MITCHELL
AKIYAMA


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Under the Dog Star  (2020 - Ongoing)
Under the Dog Star is a portal for experimental writing and written experimentation. This project has grown out of my experiences over several years of teaching creative writing seminars to graduate and undergraduate students in the Visual Studies program at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. In my time as a writer and teacher of writing, I’ve come to realize how deeply the habits and norms of academic writing are ingrained. A graduate student once described the voice that takes over when she writes as “it” – “it” speaks, “it” writes. “It” is the voice that tells you that you should fret over arguments and theses and conclusions. “It” then writes through you from the detached and fictitious omniscience of the third person. “It” limits the insight, the oblique clarity, and even the pleasure that writing can offer. These exercises are meant to help writers explore other modes of expression, other voices, other ways of grappling with experience and research, other ways of finding commitments and stakes in one’s writing.

The project’s title comes from a passage from the novelist, W. G. Sebald’s elliptical 1995 novel, The Rings of Saturn. The book begins with an unnamed narrator isolated in a Norwich hospital who muses about “whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star.” As I write this, while April 2020 limps towards May, many of us are also in some form of isolation, grasping at information and signs that appear on our screens. The physical, social spaces where we once met are off limits for the foreseeable future. Social media and online communication were once mostly supplements to these spaces, even though we anguished over how much time we were spending in the “virtual” world. But now, when many of us only leave our homes to shop for food or exercise, the screen has overwhelmingly become our primary meeting place. I live in Toronto, Canada – a large, cosmopolitan city, but the majority of my interactions with my community and with the world now happen via video conferencing and text messaging. The city where I live is, in some ways, no longer the city in which I live. This project is an effort to reimagine and create a city built from words and ideas that, at least for the moment, can only be erected within walls.

- Mitchell Akiyama, Toronto, April 28, 2020.

Under the Dog Star was conceived by Mitchell Akiyama with coding and web design by Matt Nish Lapidus. This project was deeply influenced by the creativity, patience, and curiosity of students in VIS2002: Research and Writing and VIS330: Artists’ Writings courses in the Visual Studies department at the University of Toronto.