#I’d rather make a new language/framework/ability to make interactive things

[as-if-and-only-if]

my fatal flaw is that I really want to make highly interactive things but just do not vibe with any of the conceptualizations used in any game editor/UI language/markup language I’ve encountered so far :/

[superlinguo]

Conversation, cooperation and dementia

I have had more than one grandparent with dementia. This post is a series of personal reflections about the way conversation changes when someone you know well loses the ability to remember, and how linguistics has given me a framework for dealing with this. I don’t know anything about dementia other than these experiences, and there are whole sets of emotional and logistical challenges of living with dementia, or a loved one with dementia that I’m not going to address here.

Dementia presents a challenge when you’re having conversations, because the person with dementia loses the ability to track what’s been covered in a conversation - perhaps over the course of 15 minutes, perhaps sometimes in 15 seconds. This creates loops and eddies in conversational topics. It also breaks down one of the fundamental features we require in communication; the belief that our conversational partner is a cooperative one.

Cooperation is important because otherwise a well-flowing interaction is, on the surface, a series of non-sequiturs as the person speaking makes a leap and their conversational partner(s) makes the leap with them. Why are we talking about Uncle Desmond? It must be relevant to the conversation about Aunt Muriel we were just having. A person with dementia can feel from their perspective that they’re being cooperative but from your perspective they’re telling you the same story about Uncle Desmond’s first wife for the 3rd time in 15 minutes.

I’ve noticed that different family members deal with the destruction of the facade of cooperation in various ways; the helpful one tries to turn the conversation to other topics, the sanguine one lets the story play out a fourth time, the pragmatic one tells my grandmother every time that she’s already told this story and that, in fact, she has dementia. Each is trying to rebalance the illusion of cooperation, and each has varying degrees of success which I’m sure relates to my grandmother’s relationship to them, her personal condition, and everyone’s mood on any given day.

Another group we see constantly breaking the sense of cooperation is children. Kids are tiny randomness machines and keeping them on conversational tracks can be a lot of work (and work that extends beyond the years of just learning to speak grammatically). The thing with children is that we expect this from them to some extent. The challenge with conversing with a family member with dementia is that we have years, often a lifetime, of conversational rhythm with them.

The ways in which we expect conversational cooperation were broken into four main categories by Paul Grice. He called these maxims, which I always think of in the ‘guide’ sense rather than ‘rule’. They can help clarify the ways that it can feel difficult to maintain a conversation with someone who has dementia. The first that comes to mind for me is always the maxim of relation, because it does not seem relevant to return to the same story of Uncle Desmond again without new reason, and because this might lurch suddenly into a new conversational track about a cousin you haven’t talked about for 15 years. I’m sure that if I made transcripts of conversations my family have with my grandmother I’d find examples of various different ways that our conversational expectations are challenged in these small talk moments. Knowing about conversational cooperation has made me far more relaxed about approaching these conversations, in one of the more unusual ways my linguistics training has giving me a weird sense of peace about a process I have no control over.

This is where my thoughts on this topic had arrived at. I was talking to my colleague Tonya Stebbins about these experiences the other day and she introduced me to the concept of validation theory. Validation theory is an approach to interactions with people who have dementia that starts from the assumptions that you need to consider the emotive content of what they’re saying, rather than the informational content.  This allows you to engage with their emotional state. There’s an overview at this website, but I’m yet to dig into any literature on the efficacy of this approach.

To illustrate validation theory with an example I still remember from when I was very young and we were visiting my great grandmother: When a person with dementia is worried about her young grandson getting off the bus after school, even though she’s sharing these concerns with that grandson who is actually a middle-age man visiting with his own small children, the idea is to not simply point this out to her, but to attend to the underlying anxiety that has surfaced as this particular and temporally disjunct concern. Regardless of the fact that it’s been decades since her grandson stopped going to school on the bus, taking a conversational approach that spoke to her concern would be a way to address whatever anxiety she had. 

What I immediately like about validation theory is that it re-balances the onus of cooperation in the conversation. In this approach, the conversational partner without dementia is responsible for ensuring they are not failing at the maxim of relevance by attending to the implicit anxieties, worries or joys in the conversational eddies of the interaction. 

Chatting to my grandmother is both one of the most normal and most challenging things. It is as once unremarkably familiar and exhaustingly surreal. I’m grateful that a linguistic perspective on conversation has given me some coping mechanisms for navigating the more surreal moments.

See also:

Lingthusiasm episode 11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims

Hamilton, Heidi E. (2019). Language, Dementia and Meaning Making. Navigating the Challenges of Cognition and Face in Everyday Life.  Palgrave Macmillan.

[lavalamplighter]

An introduction to my Final Major Project.

