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Positions through iterating – Written Response

  1. Zarina (1999) Home is a Foreign place [Portfolio of 36 woodcuts]. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/499720 (Accessed: 30 April 2025)

Zarina’s Home Is a Foreign Place is a series of 36 woodcut prints combining minimalist visuals with Urdu words to evoke memory, displacement, and belonging. Drawing on her personal history and global movements, the series weaves cultural, linguistic, and material references into a poignant meditation on home and identity. This selection of woodcuts inspired me to consider how graphic shapes can relate and represent feelings of displacement and of longing towards a home that never was, emphasizing that abstraction and simplicity can carry profound meaning. Her representations inspired my choice in my iterations to apply graphic romanian-inspired symbols to the original prints to create the layered effects. 

2. Space One Eleven (2015) Negotiated Identities/Saints and Tears [Exhibition]. Birmingham, AL: Space One Eleven. Available at: https://spaceoneeleven.org/exhibition-archive/negotiated-identities-saints-and-tears/ (Accessed: 1 May 2025).

Negotiated Identities/Saints and Tears is a 2015 international group exhibition held at Space One Eleven in Birmingham, Alabama, featuring artists from the American Deep South and Romania. The exhibition explores how personal and collective identities are shaped by political histories, cultural memory, and religious symbolism. Romanian artists, navigating post-communist realities, and American artists from the Deep South, confronting their own socio-political landscapes, engage in a visual dialogue. Through collaborative works, the exhibition delves into themes of autonomy, privacy, and the enduring impact of authoritarian regimes, highlighting the universal quest for self-definition amid complex historical contexts. Within this exhibition I was struck by the work of Karen Graffeo who’s use of graphic symbols overlaid on old romanian imagery inspired my subsequent iterations in this project.

3. Benjamin, W. (1969) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 1–26. (First published in 1935).

The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin argues that mass reproduction technologies, like photography and film, strip art of its “aura”—its uniqueness and presence in time and space. This shift transforms how art is experienced, detaching it from tradition and ritual. While reproduction democratizes access, it also opens art to political manipulation. Benjamin explores how these changes reflect broader shifts in perception, politics, and cultural production. While this choice approaches more broader subject matter, I still found it fundamental in guiding my reflection upon the medium I have chosen. While not entirely political, my piece relies on the handmade aspect of it’s production to reflect and represent my feelings.

4. McLuhan, M. and Fiore, Q., 1967. The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects [PDF]. New York: Bantam Books. Available at: https://archive.org/details/pdfy-vNiFct6b-L5ucJEa (Accessed: 1 May 2025)

The youth of today are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage of mankind through the door of technological awareness. 


The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore explores how media shapes human perception and society. Through a mix of text and visuals, it argues that the medium through which a message is conveyed is more influential than the content itself. McLuhan shows how technologies like print, television, and electronic media reconfigure our senses, behaviors, and environments, ultimately reshaping culture and identity in profound, often unnoticed ways. My own perception of this work is ephemeral, oftentimes I get lost in the language, but I find it inspirational in the way it aims to shape and explain the concept of media and how it influences today’s society. This book reflects on my own thought process of developing this project.

5. Fowler, R. (2024) Boarding All Rows [Linoleum and Woodblock Prints]. Unknown. Available at: https://www.boardingallrows.com/blog/new-series-of-linoleum-and-woodblock-prints-2024 (Accessed: 1 May 2025).

Fowler does not provide a detailed explanation for the pieces created; rather, they serve as an exercise in lino printing. The work is particularly notable for its blend of lino and woodblock printing, combined with the use of different coloured inks. It is an experiment in layering ink, creating a visual effect reminiscent of decoupage. This approach inspired my own work, giving me the idea to layer symbols over my initial designs. While I originally intended to replicate the feeling of these overlaid, somewhat chaotic images, I realized that such complexity could make the compositions too busy and difficult to keep fast and light-footed, which was essential for my 100 iterations.

