A Fascination with Found Paper Objects

When I spot a piece of paper, while in the supermarket or out for a walk, that has writing on it, I always pick it up and read it.

Supermarket finds are invariably shopping lists. The usual stuff: excessively packaged foods noted by brand name, snacks, breakfast cereals that are mostly air, laundry products. On the street, you never know what you'll come up with. I once picked up a folded sheet of notebook paper to find one line of writing: "girl you no I love you so." (Darn those homonyms!)

Found objects first appeared in works of art associated with the surrealist and dada movements of the early 20th century, when World War I scrambled an ordered, rational world. Artists have since then made mosaics from bits of junked glass, and sculptures from aluminum cans and auto parts. Detroit's Heidelberg Project decorates entire abandoned houses with discarded objects of all kinds.

Harry Partch was an avant-garde composer who lived the tramp's live during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He made instruments from things he found in trash dumps, and wrote music for them. John Cage added the concept of indeterminancy; a universe operating completely at random. He once placed star charts atop sheets of blank music. The notes went wherever the stars happened to fall.

Indeterminacy applied to grocery shopping would mean that dinner could be made from only items that were on the lists I found.

Found documents didn't have their day until technology made it possible for them to be scanned and posted on the Internet.

Found Magazine is both an on-line and print publication whose readers are encouraged to scan and submit their finds. One is posted each day at www.foundmagazine.com. So stop and think before you leave that note under someone's windshield wiper. It could end up there.

Anything is eligible: memos, cash register receipts, handwritten notes that fell out of library books, notes written in an angry scrawl and left where the victim would find them, and more formal messages composed on Word, two paragraphs, indented.

Each submission is a window on someone else's life.