When I started this project I was thinking about many great folk artists from across the world, I was struck by how despite their lack of traditional artistic skill, through diligence and a commitment to their own vision, they were able to create fascinating and intimate spaces, spaces where you are surrounded by the labour of an artist, from every corner of the room, filling up your reality with whats inside the creators brain. Howard Finster's Paradise garden, Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers, Raymond Isidore’s Maison La Picassiette, It was places like this that I wanted to mimic; The commitment and dedication of the artists is so clear, and the realisation of their vision is profound, as if their internal world inside their brain was built all around them to the best of their ability. In thinking about these spaces I came to think about why the people that made places like this started in the first place, about what surrounds someone and what is inside someone that drives them to build such incredible environments. In thinking about this I came upon two factors, face and place, face referring to the artist themselves, who they are, what they like, how they were raised, what they believe in. Place referring to where they are, what surrounds them, how much space is available, what populated the land around them? I noticed that so many artists that made massive, expansive works were from America, which is a country defined by its relationship to the vast land that it lays upon, and the freedom that it provides. I feel that artists like Leonard Knight and his “Salvation Mountain” or Dominic Espinoza’s “Colorado Castle” could never have existed anywhere but America. But applying the factors of face and place to myself and where I live was not such an easy task. Considering how to make work that both reflected myself and the environment that surrounded me was difficult, and initially my thinking was quite basic, I felt that the framework of building a folk art style installation filled with my own improvised and loose style of drawing would be enough, but a couple things steered me away from this type of thinking. For one, the moment I pitched this project to multiple people they would recommend Steven Wright’s “house of dreams” which although I have never visited seems amazing, so he was also basically doing what I wanted to do but on a much larger scale and with the attention to detail and time that I feel a project like that really deserves, naturally it slightly put me off my own smaller version of the same project, similarly to me Steven Wright feels that he is inspired by great outsider artists across the world rather than being an outsider artist himself. So basically someone was doing what I’d thought of but bigger down the street, so I decided to pivot my idea. Another thing that turned me off from my original concept was that I felt it was frivolous to base a project purely on my own improvisation and whatever took my fancy at any given moment to draw, I wanted to try to make something that had a meaning and a purpose that people could really sink their teeth into and hopefully find some substance within. It took me a while to find my legs using this approach, and the first few paintings of the project reflect that in my opinion. They in many ways feel underdeveloped to me. However given the time constraints I didn't have time to redo them (However I did give them some upgrades and tweaks later on.) In a way it feels like a testament to the growing and changing nature of the piece as I was making it, however in another they slightly annoy me and I wish I could replace them with paintings I really felt pulled their weight in the greater composition and helped convey the overall message better. In thinking about America and folk art I couldn't help but start to think about Basquiat and how he took the language of American folk art, which at the time was even more sidelined and unacknowledged than it is now and managed to apply that aesthetic and visual language to his own life and experiences living in New York. I considered who Basquiat was and where he was, living in a city so similar to mine, filled with galleries and some of the most valuable and esteemed art from across the world, yet also teeming with street art and creativity, creeping from every wall and surface. I started thinking about graffiti as a form of outsider/folk art, and how Basquiat used his own tag Samo earlier in his career, and how already in the late 70s and early 80s he was already deconstructing the iconography and language of tagging and graffiti. I thought about how his contemporary Keith Haring did a similar thing with his subway art series. How in bringing art into a public space and allowing the contrast of his art and its grimy surroundings added meaning into the art itself, turning the subway into a giant gallery for his own installations. I personally feel like New York and London are similar cities in many ways, both are predominantly Victorian and both are economic and cultural capitals of the world. So I felt that these artists' responses to both folk art and the art around them would be a useful guideline for making my own work. Using these guidelines I started to steer the work to be more about my own relationship with the city, the art that peppers it and how I interact with it, how the buildings feel around me, how the city changes, where it started, and how it works. The Manhattan grid is obvious and rigidly set, but London's grid is elaborate and winding, the system it adheres to is difficult to understand, but many say that the entire city of London is based upon the dimensions of London bricks, that each room in most Victorian houses is measured around the dimensions of these bricks, and that each block of houses is also based on the dimension of these bricks, this turns London into a kind of synecdoche where each small piece reflects upon the whole, and the whole reflects on every small piece. London is also an ancient city, people have been living by this river for thousands of years. London is a fantasy as much as it is a place, you can feel the history all around you hidden in small details, ready to be uncovered and understood better. I wanted to make work that reflected upon the history of London, the present and the future, I wanted to make a piece of art that reflected on this incredible wealth of culture. The work itself is constructed in this way, I used brightly coloured spray paint and paint markers to reflect graffiti, which I believe to be the purest folk art of the modern era, I respect local taggers like Glumer and 10foot much more than a lot of mainstream artists, I really look up to their commitment to an artistic statement so simple as writing your own name. I think it’s incredibly admirable. I thought that using bright spray paint on modroc would create interesting uneven surfaces, full of holes that spray paint could seep into and form either smooth plateaus of paint or rough, uneven areas, making a surface that would be interesting to draw on. I also felt that making surfaces like these would add a sculptural aspect to the work, although I had downsized from my idea of building a full tent of paintings I still wanted to make something that people could walk around and observe from multiple angles. I also felt that the surfaces had a modern-primitive feeling, like I was merging the street art of now with Celtic art of long ago to form a mashed up artifact from both the past and the future. I really felt that the work started to take shape after I started using stippling on the paintings more, The small spots helped accentuate the texture of the modroc, allowing you to see the unevenness of the surface even better, as you could see how each individual dot was shaped by the part of the surface it was on, whether it be a smooth area or a rough one. I was also heavily inspired by community murals all around south London. I love these places and it always makes me happy to see a community mural. They're such an honest and unpretentious form of art. I especially love seeing them at adventure playgrounds, which are another of London’s unique forms of folk art, I wanted to use that sort of oblique story telling you see in these murals in my own art, but use it to tell stories about me and my own relationship to the city around me.