6. Ford, L. O. (2011) Savage Messiah. London: Verso Books.

Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield Ford is a zine-style, psychogeographic exploration of post-industrial London. Blending collage, drawing, and text, the work captures the emotional residue of urban decay, gentrification, and working-class displacement. It documents forgotten spaces and resistances, channeling punk aesthetics and radical politics. Through layered visuals and fragmented narratives, Ford evokes both rage and nostalgia, offering a haunting portrait of a city transformed by neoliberalism and erased histories. Inspired by Ford’s expression of individuality, I wanted to also use text and words at points to establish my feelings in regards to my identity. The layering of her images solidified my desire to add the collage style spin towards my second rounds of iterations.

At its core, my enquiry is straightforward: I seek to understand what this part of my identity—being a Romanian immigrant—truly means to me, and how I can express it visually through a graphic project. I chose lino printing as my method of exploration, as it offered a tactile and expressive medium that felt both accessible and unfamiliar. This process pushed me to reflect inward, which is something I’ve often avoided in my creative practice, either due to my own shyness or due to insecurity in myself. Previously, I focused on representing others, their experiences and stories, often leaving my own identity as a subtle, almost invisible footnote within my work.

Text was reworded at points and gramatically corrected through AI

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Positions through iterating – Research and Writing

Week 1

Initially, hearing the brief in the morning made a shiver run down my spine. 100 iterations in a publication format. It seemed daunting as a one week project, through my mind ran all of the ways I could tackle this monumental task. I knew I wantedto continue experimenting and exploring my previous linoprinting project, the physicality and tactile process of it was a pleasant meditative experience I was thrilled to experience again.

Trying to keep my process quick and not overthinking it meant that I had no time to dwell on how this publication wuld be bound, as I ran a high risk of falling into overly complicated bindings. I opted for a coptic bound publication using thin smooth paper, this choice was motivated by my desire to have the iterations presented in an A5 format and weight related thinking.

For printing I opted to use a combination of blockprinting ink and of standard craft stamp inks to overlay on top, this was used with teh intention of having a speedier process in layering.

The result of this week was 100 prints of the same block done in fast succession which was an intentional move as it created unique and incomplete prints, over which I overlayed several designs that very directly lifted or inspired from romanian shirts, paintings and overall just graphic designs with a romanian inspiration.

The inquiry I worked towards was exploring identity and loss of it as an immigrant through linorprinting. A traditional medium depicting my uneasiness with my identity.

Week 2

Once again I found myself unsure how I would attain the number of iterations needed, but confident I could if I put my mind to it. By this point most of my life is packed in boxes in my room in preparation for my move, which limited my ammount of space or supplies to be used. Instead of seeking out fancy experimental paper, I opted to go straightforward, printer paper and blockprint ink.

I decided the variation of the iterations would come through the images the empty space of my stamp framed, the skirt acting as a window. The images were all self representative, places from my life, childhood foods, images from important historical romanian events.

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Methods of contextualizing – Written response

1.

This group project and the subsequent exploration of the way social media, particularly Youtube and its autoplay feature, opened my eyes deepened my understanding on the way disabled individuals are treated and integrated within society. This process highlighted how the structural nature of digital inaccessibility is perpetuated through the current climate. Rather than framing attention deficit and dopamine-seeking as individual failings, our discussions revealed how platform algorithms exploit neurodivergent users, creating engagement loops that disregard access needs.

Autoplay, for example, enforces a rhythm of consumption that disregards agency, making rest or disengagement more difficult, especially for users with executive function challenges. Through this project my team and I were able to expand and shape our understanding of accessibility, not only through design but also through advocating and understanding our peers’ needs. Moving forward, I aim to take this experience as part of my practice and continue to be mindful and take into account accessibility as I continue my work and expand my knowledge.

2.

Harris, T. (2016) ‘How technology hijacks people’s minds’, Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3df3

In his 2016 article, Tristan Harris explains how tech companies take advantage of psychological vulnerabilities to capture individual’s attention. Using systematic tactics like social validation and variable rewards, these social media platforms manipulate users into maximizing engagement at any cost. Harris advocates for ethical design that puts the user’s well-being over the need for profit. In the context of my project, his article exposes a way in which autoplay is especially designed to dictate participation and erode agency from the user, as it assumes what the user should see next and does not give them time to decide. This enforced continuity mirrors exploitative work rhythms, where relentless momentum overrides individual pacing and consent. Additionally, this algorithmic flow disregards individuals with disabilities or who are neurodivergent, as they may be more vulnerable to seeking entertainment or being confined to a sedentary lifestyle which means they are more likely to fall within autoplay capitalism.

