For the Alphabet Project - Update

The exploration of the alphabet, when it boils down to it, has three aspects that, for me, are interesting and artistically poignant enough to work with on a poster project.

(How convenient that there are 3 posters to be done in all!)

Ever emanating the rascally Paul Gauguin, I think the three temporal forms of the transformation of the alphabet are the most fascinating, as they're all contained in the finite source of any given character and its recorded past: the all-encompassing title "Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?" comes to mind when looking at our language through a letter, fleeting in form and timeless in impact. Each letter can be explored for its role in the past, present and future, and each of these periods carries a sort of philosophy with it, a focus that I'd like to explore a little further.

Where did our letters come from?...
---I really liked the concept of letters being born of pictographs and heiroglyphs from ancient civilizations, and I was fascinated further to think that these basic forms can disperse into different letters in different cultures. Symbols for objects or ideas are collected by the rudimentary civilizations, then contorted and twisted and tilted and squished into something more basic: the written form of an object becomes the written form of a sound, of an utterance of the mouth--- in this grand process eschewing bits and pieces of the original form's objective meaning, but still echoing it just slightly for those who really know how to read them.
I found it beautiful, to use that audacious and wonderful term, that most of the civilizations producing early alphabets and series of pictographs attributed them to the divine, that this kingly gift was a way of communicating, of consolidating ideas, from eternalizing conversation with God. Letters, for the most part, were soaked in spirituality in form and in philosophy; in the same way that our letters and even some of our basic enunciations are linked to the past, I wanted to indicate that the spirituality behind them and the link to God that they emanate is not lost. To do this, I want to embody the pictorial form preceding letters in one of my posters.



"Who" are our letters?...
---I also can't ignore that one today doesn't see letters as praying figures or Godly suns. The most beneficial alphabet system we've been able to design is boiled down, as I mentioned above, to the symbolism of sounds, of vowels and consonants. With these, we can write anything and identify sound with image, filling it with value. It is so engrained in our understanding of letters today that seeing a letter fills us with the understanding of their pronunciation.

R R R R R R R R R

O O O O O O O O O

A A A A A A A A A

For this reason, for the more present understanding of letters, I want to focus on their ultra-secular connotation of sound. I might arrange shapes of mouths creating different pronunciations of a vowel around the letter itself as a minimalistic, modern representation of the letter.


Where are our letters going?...
---Will be the fun one. I might take a letter, consider a different connotation we have with it (outside of its pronunciation, which I understand is a simplification of how we understand letters today), then morph it and shape it into a pictograph again. A "T", for example, might be equated to a t-shirt, since the object and symbol reflect one another. Perhaps as language progresses, the "t" might assimilate to object so that the symbol literally stands for the shirt... then, perhaps, the symbol of a shirt is directly connoted to mean a male who might wear the shirt, or perhaps the cotton that went into the shirt (as opposed to whatever material might be used for other clothing material), or perhaps for "clothing" on a whole. This progression from alphabetic into heiroglyphic and into pictographic form of representation is perhaps suggestive of a regression in the future to a more rudimentary society (which needs a less-sophisticated written language), which may not have any real proof to validate this extrapolation of progress. However, the conceptual idea is to make more real the progress of the past letters,to suggest the ability of letters to morph and alter thanks to the needs of the civilization at any time. The "T" is by no means static.

Artist Focus: Roch Forowicz

Refreshingly simple in concept and execution, the most prominent work of Roch Forowicz, "looking," is just that. In 2006, the young Polish artist set up a video camera outside the window of his home apartment and consequently set up the online project which broadcasted the content he caught on film. The material is organized into what the artist calls "parts," including 7 in all; they are medium- to low-quality documentations of situations occurring outside what the artist insists is the same window, each lasting several minutes in length. They have titles of what seems to be the main "point" or situation within the film clip. The scenes are relatively monotonous and grow a bit boring for the average viewer, but they surely were chosen for their intrigue, being out-of-the-ordinary situations (such as "Death in the city," the first part, which includes police officers hovering over a body of a man laying on the ground) or being strangely personal and almost intrusive (such as "Classic Bench," the fifth part, which documents two men sitting on a bench, conversing and commenting on things and characters that pass them by). In the artist statement on the website, Forowicz assures the visitor that this site was not intended to be voyeuristic (not about "crime [or] love"), but the power of simple observation to appreciate the "drama" occurring in ordinary life, particularly when we take for granted fabricated dramas to bring us entertainment.

