Square Book

Square Book is a companion text to Il Sun Moon’s doctoral thesis, Atmospheric Frames: Diagrammatic Bodies and Spatial Sensations in the Experimental Moving Image. Yet it is more than a supplement. Rather than merely reflecting upon the practice, this book is itself a part of the practice—an extension of the diaristic method into the realm of writing, layout, and printed form. Composed of reflections, fragments, and processual notes accumulated throughout the making of her moving image works, the text unfolds as an essayistic notebook: tentative, layered, and affectively attuned. The thoughts inscribed here are not written after the fact, but alongside the process; they are lived-with and thought-through in rhythm with the editing, filming, and sensing that define Moon’s approach to image-making.

The images included in Square Book are not illustrations of the text, nor is the text an explanation of the images. Instead, they exist in resonance. All images are drawn from Moon’s diaristic video works and form part of the trajectory that led to the exhibition Dailiness and Atmosphere, held at Stanley Picker Gallery in November 2023. The book thus marks a moment of convergence between research and practice, but also insists on the incompleteness of such convergence—on the continued unfolding of the diaristic as a mode of thinking and making.

As a printed object, Square Book occupies a spatial register: it can be held, flipped through, and returned to. It asks to be read not linearly, but atmospherically—through the echoes between word and image, between theory and daily perceptual experience. Just as Moon’s doctoral work cannot be disentangled from this book, this book cannot be understood apart from the experiential, fragmentary, and affective field it emerged from. Rather than presenting a conclusion, Square Book proposes a continuation. It sustains the question of what it means to dwell with images, to write with atmosphere, and to remain in proximity to the dailiness that eludes capture.