Newport, C. (2019) Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. New York: Portfolio.

Within his 2019 book Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world, Cal Newport argues for digital minimalism, a philosophy that advocates intentional technology use to reclaim focus and autonomy. He critiques the addictive nature of digital tools and proposes strategies like tech sabbaticals and solitude to foster deeper engagement with life. Newport’s call for intentional disconnection challenges the imposed temporal structures of digital engagement. By resisting the compulsive cycles of notifications and autoplay, digital minimalism disrupts the relentless pacing that diminishes agency and enforces participation. By introducing deliberate pauses between videos, the plugin forces users to make conscious decisions about their viewing, rather than being passively drawn into the next recommendation. This intervention embodies Newport’s argument that reclaiming attention requires active resistance against persuasive design. Breaking the rhythm of endless consumption, the plugin acts as a digital minimalist tool, empowering users to engage with content on their own terms rather than those dictated by platform algorithms.

Zhou, M. (2016) Fragmented time. Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/45820185/Fragmented-Time

In her 2016 Graduation Show piece Fragmented Time, Zhou represents the ease with which technology can whisk users away, immersing them in an endless cycle of distraction. The piece visually simulates how individuals fall into the digital rabbit hole, losing track of time as they are pulled deeper into fragmented, nonlinear engagement. Through her use of visual design, Zhou illustrates how digital spaces fracture attention, disrupting a person’s ability to focus and maintain intentional interaction with content. By capturing the overwhelming and disorienting nature of digital consumption, Fragmented Time highlights how technological structures dictate user behavior, often without their conscious awareness.

Zhou’s work directly influenced the design of our plugin, which aims to combat the same experience of overwhelming digital engagement by preventing users from binge-watching YouTube videos. Just as Fragmented Time exposes the chaotic and compulsive nature of digital consumption, our plugin intervenes by breaking the cycle of autoplay and endless recommendations. Inspired by Zhou’s representation of distraction, we sought to create a tool that restores user agency, forcing deliberate engagement rather than passive absorption. By interrupting YouTube’s seamless flow of content, the plugin replicates Zhou’s critique in an interactive form, transforming her visual exploration into a functional digital intervention.

Song, Yehwan (2024) ‘(Whose) World (How) Wide Web’, Instagram. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/C2X0OJIrwNH/?igsh=QkFmeF92WWNBaw%3D%3D&img_index=1

Yehwan Song critiques the standardized structures of the web, questioning who controls digital spaces and how users navigate them. Through experimental web design, Song disrupts conventional interfaces, highlighting the hidden constraints that shape online experiences. Song’s work exposes how digital platforms dictate engagement patterns, limiting user agency. By resisting uniformity, it challenges the imposed temporal and spatial structures that enforce passive consumption and uninterrupted participation. This project utilizes the digital landscape to express its intended messaging, which inspired our project’s direction, to engage the internet as a medium of communication. It created a visual language for us to better understand how we wanted to express our perception of autoplay and the digital medium. Song’s experimental approach to digital design helped us conceptualize a visual and functional language for our intervention. By disrupting autoplay’s seamless flow, our plugin mirrors Song’s critique of passive digital consumption, transforming it into an active choice.

Gerbaudo, P. (2012) ‘Introduction’ Tweets and the Streets. London: Pluto Press. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/reader.action?docID=3386687&ppg=1g=1

In the introduction for his book Tweets and the Streets (2012) Paolo Gerbaudo examines the role of social media within contemporary activism, arguing that platforms like Twitter and Facebook dictate collective action. While enabling mobilization  and community these digital tools also shape and pace the direction of movements, constraining what the individuals interacting with the platforms can do. By extension, Youtube, which is a social media, also imposes temporal structures and directions, prioritizing virality and algorithmic urgency in order to dictate engagement. The rapid, fleeting nature of online movements mirrors broader societal rhythms that demand constant participation, often at the cost of sustained organizing and reflection upon the behaviour and media that is being consumed. This felt especially relevant to our project as we felt that the autoplay feature exists as a form of determining the pace of the users’ engagement with the work, choreographing the way the platform is to be used and engaged with.

