All Area

Roy Skodnick
New York

Nos. 1–3 (Spring 1980–1992).

Nos. 1 and 2, “From Gloucester out…,” designed by Bethany Jacobson. No. 3, “La Pelota Que Rebota, Santa Clara del Cobre,” designed by Yuri Yarmolinsky.

All Area 1 (Spring 1980).

All Area grew out of Talking Wood, a bioregional journal about New Jersey, edited by video pioneer Paul Ryan, who worked with Peter Berg’s Planet Drum in California, the first publication to propose bioregion and watershed as forms of natural and cultural morphology. Ryan inspired me to put the work of Charles Olson into such terms. Ryan and Frank Gillette had already done that for Gregory Bateson in Radical Software. Thus in All Area 1, Ryan interviewed Bateson, Gillette mapped South Padre Island in Axis of Observation, and William Margolis recorded the geography of a Bedouin tribe in the Sinai. Paul Metcalf and Ken Irby were masters of landscape too. Charles Stein provided a reading of Olson’s alchemical landscape. David Finkelstein used Olson’s triad (topos, typos, tropos) to map space in terms of quantum theory.

Art, science, and technology intertwined. No. 2 put Olson in relation to Kenneth Burke and Julia Kristeva. Sherman Paul read Olson through Burke; and Gillette, my partner in the Burke interviews, engaged the earliest forms of the internet to attempt a “grammar” in dialogue with the noetics of Brendan O’Regan.

Bethany Jacobson and I published a graphically ambitious journal, mining archives of AT&T and Edison, as well as Charles and Ray Eames’s A Computer Perspective for the 1966 IBM exhibition. Thus Norbert Weiner, John Von Neuman, and Claude Shannon were put alongside Trent Shroyer’s Critique of the Domination of Nature.

No. 3 appeared “late in a slow time”: a catalog for sculptor Ana Pellicer’s La Pelota que Rebota that represented Mexico for the 1992 Quincentenary Celebration of El encuentro de dos mundos (Europe and the Americas).

Through All Area I met James Metcalf and Ana Pellicer, who invited me to document their work in Santa Clara del Cobre. From cod to copper: from the “Big O” to two revolutionary sculptors: from Gloucester to Michoacán.

— Roy Skodnick, New York City, October 2016

All Area 2 (Spring 1983).