I realized that the majority of my impatience when observing Forowicz's work likely stemmed from the fact that I was expecting the fabricated sort of drama. I was attuned to constant thrills and exciting details that were made available to me through a screen, with characters that were knowable and change rapid enough to demand (not just politely suggest) my attention. I was hardly even willing to look at a potential crime scene with a (likely) dead body laying on the ground for the monotony!-- surely this was not a problem with the content presented, but my conditioned patience. If the contrast was what Forowicz intended to become painfully clear in "looking," he achieved it.

I feel strongly that "looking" is successful on other fronts in a wonderfully fresh, plain way in comparison to other artists who attempt the same feat of naturalistic observation. Vito Acconci in his early projects of following people with a camera seemed more to be bringing more attention to his own strangeness, the ridiculousness of his actions with any message he wanted to make about publicity of appearance somewhat brushed over. Forowicz doesn't intend to decorate his observation with unacceptability in his actions. He observes, and allows others to observe by placing his findings on the most accessible source known to us currently, the internet. He advertised himself with fliers, as well, so his website might get better publicized. In this light, his objectives for this project are refreshingly simple: he wanted to make the private public and the transitory frozen and duplicated. It is effective as a haiku and, given the patience, quite satisfying.

little thought...

Maybe I'm giving too much thought to this layout and connotation of a poster form. Maybe I should focus on making an artwork that just so happens to be as small and as disposable as a poster.

But even then, I admit I'm a little paralyzed by this project. Most of my thoughts on the alphabet and its parents are not really as emotion- or opinion-driven as most artwork tends be. Why not just write my thoughts? The idea would be clearer.

Back with further conceptualizations later. Hopefully I've exorcised all the misgivings out of my system and can just focus.

A culmination of thoughts on the Alphabet project after the snow days...

I assure you that this isn't the first I've given this project any thought. I'd be in for it if this was. I've let the idea wash around in my mouth for a while and allowed it to grow before formally posting a blog entry... perhaps I'm just not used to the blog format enough to comfortably post thoughts as they occurred.


The idea was to concern the procession of an English-language letter back to Greek, Roman, even Phoenician or Semitic roots in history. Our alphabet is far from static, having evolved from pictorial symbol through a series of abstractions to produce the letter we have today with a relatively rich genealogy behind it. The idea, to be frank and subjective, is relatively interesting but rather finite and unapplicable. Sure, the letter "A" may have "evolved" from a previous form. That form may once have meant this or that and has become refined and restructured to symbolize the sound made at the beginnings of "apple," "avery" and "awning" combined. I guess one might be interested to know the history and the implications of its pictorial state, and one might be gently reminded of it whenever reading or writing letters. It's viable. But for a poster? Let's think more about this.

The proposed outlet for exploring this idea was to create three posters for three different letters of the alphabet, of our choice or based on the letters of out names. Now, for me, posters are very specific artistic outlets. A poster is made to hang on a wall, often temporarily; it might be framed, I suppose, if it was signed or particularly special, but in general a poster is a low and very disposable object typically not thought of as art. Art has a weighty connotation of self-sufficiency in idea, and posters, on the other hand, are typically not created for their own sake. They attempt to convey a persuasive message as they hang temporarily: the most common posters that come to my mind are...

--advertising posters. These give information and attempt to present subjects (being a music venue, a show, a product, even an idea like a public service announcement) in an appealing way.