McLuhan, M., Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Berkeley: Gingko Press. Available at: https://archive.org/details/pdfy-vNiFct6b-L5ucJEa

In their 1967 book The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of Effects Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore argue that the medium itself shapes human perception and society more than the content that is delivered. They explore how media alter sensory experiences and social structures, emphasizing that technological environments dictate how people think, act, and interact. McLuhan’s insights highlight how media impose temporal structures that govern attention and behavior. This text was also important in our research regarding our project, as we found that autoplay develops itself as almost a medium of expression, as the individual is being exposed to information through the algorithmic stream of videos. The rhythmic flow of digital content, from autoplay to infinite scroll, enforces patterns of passive consumption, shaping participation in ways often unnoticed. This also is expressed through the use of pop-ups in our work, the pop-ups become the medium and therefore the message is also within it.

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Methods of contextualizing – Research and Writing

“Killing rhythms” is a concept introduced by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their 2013 book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. They describe it as a normative and systematic temporal structure of capitalist, settler-colonial society—one that enforces productivity, discipline, and exclusion.

Shannon Finnegan, Have you ever fallen in love with a clock?, 2021. Analog clock showing days of the week, dimensions variable. Photo by Axel Schneider. Image courtesy of Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.

Based on this concept, my group and I decided to examine systems that we believe reinforce similar patterns. Each of us identified a system that excludes people with disabilities or those who face struggles.

For my contribution to this group, I identified two different systems that operate within the framework of killing rhythms, as described by Moten and Harney.

First, I examined the corporate workspace, where disabilities are often overlooked. Fast-paced corporate environments fail to account for employees who may struggle with meeting targets or handling intricate workloads under strict time constraints. To address this, I proposed a system that would allow individuals to express when they are struggling with their workload.

Second, I explored creative fields, which, while similar to corporate environments, present an additional challenge: the demand for rapid yet innovative output. While meeting deadlines is already difficult for many, individuals with disabilities may face even greater obstacles in reaching creative expectations. As a potential intervention, I considered how identifying and working with alternative rhythms could make creative workspaces more inclusive.

After discussing our ideas as a group, we ultimately decided to pursue my classmate’s idea of portraying capitalism through autoplay. We felt this concept effectively represented the killing rhythm system.

For this project, each of us was tasked with generating two ideas for interventions. One of my ideas was to create a browser plug-in that would help users limit their intake of autoplay content. Its goal was to remind individuals that they have the agency to stop consuming media, rather than being drawn into an endless cycle of passive viewing.

To refine this idea, I spoke to my friends and peers about their own media consumption habits and how autoplay affects their daily lives. Through these discussions, we realized that users are more likely to ignore pop-ups that resemble the platform’s original design, as they tend to blend into the interface. This insight led me to consider creating pop-ups that break the expected visual pattern, introducing randomness to keep viewers more engaged and aware of their consumption.

Another aspect we discussed was the tone of these pop-ups. While a fully professional tone was an option, we also considered incorporating a variety of tones—some playful, some direct—to better capture users’ attention and prompt them to reflect on their viewing habits.

For this project, each of us created roughly seven pop-ups, which we then compiled into a short film simulating how the plug-in would work. We incorporated all our ideas into this film and presented it to the class on Tuesday.

Following the feedback of my tutor and peers, my team and me decided to create a few more pieces of media that would accompany this project. I took it upon myself to create a faux bank statement that would be sent to individuals in order to bring awareness to their screen use.


Harris, T. (2016) ‘How technology hijacks people’s minds’, Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3

Zhou, M. (2016) Fragmented time. Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/45820185/Fragmented-Time

Newport, C. (2019) Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. New York: Portfolio.

