Accidental Haiku
2009 / found 12-section diary from 1975, coloured tags, audio recording, headphones, custom vitrine
An anonymous, part-completed diary from 1975. Entries that accidentally adhere to the rules of the Japanese poetic form Haiku are flagged.
Haiku rules from Wikipedia 2009
1. Use of three (or fewer) lines of 17 or fewer syllables;
2. Use of a season word (kigo);
3. Use of a cut (sometimes indicated by a punctuation mark) paralleling the Japanese use of kireji, to contrast and compare, implicitly, two events, images, or situations.
Audio sample of the fourteen accidental Haiku poems read aloud by Martin Prekop. Viewers were able to listen on headphones.
Accidental Haiku was made during my tenure as Theodore Randall International Chair at Alfred University, New York. An article about several works made during this tenure was written by Laurence Biemiller for the Higher Education Chronicle. I kept a studio diary of stories from my time in Upstate New York. It was reconfigured and exhibited with the accompanying audio track as part of Realization is Better than Anticipation at MOCA Cleveland, curated by Megan Lykins Reich and Rose Bouthillier.