Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Asemic writing/Haptic poetry

I've had an interest in linguistics recently and the border-zone between text and visual art. Analog (subjective semantic continuum) versus digital (discrete agreed-upon(?) sign), in the realm of symbology.

Certainly there are ample advantages to languages in spoken and written form as they've developed in numerous cultures over the course of history. And there is great diversity to be sure within human language (e.g. ideographic systems vs. alphabetic systems; words/morphenes as the atomic unit of language vs. combinations of semantically null letters).

But languages seem to develop more cultural specificity over time; in other words, less universal and accessible to outsiders. I propose to explore the creation of a poem-thesis, in a language that can be “learned” rapidly and which will be intriguing enough formally for an audience to want to derive its meaning.

Questions:
What might be the nature a text that prominently uses color (edo script), 3-dimensional structure, or texture (braille) as a formal feature?

(In Sumeria and elsewhere, written language first developed as a manner of accounting, particular to a class of scribes. Initial written/stamped symbols are abstractions of what were at one time physical tokens. Inventories of these alternately imprinted and variously-shaped objects were kept as a semantic records.)

Is there a more integrative, subtly expressive way to indicate emotionality in writing that is somewhere between adjectival and pictoral methods? (Emoticons: a good example of what not to do here)

There are some concrete ideas that are easily and expediantly expressable in written language, but many abstract notions recourse to visual aids. How smooth can a transition be between these forms?

What about a script that can metamorphasize like an Escher painting from one form to another, sublimating from 1 to 3 and condensing to 2, or incorporating innovative superstructures (e.g. hyperlinks as opposed to linearity)?

To what degree can a language be ambiguous, while still being functional/parseable (programming languages->natural languages-> abstract art).

Different faces of a single project:
Swapping the functions of a descriptive placard and an art-object.

Many larger projects, particularly those that are collaborative in nature, have different forms in different stages (e.g. script, screenplay… final reel). Many products in our capitalist economy, some artistic works also take on a plethora of media forms (e.g. games, action figures, novelizations, lunchboxes) in which it is possible for no product may hold the status of dominant or official form.

Scheduling:
I intend to produce a concise, natural language script version of of this experiment over the couse of the next two weeks, as well as a shot-list, or form-list or sorts for the expressive avenues I think it would be appropriate for the project to do down.

Some inspirations ifrom this artistic arena:
Brion Gysin's calligraphy.
Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini (1976-1978)
Conlangs.

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