Month-long sentence
Month-long sentence was a durational work which took place throughout February 2016. Every day, I posted a postcard bearing a single character (letter or punctuation) on the reverse to the recipient.
Eventually, this spelt out the 29 characters (this was a leap year) of the website thisisamonth-longsentence.com, a website documenting the real-time execution of the piece and its rationale.
This work is a month-long sentence not only for the sender, who must mail a postcard every day for a month, but also for the recipient, who does not know their final destination until the process is complete.
“All ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty.”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Every decision, made consciously or otherwise, is a limitation; an abandonment of many other possibilities. Every choice strips us of potential as we go, rendering us “A person who is not _____” in an infinite number of permutations.
To an observer it might seem that we are constantly striving forward, desperately shedding layers of possibility as we go, as time whittles away the achievable, narrowing down all conceivable avenues until we reach that perfect, singular full-stop where all potential ceases and we become boldly, unquestionably, “A person who was _____”; a quantifiable, definable, complete and completed entity.
These prisons are unavoidable, whether consciously or unconsciously-chosen. Perhaps it is best that we choose.