Song, Yehwan (2024) ‘(Whose) World (How) Wide Web’, Instagram. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/C2X0OJIrwNH/?igsh=QkFmeF92WWNBaw%3D%3D&img_index=1

McLuhan, M., Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Berkeley: Gingko Press. Available at: https://archive.org/details/pdfy-vNiFct6b-L5ucJEa

Gerbaudo, P. (2012) ‘Introduction’ Tweets and the Streets. London: Pluto Press. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/reader.action?docID=3386687&ppg=1

Abdurraqib, H. (2023) ‘The hollow allure of Spotify Wrapped’, The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/the-hollow-allure-of-spotify-wrapped

The A11Y Project (2022) ‘Never use auto-play’, The A11Y Project. Available at: https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/never-use-auto-play/

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Methods of iterating – Written response

DRAFT 1

My chosen piece was a printed vase illustration by Andrea Lauren (@inkprintrepeat on IG). Lauren specializes in linocut printing and especially in working with jigsaw printing. 

Technically, linocutting did not present itself as a challenge, it used fairly straightforward methods of carving and while it did take an adjustment to holding and handling the tools I was quickly able to familiarise myself with it. The biggest technical challenge I found was not being able to control the carving fully without sacrificing the loyalty to the original piece. Another challenge of the medium was the fact that I was only able to source a few primary colours of the printing inks that are typically used with it. While I was confident that I could mix them to match, I had not anticipated how hard getting an even mix would be. 

From my observation, many linocut artists seem to favour folk imagery as well as classical motifs, oftentimes it seems apparent they are trying to emulate the image of woodcuts or the feel of older prints. 

To the benefit of the medium, it seems to be used often to create empowering and accessible prints, many times created from a diy spirit.

DRAFT 2

After reading the snippet of Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in style”, I was intrigued by the playfulness and the difference presented by the few chapters available. While maintaining some parameters and constraints, his work clearly flourishes under this enforced rulebook. By retelling a simple anecdote in 99 different styles, it highlights the malleability of language, the role of form in shaping meaning, and the humor in experimentation. 

Queneau’s example sits to show that language is a medium that can be shaped, chiseled and expanded, which intrigued me as a concept. While the medium I had chosen was of a less literal manner, I was interested in putting into practice the similar mindset of creation through constraint. 

Initially it was daunting to try to consider different ways of experimenting with my iterations. Even though lino printing is a medium that encourages experimentation within some limits, I was struggling with imagining or thinking up methods of hacking the medium in a way that had not been done before or shown to me by my own printing books. One of which being  Andrea Lauren’s own book, Block Print

Using my previously established medium, I devised to experiment in different materials while maintaining the same ink and stamp, which will act as a control element and my own established constraint. 

I was aware that conceptually, the message I was choosing to translate through my print was as important as the print itself, so I took the time to consider what I wanted to evoke through my print. It seemed natural for me to create a piece that represented my identity. I chose to depict a Romanian immigrant within a crowd of people, her face neutral as to be altered by the methods I intended using. I maintained my approach playful, my workspace was my floor, scattered on a plastic cover were my supplies, my ink spread on paper, some towels on the side to dab my inked pads when they needed cleaning. 

My materials were sourced from what I had around my house. Thick cardstock and mixed media paper were my first victims of experimentation. My first course of action was to print as I had been instructed, moderately wiping the ink off and pressing the paper on top with even pressure, but as I continued creating prints I changed up the pattern, opting to either use too little or too much ink to observe the effects caused.

 Following that up with using tracing paper and fabric to print. I found the tracing paper created an interesting effect, as the paper buckled and warped due to the wetness of the ink. The fabric has an equally surprising effect, bleeding through the material and folding within the carved out portions, the fabric prints picking up way more ink that the normal paper prints. 

An unexpected effect was the creation of prints on ‘scrap’ pieces and fabric, where I had carelessly put down the blocks in need to not stain my carpet. These prints created a textured and quite freeing print, the image unencumbered by my control. These created the most intriguing imagery.

Overall this step of the experimentation helped me better understand the process of lino printing and how this can be hacked and changed to create new and interesting visuals.

DRAFT 3

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Methods of iterating – Research and Writing

I began this project slightly unsure, freshly back from my holidays I didn’t know what I wanted to approach as my medium of iteration. I was torn between forms and artists I wanted to follow. With the help of my tutors and colleagues I finally decided I would take up lino printing. I had often marvelled at such projects and it seemed very satisfying to carve away at a block.

For my referential step of this project, I decided to recreate a piece by Andrea Lauren (@inkprintrepeat on IG) of a printed greek vase. I was fortunate that Andrea Lauren also authored an instructional book on lino printing, which gave me a starting point in understanding supplies and the process.

