In primary school, I remembered an exercise we do for homework to improve our handwriting. You trace upon a page of calligraphy printed in red (sometimes covered with a page of tracing paper, and we call this explicitly 描红-trace red). With the graphic nature of Chinese characters, your inevitable alterations in your "manuscript" render a different scene from the original, and your strokes swing with success/failure along accuracy, regulation, beauty and style. Every time you write a tree, you plant a tree that has never existed before yet carries and is already part of the whole lineage of all trees, across time and space, literal and botanical, metaphorical and categorical, and your tree spreads in the same manner and flood through all strokes to the point that, like a contagious disease, you do see the world in a grain of sand. [note: perhaps this text should be red]
As the workshop archived in this section weaves together multiple artforms, methodologies, and methods of inquiry, palimpsests often require, quote, “interdisciplinary encounter” (see Sarah Dillon’s The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory). How would YOU dear visitor take a palimpsest approach to digital archiving?