Notes on Notebooks is a research enquiry made visible. Navigating thoughts expressed by writers, artists, and academics, the A4 team critically examines how people use notebooks as a modality that offers a vital space for thinking and confessing.
These strands of exploration – from debated diary-keeping motivations to entomology sketching methodologies; from bookbinding experiments to architecture journals – are scrawled in chalk across a floor-to-ceiling blackboard, connoting the immediacy and impermanence of a thought. In this material choice associated with learning and teaching, the notebook is examined as an ‘open studio’ where ideas straddled the boundary of public vs private.
The research is purposed to inspire conversation around what it means to keep a notebook – with some of the research being harvested from anecdotes and discussions with colleagues and friends, as recent projects at A4 have circulated around books and book-making.
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Goods is a project space for work in process and thinking aloud. The location’s transitory nature as a thoroughfare encourages a light-footed navigation of curatorial and artistic practice and rapid prototyping of ideas.
Some questions asked during the course of the project:
- • What does thinking look like?
- • What is the notebook’s relationship to the studio?
- • How can a list become a time capsule?
- • Does material, like paper weight or binding, affect the shape of thinking?
- • What does it mean to write by hand?
- • Do we want/need our private life to be legible?
- • Should a notebook be inwardly or outwardly focused? Is there a best practice?
- • How has technology impacted note-keeping?
- • Does the notebook retire? How?
- • Does the notebook become a site of transformation when something is published or produced from it?
- • Is a notebook ever objective?
- • Why does a note escape judgment?
- • What is the difference between drawing for scientific classification and for aesthetic pleasure?
Sources
- • Allen, R. (2023) The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. London: Profile Books.
- • Didion, J. (1968) ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp.131–141.
- • Draney, J. (2017) ‘Are We Different Writers When We Move From Longhand to a Screen? A Brief History of Panic in the Face of New Technology’, Literary Hub, 18 August. Available here.
- • Freud, S. (2024) ‘A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad’, in The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. I–XXIV. Translated by M. Solms. Lanham, U.S.: Rowman & Littlefield.
- • Klee, P. (1915) Pedagogical Sketchbook. New York: Frederick A. Praeger.
- • Lichtenberg, G.C. (2000) The Waste Books. New York: NYRB Classics.
- • Pellas, F. (2017) ‘“What Am I Trying to Leave Behind?” An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri’, Literary Hub, 31 August. Available here.
- • Taussig, M. (2011) I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- • Van Beethoven, L. (2018) Beethoven’s Conversation Books. Vol.1. Martlesham, UK: Boydell & Brewer.