an initial stab at the brief for my intended thesis project, completed for Bill Seaman's DmSeminarTutorialTwo course, Spring 2006, RISD. This is very literally tied to my TheySaySmall work. Since I realized that I do not want my work to merely illustrate that story and scene, I have started another statement of interest that approaches my stuff from the ideas: StatementOfInterestTwo

I am a geometrist by trade, but one who has stumbled onto something so interesting that my focus has been given cause to waver. And though the object I examine may not be geometric, my eyes are still those of a shape-seer.

While searching for the actual shapes of Plato's forms as a researcher at Rotherhithe University, I came upon a pair of signals, consistent in some ways yet modulated and almost unpredictable in others.

In time I realized that these signals were voices, and that these voices were ours.

The voices

• THEY are the code we created that came to be all existence.
• SAY is the voice of a remembered humanity.
• SMALL is me. Robert A. Small, Assistant Professor, Rotherhithe University.

TheySaySmall is a Story Scape that explores concepts reaped from PostColonialism, DmMediaArchaelogy, and the Gallery Context as a narrative. It is a story that explores phenomena like manufactured/selected authenticity, boundary events in the process of totalization, media technology as cultural forms, the gallery as a void from everyday cultural constructs, and the object as defining space without resorting to any of those terms. The goal is to present schools of thought as characters, theories as physical spaces, and arguments as plots we I spin a yarn that is enjoyable simply as a story while also revealing as a discourse.

The written thesis itself will be a work of fiction without any scholarly terms, rigorously end-noted to provide the theoretical context necessary for deeeper readings of the text. I am not interested in a political discourse on PostColonialism, an analysis of PostModernism, or a critique of the gallery as context; rather, I wish to illustrate aspects of these sets of critical thought that I fiund interesting, through an enjoyable narrative story.

The thesis project will be a constructed three-chamber "world," a series of three tunnels that represent the three streams of the ether in the TheySaySmall world.

• THEY is a tunnel of misguided tools that evidence code-being's misunderstanding of the human condition.
• SAY is a mood-emoting area, a region in which participants feel what it is like to be a human remnant lost in a mingled stream of life-force. It is a sort of Self Portrait of the disembodied human condition in the spirit of MarkManders building as self-portrait.
• SMALL is the office of Robert A Small, filled with custom furniture designed to the quirks of his experimental and faux-historical needs, and littered with the results and process of his research a la NedkoSolakov. On his desk lies a copy of The Lights Going Out, my written thesis.