click for a new word
The show I just wrapped was kind of conceptually overloaded, but it was useful as a kind of high-level survey of the stuff I’m wrangling right now, and the goal was to find new ways to connect the tile art I’ve been doing, which is of the Dungeon Mode, to dungeons-as-mines, which was an underdeveloped chunk of my thesis writing that just kept blowing up as I would find more and more readings and more weird kismets piled up in my life related to it.
One of the things I would like to drill down on for another installation is the written language aspect. I talked a little bit in the writing that accompanied the show about how writing direction is associated with cultural notions of moving through time. I had been thinking about how a character set is a lexicon of visual language, and how my character set has letters and numbers but also symbols, and visual building blocks of images. Since I’ve named every tile in a sort of unicode mimicry, I had thought about building ‘words’ on the grid, with the notion that there’s some kind of time aspect (in the dungeon mode up is the future and down is the past). I had also imagined these as divination runes or something after having done my Geomancy sketch. Something with subjective, contextual meanings. It’s way too complicated to be useful as a language, but it suggests a lot as an art project. Here’s a code sketch I did with building out these ‘words’.
I had some sound stuff (using sonic pi) that I didn’t use in the space because the other stations were too noisy and it just didn’t fit. I imagine a room that’s nothing but a projection of each word every twenty seconds or so, with an accompanying tone or percussive sound from the collection of sounds I made (remember the tileset has an accompanying collection of samples of this little kalimba+drumhead instrument I have), and then the light in the room also changes to match the background of the screen. I would love to do this, it would be the opposite of didaktik gama- no explanation, just a space to be in, because I already did the conceptual work leading up to it. My goal is not to have the end works be breathlessly wordy, that’s just how I get there.
I talked recently to a member of my cohort (Bobby Joe Smith III) who is Lakota and working with new/existing Lakota orthography and ideas about new writing and computing devices for them. One of the weird harmonies I encountered when I was doing this research was that I was reading a lot about the creation and systemization of Czech orthography and grammar (Jan Hus supposedly takes a stab at it in 1412 and then we get a ‘modern’ grammar and orthography in 1809 by Josef Dobrovský), and in general how written vernaculars get used to create national identities, and then remembering that one of the Lakota orthographies was extremely contentious because it was facilitated by a couple of Europeans, one of whom was Czech, and the resulting letters are very Czech looking, and the Europeans ended up copywriting the resulting dictionary and learning materials. There’s also a harmony with uranium mining, in the past in Bohemia and now in the Black Hills in Lakota ancestral lands.
So, I keep trying to move into the mining stuff or the language stuff, but then there’s all these strange attractions between them that keep them as parallel concerns. It’s odd. I’ve moved on now from Technics and Civilization and De Re Metallica to this book- Mining Language Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. So I guess I am not finished with this stuff yet!
