Book : 'Schematics: A Love Story' (2011)

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"Schematics: A Love Story"

Published in December 2011, "Schematics: A Love Story" is a unique and experimental board book that pairs found scientific line graphics with simple prose to form a narrative language in which life is mapped, charted and diagramed. Giving expression to the joys and uncertainties that shape love and loss, and exploring the way time and space links them, the left-hand diagrams in the book are found by Googling words derived from the essence of the right-hand text. Thus the format asks the reader to parse experiences and remarks made by the narrator with a world of phenomena and signs reduced to abstract lines, circles, arrows, letters and digits. Monochromatic renderings of magnetic fields, star plots and other interpretations of visual data are presented in conjunction with associations, confessions, questions and fading memories. From those forty-three juxtapositions a layered and paradoxical narrative emerges - a narrative that operates simultaneously on two distinctive registers: the deeply personal (a love story between the narrator and the objects of his affection, desire, and confusion) and the profoundly universal (a love story within matter). As David LaRocca writes in his afterword, "Schematics is a love story because love involves (tragically, incorrigibly, but also beautifully) a desire for something that continuously transforms. Love is painful because we want the object of love to change and to stay the same; love is a desire and a fiction that animates our greatest pleasures and our most profound sufferings. Hibbard’s poetic concept-curating presents schematics that invite us to consider - alone and as ‘all one’ - the existential graphs that underwrite life, and take us out of it.”

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