#which for me is linguistics and how languages work on a fundamental level and especially how they change over time

[hunxi-after-hours]

Hi Hunxi!!🥰 I just finished the first The Poppy War book and wanted to ask your opinion about something. Tho I loved it — exhilarating action, drug-fueled avatar assumption, rekindled ancestral rage and all — one thing bothered me a lot. As a native Chinese speaker (tho studying in the states, yay) I instinctively recognized much of the historical analogues + literary references, which made it all the more offputting to see place and people names like Nikara, Khurdalain, