SOLACE AND PERPETUITY, A LIFE STORY, is an algorithmically rendered fictionalized autobiography of an artist. As in a medieval Book of Hours, various genres of original writings are represented: diary entries, dreams, academic papers, fictive prose, poetry, plays, and video and installation scripts, and more. The writings, separate documents, were numbered and then fragmented into their indigenous paragraphs, which, in turn were sub-numbered. The paragraphs become the modular units subjected to an algorithm that scrambles their order. Scrambling provides a kaleidoscopic reading of potentially hundreds of thousands of possibilities, some manifested here in 10 different paperback versions, numbered with the obsolete Dewey Decimal number 709 which designated the category of artists’ autobiographies.
Published by Weil Books in 2015. Winner of a New York Foundation on the Arts Award in Fiction in 2015. Currently in the Duke University David E. Rubenstein Rare Book Collection. -Publisher
Note: color and number of cover is variable.