I've really enjoyed the blog space approach in this course. Completing a weekly task is only half the fun. The rest comes from browsing through and engaging with other people's posts. The variety in our approaches and thoughts on the same assignment never fails to amaze and intrigue me, and I always close each window with my mind spinning with new ideas. For my linking assignment, I have selected posts that I found myself thinking about long after reading and commenting on them.
Link 2
For my second link, I went back to Shawn Lau’s week 4 post on potato printing. The original can be viewed below.
Post Summary
Shawn’s post begins with visual media; first displaying the potato print as it was made, then displaying it reflected in a mirror, and then finally displaying only the mirror reflection. He follows this with a discussion about the trials and tribulations he encountered during this task, as well as how he sought to creatively overcome them without needing to repeat the work process all over again. He also mentions the time this task took, his preference and motivations for use of capital letters, and his subsequent thoughts on the mechanisation of writing.
Reflection
Shawn’s writing for this task was interesting, and the architecture of his site is easy to navigate, but his use of reflecting text to “correct” his error was what really made me select his post for this reflection. I too encountered a backwards letter, but since it was only 1 of 5 I decided to embrace it and make it part of the typography I had created. In contrast, all of Shawn’s letters were printed backwards and then he printed the word from right to left as well. This inversion of letters was already visually fascinating, and makes me wonder why he made the additional choice to invert the word as well. Other than these subversions of normal text standards, his spacing and alignment were very neat and made the whole effort look almost intentional.
Shawn then placed his text in-front of a mirror and the intrigue I already felt multiplied exponentially. Aside from a lifelong fascination with reflections (see below), I feel like there was a lot of subtext to reflecting words that went far beyond simply correcting an error.
Text, in so many ways, mirrors our lives. The way we produce texts and what we produce them on reflects our societies and the technologies we have. The way we use text becomes a reflection of societal norms, notions of truth, and ideas about what is and what is not knowledge. The content of text, of course, is a direct reflection of humanity containing abstractions of our thoughts and experiences and ideas and feelings and histories and and and… This is the crux of hermeneutical studies, English courses, poetry analysis, artistic expression, and so many other things where text in its various forms is analysed as representation of human existence (and reflection of both the seen and the unseen alike).
Text itself is thus a mirror in so many ways. The idea that it can right distortions is a powerful one. The idea that text can distort whilst looking clean and intentional is equally important. It makes me wonder if the news we read, the history books we are taught with, and the updates we see on our social media feeds should be considered as the original backwards print or as the corrected reflection in a mirror.
These are just some of the ideas that all came crashing down on me when I viewed Shawn’s post; text as a technology of reflection; text as a mirror of human society; and text as a tool for power, representation, and liberation depending on where you’re standing and whether you’re looking at the original or not.
So, thanks Shawn. My existential crisis continues, but my optimist nihilism hopes to win another day as well.
Mirror Selfies
I’m not one for selfies, or pouts, or even really having pictures taken of me… but I use mirror selfies to track my life and my movements around the world. I also just have an obsession of photographing reflections in mirrors. All of this photography is also still done on 35mm film, which for me is a conscious way of engaging with the present. I can’t just snap multiple versions of this, I need to make sure the picture I take is one that reflects (!) the moment in time I want to commit to memory. This process results in these mirror selfies being strongly tied to spaces, places, and traces in my life. Here are some I’ve posted on my instagram, if you’re curious.