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The Letter We Live This Life Language Acquisition we r watching u ! PApTCHA Pacemaker 70 Swans A Brief History COMMERCIAL
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We Live This Life
and Digital Media for Societies in Turmoil
ed. Ursula Böckler, Julia Lazarus & Alexandra Weltz-Rombach
published by K. Verlag Berlin Sept. 2023
From K. Verlag: Can radical film practices help to understand a disintegrating world? Can they have a healing effect? How can we maintain structures of solidarity in the field of radical media production for societies in turmoil and transition? And what does radical cultural practice look like in times such as ours, when everywhere we turn there seem to lurk even more acute challenges?
This concept for diagrammatic writing first emerged in my practice when I was tasked with translating an essay of mine into a film. I had been studying semiotics for some time and was taken by the theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. In particular, I appreciated the way Peirce expands on the more widely-known writing of the French theorist Ferdinand de Saussure, who coined the terms: the sign, the signifier, and signified. What Peirce then wrote about was another grouping of three: the index, the icon, and the symbol. We can work backwards from here and look at the symbol first, as it is the term he gives to our common understanding of what we call “a word.” Words, after all, have arbitrary relationships to that which they refer. Most of the time. What about the word “tree” inherently relates it to those tall things outside with trunks and bark and leaves reaching toward the sky? Nothing really. And I’m not trying to ignore etymology here either. English is a relatively new language, but if we traced it back to the Latin word for tree, which is “arbor,” we wouldn’t see anything inherent in that text either. Just another word.
After symbol, however, we get the icon. The icon is a word with a closer relationship to what it means—though still indirect one. Onomatopoeias are good examples. We can look at words like “boom” and “clap,” which sound like what they mean. Emojis—a more recent development—work similarly. They look like the emotion they’re meant to communicate. Most of the time. And finally, there’s the index, which does constitute an inherent linking between a signifier and a signified. An index indicates presence. It wouldn’t exist as a mode of communication if the thing to which it was referring had not, at one time, been present. Two of the most common examples of this are: 1) smoke coming from a fire and 2) the track of an animal in a forest. The smoke not only communicates the idea of “fire” to those who see it, but it also exists as a product of the fire itself, indicating that the fire is—or recently was—actually there. Same goes for the paw print.
With these categories in mind, I couldn’t help but thinking about breaking our common forms of language open. How can we communicate things with the pairing of image and word? And can this fall somewhere between the categories? And is indexical writing ever really possible?? These are some of the questions I am always pondering when putting together diagrammatic works.
For “We Live This Life,” I also considered order. I looked at each figure as a frame and then wondered: how could I borrow ideas from the foundations of video editing? The Kuleshov Effect and early theories of montage where always swirling around in the back of my thinking. I realized that people would read the consecutive figures differently depending on what preceded them. And vice versa, readers may even remember the previously figures different based on what was to follow. In this way, I began to construct sequences.
I’ll conclude by mentioning that I’m always curious to see if it might be possible to look at something in its simplest form. In doing so, I find that the rules that humans set up for themselves seem kind of absurd and arbitrary, much like language. Given this, I sought to avoid hierarchies. A tree could be next to a person, which could be next to privatized health care, which could be next to ice cream, because in this life that we live, they all already are every day anyway.