Entropic Publishing
Dispatch #1
Yesterday, as I made my towards my ultimate destination of Trenčín, Slovakia, I drove through the post-industrial town of Ostrava in the Czech Republic, a city in the Silesian region ringed by dis-used steel factories, coal pits, blast furnaces, and coke plants that have been repurposed into sites of leisure and cultural heritage.
Immediately I thought of the land artist Robert Smithson, who suggested that the future is pre-dated by decay; what he called a “set of ruins in reverse.” He referred to this as entropy, not so much in the scientific sense, but metaphorical. For him, entropy meant that once a system has begun, it is already tending towards its own dissolution.
And that’s what this newsletter is all about. It is a “set of ruins in reverse,” born with its own death inscribed. That sounds rather dramatic, but since yesterday, I conceive of this second set of dispatches (the first can be read here) as a form of ‘entropic publishing,’ vanishing not by accident but because disappearance is written into its design, dead even before it begins.
The deletion of you, the subscriber, is intentional as well. Your own disappearance in a month is part of the form, an entropic gesture built into its structure. So I am not describing entropy, but enacting it, carrying erasure as part of its basic operation.
This brings me to the next point: you might notice that I have a name for this Mission in Trenčín: the Temporary Seeing Section. I made a list over the summer, agonizing over various options:
Temporary Alignments
Public Optics Unit
Department of Minor Crossings
The Misalignment Authority
Manual for Incomplete Views
Agency for Partial Sighting
Civic Unit for Peripheral Observation
Even this discarded list is part of the method, a minor archive of visions that never came to be, already obsolete before they were enacted. I opted for the Temporary Seeing Section in my car, as the smokestacks of Ostrava faded from view in the mirror (itself a gesture of disappearance). Seeing is provisional. Anything that I record in Trenčín is a view that won’t last; conditions change, contexts shift, and perspectives fade. The moment I ‘named’ the Bureau’s next mission (its first was Park Maasvlakte), is also the start of its decline, a ruin in reverse. The Section is a vantage for a specific moment of time and space, then it closes.
The Temporary Seeing Section — including this newsletter, and anything else I get up to here — is a methodology, really. It is a photographic project that understands seeing as temporary, entropic, and already disappearing.
Yes, very poetic, but: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
I have been commissioned by the city of Trenčín, which is the European City of Culture for 2026. They’re asked the Bureau to create a series of public art installations this year and in 2026. Specifically, they asked me to focus on an old railway bridge that crosses the river Váh, once a key transit node and today an industrial relic, formerly part of circulation and freight but now circulation reserved for a different form of capital, mostly symbolic. Like those coke plants in Ostrava, this bridge is a shift from work to spectacle, carrying trains to carrying memory.
What I am going to do? Well, read this newsletter to find out!