2) If a metaphor is a balcony, is the view it affords measurable in terms of a paraboloidal function (for example: x2/a2+y2/b2 = 2cz [where a, b, and c are constants]), or is that just gibberish? Justify. I’ll always admit my ignorance. 3) What is an Author? Is she an Architect? Think hard. One author most certainly is, Madeline Gins. However, to what extent she is the architect in her partnership with Arakawa, I have no idea. You may have noticed that for most projects they sign their work Arakawa and Gins, but for the recent Architectural Body, the order was switched, Gins & Arakawa. Certainly Madeline plays a significant role in publicizing their work.. To really answer these questions we have to define some set of parameters so you are reading from the same book as me. What is an author? Is she just someone who writes books? In the C20th there was an overwhelmingly strong push for the ‘author’ or ‘artist’ to exclude herself from the actual production of the artwork, my favorite is Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (is Duchamp there?). What these experiments should have taught is us, as Jackson MacLow has said, that it is virtually impossible for an author to remove herself from the production of a text. Kent Johnson, the author of this quiz I’m so slowly answering, has argued persuasively for the public removal of the author through the undermining of the actual identity of the writer (I very much like this idea, but think it an odd practice on a large scale). Moreover, the Yasusada poems (it is beside the point speculating about the extent of Kent’s involvement with the works), in an inverse but similar manner to Duchamp’s Stoppages, demonstrated that a large part of the reception of a work is actually channeled though a social and emotional constructions of the author. In other words, our idea of who the author is (bio, sex, name, etc) feeds into our reading of the author’s work. It would be interesting to play with this idea on an editorial level, for example by misattributing all the works in an issue of a magazine or an anthology. So is the author an architect? We could be cliché here and say that no, the reader is the architect, the author is just a construct etc etc. However, the author, whoever chooses to commit words and ciphers to paper (or digital display), does play a part in architecting (to be Ginsesque). Of course, the author’s identity alone creates a certain space through which we inhabit a work. But also the directions words can take us into architectural environments, or at the very least, color these environments, is also to some extent the doing of the author, who is really more like a helmsperson (a cyberneticist).. 4) Can a security alarm system be built into a poem? Name it. John Cage heard Brancusi in the car alarms of New York. I heard certain poets want copyrights for their poems. Quiz #5 1) Is the cultural space that forms the writing even as the writing (of experimental Authors, that is) attempts to probe its dimensions the space of a certain Flatland? Refer to Bachelard and the Japanese folktale about the mice {sic} and the elephant. Very funny! It’s been a while since I took the elephant to work. He was sadly retired to Ueno zoo, but I have visitation rights on the weekend. To read of the sad demise of the Japanese elephant, and the ensuing experimental writing… 2) Can architectural acoustic theory (reflection, diffusion, refraction, decay of sound, and the artifices of its absorption) serve as an heuristic tool for imaging the institutional interpolations (not obvious ones like the Academy, but those at more inaudible frequencies) inhabiting the cultural structures of avant-garde poetry? If Yes, build a cardboard model of such a tool. If No, try to build one anyway. I’m not sure, but I heard someone stole this from a prominent Language Poet: This is a prototype for a series of architectural sites: