence -- silence as absence, silence as violence (being silenced), silence as the origin of sound and creativity, silence as rest, silence as the space of memory and potentiality, longing for silence and its impossibility.  It also takes on questions of transitionality, intermedial tensions, expression and collaboration in the digital/COVID-era, and self-experimentation in body, media, and genre.  Our artists were all given a set of philosophical and artistic resources to experiment with, and we then worked together to blend the work they created into a genre-bending audio-visual collage. The online portion is an intrinsic aspect of the project--the book is filled with QR codes that link to music, videos, visual works, and other digital media.  Prominent contributors from all over the world included Alicia Mountain, Russell Sheaffer, Babette Babich, Orr Menirom, Ava Winter, Bryony Gillard, and many others.

Learn more at: https://fieldguide.art/