Julie Boldt
ATTEMPTS AT EXHAUSTING TEXT: PEREC
A story-Telling machine, dissembly
This is a one chapter example of a project that will produce 99 individual visualizations corresponding to the novel, Life A User's Manual, 99 chapters. Each piece tracks how Perec’s constraint system operates at the chapter level, mapping structural pressures and latent categories that shape the narrative. Simultaneously, the element of uncertainty is ingrained in the coding system.
The works function both as analytical tools for literary criticism and as autonomous compositions inspired by concrete poetry. They are being used in a reading group studying the text in our weekly readings.
Drawing of Ch. 9
Beginning as a traced silhouette of every word from a chapter of Life: A User’s Manual, this drawing translates the novel’s constraint coding into physical mark-making. While the silhouettes of the original words remain in form, the constraint values take this linguistic place. It stages a tension between diegetic narrative space and the governing structures that produced it, asking whether textual world and structural system can be visually disentangled.
2025-2026. Acrylic, acrylic paint, spray paint
Pattern and Pareidolia
This work emerges from my early study of Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, which is structured through a complex system of mathematical bi-squares and distributed constraints. Translating that combinatorial logic into embroidery, the piece examines how pattern produces meaning — and how systems generate the illusion of inevitability. It marks the beginning of my sustained inquiry into the genetics, intentionality, and hidden architectures of literary form.
2025-2026. Needlepointed embroidery floss, matte board