The Frye Trunk: Opening a Pandora’s Box in the Archives of Attention

An ESTAR(SER) “Special Report”  

The research collective known as ESTAR(SER) works to deepen our understanding of the history of formal practices of sustained attention — in general, but with special focus on the mysterious community of radical “attentionauts” knows as the Avis Tertia, or “Order of the Third Bird.”  

In the course of the preparation of the Frye Art Museum exhibition, THE THIRD, MEANING, researchers working with ESTAR(SER) discovered a remarkable new repository of artifacts and documents that seem to reveal a long history of “Birdish” activities in and around the Pacific Northwest. This large suitcase, dubbed “The Frye Trunk” on account of apparent entanglements with the history of the Frye Art Museum itself, is now the subject of a detailed research monograph.  

An uncanny exercise in archival poetics, from the authors of In Search of the Third Bird (London: Strange Attractor, 2021), which also available from the Frye Museum Store. 

Color Illustrations throughout.  

96 pp. 

Dimensions: 6 x 9 in.  

Perfect-bound Softcover