Tracing the image on grid paper to be easier to reference
Tracing the outlines of the block using charcoal
The blocks after carving and tinting then with ink for better relief
First test print of the vase decor block (here I realised my error in the accidental mirroring)
Print station and paint mixing
My result of the replica against the original

For my own iterations I wanted to create a piece that would be created out of separate pieces of lino which gave me the opportunity to switch the pieces.

Guidelines of the piece
Mid carving
Prints
Different iterations out to dry

After drying I have compiled the pieces in a GIF to be better seen. I have experimented with several materials and methods of printing. I used fabric, tracing paper, cardstock and crocheted pieces which created an interesting texture. Using the fabric I also tried a method of blotting the block with the material insead of printing it on facing up, which created a ghostly shadow print. I also tried overinking my block and staping that on which created thick outlines and undefined lines. I also stamped my block in the ink, creating an impression in the ink.

Working on draft three I decided to change my approach to printing. Instead of carefully creating a template for myself to crave I decided to carve directly on the lino trying my best to mirror words and write backwards. I printed this on both tracing and cardstock as well as replicatingg my previous method of stamping my block within a thick ink layer.

At the feedback of my colleagues I decided that my final draft will be printed on fabric using an overinking technique and layered with some graphic elements similar to my original print.

Following the advice of my tutor and peers, I bound the pieces into an A4 book sitched together in a Japanese Stab Stitch.


Lauren, Andrea. Block Print: Everything You Need to Know for Printing with Lino Blocks, Rubber Blocks, Foam Sheets, and Stamp Sets (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2016).

Marshall, Sam. Linocut: A Creative Guide to Making Beautiful Prints (London: Pavilion Books, 2022).

Crawhall, Joseph. Quaint Cuts in the Chapbook Style (New York: Dover Publications, 1974).

Queneau, Raymond. Exercises in Style. Translated by Barbara Wright. 1947. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1990.

Bawden, Edward. A Book of Cuts. 1978. London: Studio Vista.

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Methods of translating – Written response

This text is a adaptation of Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image in the style of Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces:

The Poor image, its low-resolution, its pixelation. What is it to us? A frame, a boundary, a membrane between the image and its dissolution. A copy of a copy. Lost data, stripped layers, colours fading into nothing. And yet, somehow, it lives. It brings forth its messaging and shares with the viewer the rawness.

There are images we see, and there are images of the images we see, each layer adding noise, subtracting sharpness, blurring, changing. And yet they travel, unhindered by their deterioration. They move across the internet, finding new places to settle, new screens to glow on, and in their persistence, they become something else—a relic, an artefact of their own decay.

High-definition images—these are images that demand a certain space, a certain screen, a certain fidelity. They proclaim permanence. They claim a “place.” But the poor image has no such pretensions. It does not occupy; it wanders. It migrates across the global network like a nomad. The focus of an image is a status marker, the sharp akin-to-life look of it denotes to us its quality, it marks itself as a higher social standing. Being out of focus islowers one’s value as an image. 

The lower quality image is regarded as second best, lingering in our lives as a lesser being, yet it persists and shines. We share it despite its flaws, we engage it for what it really is. Some may opt to remove themselves from  the lessen image, to imagine instead of engaging with lower quality. The poor image persists, as a way of reassuring us that nothing can silence our culture, even in its deteriorated quality.

Each image is a memory, faint but enduring. Each image is a shared space, bridging disparate rooms, screens, places. Its poverty is its resilience. It resists, not by defying time, but by moving with it, changing with it. 

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Methods of translating – Research and Writing

“The Western is a genre of fiction typically set in the American frontier (commonly referred to as the “Old West” or the “Wild West”) between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, and commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, particularly the Southwestern United States, as well as Northern Mexico and Western Canada.

The frontier is depicted in Western media as a sparsely populated hostile region patrolled by cowboys, outlaws, sheriffs, and numerous other stock gunslinger characters. Western narratives often concern the gradual attempts to tame the crime-ridden American West using wider themes of justice, freedom, rugged individualism, manifest destiny, and the national history and identity of the United States. Native American populations were often portrayed as averse foes or savages.”

