A Moment on the Clock of the World follows The Foundry’s long-standing tradition of creating provocative relationships between form and content. The book’s design features a bold layout that divides each page into two horizontal sections.
The top portion contains each contributor’s chapter. The bottom section, appearing like a deep footnote, continues throughout the entirety of the book. This portion comprises of an exploration of The Foundry’s inquiry by Melanie Joseph, the company’s founder and the only one of its leaders who has worked at the company for its entire duration. While resembling a footnote, Joseph’s text is not an annotation or commentary. Inspired by the format of Brian Fawcett’s Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (1986), Joseph’s text explores her own profound and personal journey with the company on a different time signature from the other contributors. This structure puts acts of inquiry in dialogue with one another in such a way that shared themes, ideas, and provocations resonate not through the stentorian stroke of direct comparison, but with the free- flowing movement of harmonics, to be discovered in any number of ways by the reader. This fluidity of form will also apply to individual chapters, which by turns will the take the form of essays, dialogues, playscripts, interviews, and even a Talmudic structure that prioritizes hypertext and notation. Like the work of The Foundry over the last two-and-a-half decades, this book strives to be a performance of ideas that invites as many people as possible to consider what it means to be citizens of a world that we ourselves create.
For the visual translation of these different forms to the page, we have partnered with Jessica Green and Tom Griffiths of the award-winning Everything Studio, a multidisciplinary design firm in Brooklyn that has fashioned books and print publications for outlets such as BOMB, Cabinet, Studio Voltaire, and Verso Books, among others. Please see VII. Layouts for more clarification regarding the design we are exploring for the book.
