This past week I was mostly intrigued by Sky Marsen's The Role of Meaning in Human Thinking. Marsen distinguishes between formal and natural/conventional language, the former denoting the use of "numbers, equations, and algorithms to communicate, based on precise measurement and unambiguous reference," while the latter encompasses "verbal signs we use to communicate in our everyday interactions" (Marsen 2008). Formal languages are universal and exact, while conventional language is varied and abstract (Marsen 2008). Although I am clearly working with natural language in my thesis, it can still be useful to establish this distinction in order to properly talk about the communication of everyday life and its effects/implications.
This article elaborates on language as negotiation, drawing upon Saussure's established relationship between the signifier and signified. Marsen explains that by agreeing that a word like "tree" can be used to signify things other than the object it denotes, speakers create a code that can only be decoded by those who can decipher the patterns without referring to the natural world. According to Marsen, this demonstrates the "negotiative part of language" and "underlies artistic expression" (Marsen 2008). Clearly, the human ability to attribute meaning allows the very idea of art and the conceptual frameworks that compose art to exist. Furthermore, language's negotiability allows for the interpretation of objects like art, which also demonstrates the possibility for different opinions and perspectives through the use of conventional language.
With these ideas in mind, I thought of the word 'mañana' in Spanish and how the meaning of the word changes with the use of either 'la' or 'el' as the word's gender identifier. "La mañana" means "the morning," while "el mañana" means "the tomorrow." I thought it was interesting to make this distinction between English and Spanish because while English also has words that have more than one meaning, homonyms in Spanish are more often identified by the word's accompanying article while English homonyms are identified by the context of the sentence.
I also thought it was interesting that simply saying "mañana" means "tomorrow," but the word changes in meaning by adding a gender article, becoming "la mañana" (the morning). Even by using "el" to make "mañana" mean "tomorrow," the word takes on a more philosophical notion of tomorrow (not just "tomorrow" but "the tomorrow").
I used the Spanish phrase "la mañana le da la bienvenida a el mañana" (the morning welcomes the tomorrow) to showcase the effect of using 'el' and 'la' for the same word. I think it would be interesting to experiment with this type of 'coding' in the future.
Yes, I think that it WOULD be interesting to further explore this!!! I feel like this post very strongly articulates the primary premise of your thesis work in a way that I haven't quite "heard" yet (and also again makes me think about what might happen of this phrase is both repeatedly seen AND heard via video and/or 2D work with accompanying audio) / this mode of working in terms of coding relates to certain types of systems theory that artists have drawn on in different periods. I'm intrigued by the sentence/phrase you've composed and its philosophical implications, as well as visual form and also particular word choice in terms of its familiarity (to some/many?). This use of text as image has a lot of potential for you, and there are MANY ways to deal with it visually (as I know you have mentioned not being interested in this). Let's talk about this a bit, I feel the drip/abstraction pieces are really not getting you where you need to be in terms of your content and exploring a different direction for a bit may be useful. Oh, and here is a link to a book that may be a useful resource: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/systems
ReplyDelete