Western (genre) (2024) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_(genre) (Accessed: 14 November 2024).

Initially, I wanted to engage with the text I had chosen, Blood meridian by Cormac McCarthy, by translating his written work into visual pieces.

This was done by experimenting with poster concepts and a visual imagining of his characters, especially that of the most iconic ones: The Judge.

Though interesting these didn’tintrigue me as much as the actual act of translating.

This continued into me developing a Twine based translation of the same paragraph to diffrent languages which had been translated with the use of Google Translate. This tracked the destruction of the originals text meaning as you interacted with the work.

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Methods of cataloguing – Written response

The Glossary of words and concepts of importance to the text

Order of Things, Preface from An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

by M. Foucault

Key words: culture, epistemes, knowledge,, taxonomies, human sciences, historical, Classical Age, modernity, sciences, fiction

All of these words were extracted as I reflected upon the text in consideration of my own research into cataloguing. While reading many of these words were confusing to me, I knew of their general meaning but found myself confused by their use in text, so looking up the definition opened up another rabbithole of researching and understanding the core of the text and the goal of my work.

  • Aphasiac: a person suffering from a disorder that affects the ability to communicate, affected by or relating to difficulties in speaking, understanding speech, reading, or writing due to a disorder of the central nervous system
  • Borges: as in Jorge Louis Borges, Argentinian short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator contributing to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, influencing the magic realist movement 
  • Chimera: a thing which is hoped for but is illusory or impossible to achieve, taken from the Greek fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail
  • Classical Age: period of European history characterised by the flourishing Roman and Greek civilisations of the Mediterranean, highlighting a peak of European colonisation
  • Culture: social and traditional behaviours and ideas of a particular group of people
  • Delineation: the action of describing or portraying something precisely, of indicating the exact position of a boundary
  • (Chinese) Encyclopedia: book written with the intention of expanding and explaining upon a specific language (in this case Chinese)
  • Episteme: the body of ideas that determine the knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time 
  • Fabula: a traditional story told through word of mouth
  • Historical: of or concerning history or past events, relating to things that occurred before
  • Human Sciences: a branch of study which deals with people or their actions, including the social sciences and the humanities, as contrasted with the natural sciences or physical sciences
  • Incongruous: not in harmony or keeping with the surroundings or other aspects of something
  • Modernity: a modern way of thinking, working, contemporariness
  • Priori: knowledge that requires no evidence, considered to be true without being based on previous experience or observation
  • Tabula: a plate or frame on which a title or inscription is carved
  • Taxonomy: the branch of science concerned with classification, a scheme of classification
  • Utopia: an imagined/conceptual world in which everything is perfect

The definitions are taken from a collection of sources including the Oxford Languages, Merriam-Webster, Wikitionary, Collins Dictionary as well as my own knowledge of words and their meaning. This gossary can be further expanded as one proceeds in reading the text past the preface and engaging the core content.

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Methods of cataloguing – Research and Writing

For my catalogue, I decided to approach the 3dsky archive and first explore what sort of idems exist inside. I was pleasantly surprised to discover just how much furniture is stored inside which promped me to want to explore the sort of items made available.

A big part of my cataloguing was based on my own perception of wealth and of aesthetics as well as my perception of life experiences and the general enviorment of them. This included places I have been to before, I have seen but also places I imagined would capture these items.

This evolved into me experimenting with diffrent categories:

Feminine and Masculine; Kiki and Bouba; Neutral and Colour

Only one of these categories relied on actualy physical characteristics of the chairs, wheres the other two are based on my perceptions of both femininity/masulinity and of the non-arbrital assignment of names to items based on instict.

Taking these experiments I realised that I found cataloguing based on my own outlook and experience in life. Which brought me to creating a mini-catalogue with the aid of a few of my friends with similar life experiences, this catalogue aimed to create a strictly transient catalogue of sofas, organised off their visual characteristics and how we associate them with diffrent choices of lifestyle and social standing.

While as a prototype this brings fowards an interesting idea, it was brought to me in my feedback that it would be best to attempt to rely less on the text to enforce my commentary and think through on how I could develop this idea and expand upon my perception of wealth and social standing.