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The Whistlegraph Zine cover — Sex Magazine, 2023

The Whistlegraph Zine — Sex Magazine (ed. Asher Penn), 2023. 60pp, 750 copies.

Future

A whistlegraph has always been drawn flat — on snow, on wet pavement, on paper. These are concept drawings for what it looks like when the surface opens into a volume: people whistling together in one space, each line held in the air where it was drawn, a handle floating beside whoever drew it. They are proposals, not products — except one, which already happened.

Colored-pencil drawing: a man in a VR headset in a spare room, whistling, drawing a large striped ribbon creature in the air. A second headset charges on a folding table.
Ashland, 2022 Documentary — Recorded with Wand, our own drawing tool, on two headsets swapped in turn so the line never had to stop for a battery. The result was Freaky Flowers. The whistlegraph line and the wand line are the same hand.
Colored-pencil drawing: four people standing in a ring in white space, each whistling and drawing a different score in the air, the four ribbons braiding into one knot above them.
Choir in the round Four people, four scores, one knot where the lines meet overhead. Everyone can see who drew which line, because the handle stays with the hand.
Colored-pencil drawing: a small figure inside a large hypercube lattice of ruled pencil lines, their striped ribbon wrapping the edges and leaving through one face.
More than two dimensions The score wraps the lattice, then leaves through a face and keeps going somewhere the drawn geometry does not account for. A whistlegraph you cannot flatten back onto a page.
Colored-pencil drawing: a person sitting cross-legged wearing a thin visor, lips pursed mid-whistle, drawing a striped bird in the air — the same bird curving in the visor's reflection.
What the drawer sees The bird appears twice: once in the air at our angle, once bent across the visor at theirs. Nobody in the room is looking at the same score.
Colored-pencil drawing: two people at different distances in white space, one offering the end of a striped ribbon, the other reaching up to take it, the joint still wet.
Passing the marker A line can be handed over while it is still wet. Whistlegraphs were always made in company; this is what a duet looks like when the paper is gone.
Colored-pencil drawing: nine people of different ages spread through an open volume, each drawing a different ribbon, an older figure walking between them looking at a child's work.
A workshop, in the round Nine people, nine lines, none alike — some finished and left hanging, one abandoned entirely. Teaching it is the same job it always was: walking between people and looking at what they made.
Colored-pencil drawing: a large butterfly whistlegraph built from a striped ribbon hanging in white space, with a small person below looking up at it, and a paper tag tied to the line.
Walk around the score Butterfly Cosplayer as an object you can circle and read from a new angle. The tag tied to the line is the whole exhibition label — there is no wall to hang one on.

Drawn in colored pencil, 2026. The handles shown are placeholders except @jeffrey and @minanimals.

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Code   —   type it at aesthetic.computer, or perform it in the card player →

The graphic score. Trace the lines; sing the words.

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