--bedroom posters. These make more apparent something the owner likes or identifies with. These might feature rock bands, motivational images/text, souvenirs from places like Yellowstone or Oxford, movie posters, reproductions of art, humorous displays of text and image (like the Ten Commandments of College which mostly involve beer pong).

--classroom posters. These give information as reference; the wall is a convenient place to see them and use what's on them. (ie the periodic table, a diagram of a biological system or process, lists of literary devices, the color wheel)

Any poster I made for this project, I reasoned, would have to do something like one of these, and more specifically, be read as one.


At first, this combination of idea and outlet baffled me. Honestly, it even annoyed me. A poster, one that advertises or displays interest or information, does not seem like the first media of choice for exploring the subject matter. How utilitarian the poster is--- and how unexpected is the rather obscure idea of alphabet genealogy! It is easy to imagine placing the entire alphabet and the entirety of its 4 or 5 predecessors on a poster in a diagram form for a linguistics class, but that takes care of only one poster and is insufferably boring... and unfortunately, we must focus only on one letter per poster, and I feel that an informative poster of any one letter would be rather trite if not surrounded by its 25 brothers. I suppose personalizing posters with someone's first initial could make it a poster of interest that one might hang in their room, but realistically, the market for nerdy, female linguistics students seems too small to make a poster and expect it to be convincing. And the idea of making an advertisement poster out of any of these letters is, well, absurd.

I knew I'd have to twist this idea and the make clever use of the poster medium to make this project convincing.


My first idea for my first letter, "T," is based on the persuasive/informational posters seen specifically in the Green Bean cafe in Goodpaster Hall. Sponsored by Equal Exchange, the coffee stand uses posters to nudge customers toward more environmentally- and socially-conscious choices in their coffee consumption. Going in the same vein of informertisement (to use my own linguistic liberties), I might make a poster advising users of the English language to be more conscious of what's in their letters and what the current-day results experienced before reaching the state in which we experience them. I could illustrate it with a tea bag in a mug of water, the leaves disseminating into a brew with mature flavors (in the form of "mature" symbols floating to the top).

Do you know what's in your "T"?

har, har, har.

Artist Focus: Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina studied film and film criticism before extending her hand to new media art production, which culminated in the project “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” (1996). In terms of technological prowess, “My Boyfriend” is relatively low, utilizing techniques very similar to those we have already learned in HTML involving tables and links. The viewer enters the production with the simple white text “my boyfriend came back from the war. after dinner they left us alone.” on a black background. If one clicks the text, one is led to a new, compound image of two pictures, a window and two figures in opposite ends of the screen, both in cruddy quality and black and white against the black background. If one clicks the image of the two seated figures, one is led to a string of links involving text and image (beginning with a close-up of a woman’s face) which exist in a table with now-visible bars separating cells. As the links are clicked, new images and text—which seems to be snippits of dialogue—appear in new boxes or replace them with new cells within the original cell. This growth of cells and change of dialogue text and images creates something of a fractal pattern, leading the viewer forward until all the clicking leaves the majority of the cells blank, with only the original cells (with the window and seated figures) and the last cell with the artist’s information in the bottom right remain.

“My Boyfriend” has become a wildly popular work, with multiple imitations in multiple new media (and even “old” media, like gouache), and for a clear reason: this artwork is not like other works comprising the field of new media art. Not only does it store the majority of its apparent worth and meaning in its visual elements (unlike works like “Telegarden” and “BorderXing”), but it appears to be art-like instead of a potential error or mess of color, like “Jodi.org” might be perceived to be. For a quotidian, non-art-based viewer, “My Boyfriend” is a welcome, organically-artlike change from the I Can’t Believe It’s Really Considered Art! material the contemporary field has been producing. That it is visually appealing certainly doesn’t imply, at least for this viewer, that the work suffers from a lack of deeper thought of which more overtly conceptual work may boast. Lialina outlines something that is far from a linear conversation, far from the soap-opera-esque material the subject matter may otherwise produce. It involves temporal and spatial change in the process of clicking through the links and reading the images and dialogue clips, much in the same way a typical conversation may progress; but since the information that is clicked into is so obviously disjointed, the viewer is gently but firmly advised to read the conversation as something greater than literal. To me, the conversation being outlined is very psychological, the run-through of a very fresh memory and the things seen or focused upon when each phrase was uttered. They change in size related to proportion of importance; they progress not based on when they were said or whom they were said by, but as the situation was experienced mentally later. Once the thought of a phrase has been considered, it is left blank instead of dangling. To me, this implies that the conversation has ended—there is nothing left to be said, nothing overtly undecided about the situation for the characters that experienced it. It is only the viewer left to decide what the result of the conversation was, which keeps the experience compelling. It is specifically through the devices of expansion, of disappearance and the act of clicking, accessible only through the medium of HTML and the internet, that the story gets the meat of its importance.

