This is a random, transient cluster of those that shaped my path as I headed home from Granary Square one day. This collection can be catagorised under a semantic symbol: ‘limit’. ‘A limit’ is a symbol/sign, that offers agreements. The everyday path I walk is a product of numerous immediate agreements.

Language is also a product of agreements, defined by habits and limitations. The clear definitions in a dictionary somehow bring moments of ambiguity to language. As I walk through the city in my daily life, I constantly experience these moments: “What is it?” I ask myself. Then, After recalling “a noun,” there follows a brief loss of words and a struggle to piece meanings together. It’s a feeling of trying to think clearly while being pulled back by confusion.

I collect these confusions, hoping to examine these physical limits as to create a field to rethink about language and design. To begin conveniently, I spread the pictures from this collection on a A4 board. The ‘real world’ is now transformed to a set of flat graphical expression, moving from left to right, aligning with our common reading habit.
It seems to be a convention that maps depict stillness and offer a bird’s-eye view, creating illusions of seeing the real world. What is a map? After several revisions, I settled on:
‘It is a navigator, a summary, an index, a grid, vectors, a drawing, a tool and a visual reference.’ I removed all modifiers, leaving only the nouns as the most essential semantic symbols that enable us to understand something. By explaining one semantic symbol through the composition of other peer semantic symbols, language begins to weave connection between a map, the real world and myself.

Leaving the discussion of language aside, can I use the map as a visual container to hold a transient and everyday cluster of ‘limits’? How can it organize scattered semantic symbols? Can it provide a certain force to encourage re-seeing and rethinking conventions in reading, thereby prompting a reconsideration of everyday space? Can I activate active reading by creating graphical expressions of semantic symbols, while using the map as a field/index?

(another idea)While observing maps as an index to gather active readership, I was simultaneously doing writing and visual experiments to represent a semantic symbol. Similar to the earlier definition I wrote on ‘map,’ the method is to list and compose other nouns. I see these external nouns as vectors that reshape the conventional semantic frame. Although my intension is not to create more confusion, it doesn’t matter if some arises. I hope to process the texts with a casual attitude—the compostion of those external vectors/words may touch upon ideas that go beyond the limits of clear language.

Stickers are often used as a medium for spreading information and expressing identities or interets. A sticker can be quickly produced and adhered, which gives it a high visibility in everyday space and allows it to reach a broad audience within a short time. The ephemerality of a sticker makes it an immediate and fleeting communication tool.

References:

The text from Joseph Kosuth’s work ‘text/context’. It says, ‘This (thing before you) that you are looking at, reading, is part of other things, other discourses. This text, as a cluster of conventions, connects you to it even while it attempts to see itself. In order to locate itself in the real world it makes itself visible (not an instrument, a window, a narrative). Perhaps it could leave itself and talk about that ‘real world’ (that context which surrounds and includes you), but while doing so it would lose sight of itself, that materiality (if only of consciousness) which is itself part of that ‘real world’. What is this? Much of this text, like the English, you bring to it. As an object, as a text, this text has particular qualities, taste. The typeface is Journal Roman; the paper, which measures 29″x 41″, is Rives BFK white; this black is the opaque black of Advance JRP-710 Jet Screen poster ink. This text is one of forty just like it, framed in a wooden frame and behind glass, signed, numbered and dated. All part of the conventions and constraints which are as much a part of this text, this discourse, as that text which you read when you read this. as that text which you read when you read this. This text frames itself, but the discourse frames it. All those things you can’t see, can’t read, effect your seeing, your reading of this text and your seeing of this discourse. For various reasons this text is hanging here on this wall. It is here, it is in this role, as something that means something. Is that why you are still reading? This text takes nothing for granted but it’s still trapped. It wants to assert its own meaning but the meaning still seems provided in advance. Look around you, do other things, parts of a larger discourse (or perhaps the same discourse) assume more than they give, more than they really mean? Is there a discourse (cultural, social, political) which is stronger than, and experienced before, you experience this? What this means (as a text, as art) is part of that same discourse which constructs a ‘real world’. This discourse isn’t just what we see, it is that through which we see.

Diagrammatic writing by Johanna Drucker p.29

The rhetorical force of diagrammatic expression can never be reduced to absolutes, stable entities, or autonomous effects. The relational system of diagrammatic writing is always emergent and conditional, its values relative, its production of effects inexhaustibly variable and specific.