Julie Boldt
ATTEMPTS AT EXHAUSTING TEXT: SCHMIDT
Page 150 (Zettel's Traum), 502.3% of original size
This is one of the approximately 1,300 pages in the book, reproduced at approximately 5X scale. The text itself has been removed, but I have retained punctuation marks, and Schmidt’s handwritten edits, and citations he makes to other authors. Unique to this piece, I have also included the zettel cards in their corresponding positions where the notecard content takes form in the text.
Code:
Yellow = dialogue
Black thread = punctuation and citations
Red Thread = manuscript handwritten edits
Orange thread = English in original German manuscript
Silk appliques = passages in the text that come from zettel
Page 150 (Zettel’s Traum), 502.3% scale of original. Cotton, embroidery floss, silk appliques, 2026, 54” x 64”
Pages 100-135 (Zettel's Traum, dialogue only), 88.6% of original
This work is part of a larger series that separates and isolates the individual systems layered throughout the other pieces. While each work in the series consists of white embossed paper, each follows a different system across the same sequence of pages, including dialogue, citations, passages from the Zettel, and instances of other languages in the original text. The embossed work exhibited here tracks dialogue alone. In this case, the title functions as the key to the code.
Embossed paper, 2026, 35.5” x 47.5”
Vellum, acrylic marker, pen, pencil, woodblock prints. 2026
each of the series are 15.5” x 20.5”
Structural Studies (Zettel’s Traum), 102.33% scale of original
This series consists of smaller studies of individual pages. The bottom layer for each of them explores the same page, while the top layer dissects another page in the book that is linked by a common citation between both pages. That referential commonality is cited below each work, following their respective page numbers.
Ground layer (woodblock prints):
The first layer tracks all dialogue, color coded by character.
Yellow: Daniel (the main character)
Blue: Paul (the Freudian ID character)
Green: Wilma (the perpetual skeptic)
Pink: Franziska (the adolescent daughter of Wilma and Paul)
Vellum layer:
Yellow highlight: dialogue
Orange highlight: quotations
Pink highlight: disguised quotations
Neon green marker: other language in original text
Red marker: explicit citations
Navy marker: the citations that link the original page, ZT, 144, with another page of the book.
Red pencil: connections between main columns and marginals notes
Black pen: punctuation
Pages 1057-1092 (Zettel’s Traum), 75.9% scale
The work tracks a number of variables across 35 pages of the text and is the first piece tracking the labryinth of references that compose the text. There are a number of authors Schmidt continuously brings into the novel. The most prevalent is Edgar Allan Poe, an author whose work is at the center of the entire novel.
Highlights:
Orange = quotes, citations, and extratextual references
Pink = disguised quotations
Yellow = references directly cited and named
Green = punctuation strings
Light Blue = connections between main columns and marginal notes
Lines tracking citations and references:
Black = Poe
Blue = Goethe and Faust
Red = James Joyce
Green = Dictionaries and thesauruses
Yellow = biological and naturalist texts
Other:
White pastel crayon = dialogue
Pencil annotations all come from the collaborative Perusall threads (Figure 1) in Guide.
Architectural vellum, paper, highlighter, acrylic marker, pen, pencil, oil pastels. 2026. 60” x 75”
Sketches for Bk. 7 (aerial view)
Preparatory material for a suspended digital mapping project based on Book 7 of Zettel's Traum by Arno Schmidt. Though the digital project was abandoned, these studies preserve the act of structural reading — assembling fragments, layering interpretive traces, and attempting to spatialize narrative architecture. The accompanying work distills these thought processes into an excel spreadsheet drawing
2024. Pencil, pen, marker, collaged printed paper, graph paper
2024. Graphic, excel spreadsheet drawing