Artist Focus - Jodi.org

Jodi.org, created as a dual project between Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, is a prime example of conceptual art of the new media persuasion. Other projects and artists of my concentration have been wholly performance or idea-based, the web becoming the main means of disseminating that idea or situation, though containing no real visual content of its own. Although the work contained in Jodi.org is certainly unorthodox, it reflects a certain return to previous creations in that its visual aspects, as coupled with the behind-the-scenes aspects of thought process, contain meaning to better the viewer’s understanding of the work. When one enters the main website wwwwwwwww.jodi.org (as addressed by the Mark Tribe directory), one is confronted with a mess of text and image in occurring in varying sizes and overlapping without any apparent order. Some of the text or image links to a different page, which displays new patterns of broken script, image, animation and line. It is recognizable that these websites seem to be distortions of typical ones, a representation of one that loads poorly no matter how many times the page is refreshed. One feels as though they are feeling a path through the dark from one unknowable location to another.

All web users have experienced a glitch at some point; sometimes even common pages like Facebook display temporary glitches where the orderly, gridded content of the network is distorted and expressed in different fonts, sizes and arrangements. I find myself weirdly terrified of glitches, or so classically-conditioned to click “back” or “refresh” when I experience one that I experience a mild wave of dread and displeasure when I see one. We want the internet to be a clear, organized, unfailing container of information and to be a portal to other sources of clear information, so the speed and alacrity of our reception of new image and information is second only to our thought processes; this desire to “assert” (or at least expect) order over this tool demands that we despise any and all problems that may arise. This keeps us from appreciating the intrigue and (dare I say it?) beauty in a poorly loaded page, in disorder in the realm of order. The website itself, if seen in HTML form, has a pictograph of a hydrogen-bomb tucked within the otherwise-accurate code: thus, the action of the makers to create this disorder by planting a literal (in its pictorial form) and figurative (in the form of its translation to HTML’s language) bomb in the code was quite deliberate. Although the exact outcome of any given website with an encoded “bomb” was surely unknown to Heemskerk and Paesmans, the exact outcome is not as important as the act of distortion and the result that one experiences emotionally and cognitively when feeling their way through the website.

For me, this project emphasizes the abstract quality of the internet: although what we see in a website is a projected image, a space in which we literally move around (with a mouse or keyboard) and navigate within, it has been created based on a gobbledygook (as perceived by the untrained reader) of text and symbol , or simply of 1’s and 0’s. In essence, the internet is like an illusionistic painting: it may be created of paint, a raw material that simply has color, but that is meticulously arranged to create an image that appears to be like real life, and able to be interacted with. However, as painting progressed, intentional defects in the application of paint (such as abandoning perspective, life observation, etc) led to the creation of paintings that acknowledged the media behind it and shattered the illusionistic aspect that many modern artists felt distracted from the idea behind work. Jodi.org does for virtually-realistic websites what abstraction did for painting: it forces the viewer to realize the material behind it, and the aesthetic possibilities therein. Personally, I find the ability to observe a glitch as not only mildly emotionally jarring, but exciting: the colors, the new patterns, the almost-humorous absurdity is very eye-pleasing, in a way that few new media artists allow their work to be.