Chronofile

My arch theory + criticism prof talked about Buckminster Fuller's chronofile today - he basically kept every piece of correspondence, reciept, pamplet, etc etc that he had for a number of years - all of the stuff he called "ephemera". It's been described as a great tool for seeing how the designer lived and his ideas, but I have to wonder: does it capture the important parts of his experience?

I got thinking about this because I have a penchant for keeping ticket stubs, maps, handouts, flyers, etc much more so than I should. Every few years I throw most of it out though, forcing myself to let all the "important" pieces stay - provided they fit into one box. It's a good way of purging before I move. But do those things really get into how I lived and what I thought? And would there be a better way of chronolizing my life??

All of the "ephemera" is, in my case, capable of being highly misleading. If I want to forget something that I did or decide that this concert I attended would not send the right message to anyone going through my box of stuff, I'll probably get rid of it. It is, as much as anything else I have, another way of selectively presenting my experiences to the world. It's the same reason why customizing my binder in high school was so important and yet so difficult - I had to acquire enough clippings and photos that showed me as having cool-but-obscure interests, good taste in tv/men/music, and most importantly, lots of close friends that adore me.

Now if I decided to keep absolutely everything like Fuller did, maybe this would be different. It could serve as a tool for SELF-analysis: now that I can see everything that the world would consider as evidence of my existence, does my inner image match my outer image? (But which would I need to change to get them to match?) As a tool for historians and others to analyze my ideas though...I still am not convinced that it would do a very good job.

What about photography? I chose snapshots as the primary way of documenting my semester abroad, taking over 3500 photos in the process. Most of them don't mean much to anyone though; to me, they are capable of bringing up memories that fade in my mind as well as finding new things that blended into the background while I was there, but are now of interest to me. I failed to document most of the PEOPLE I was with though (human subjects always make me shy) and those are the things that made up the bulk of my time there...

I think a combination of word and image is best, but I rarely take the time to combine the two and synthesize my experiences. I have great ideas for short essays and reflections while I'm walking but I rarely remember them by the time I get to a place where I can type/write/draw...I should work on this.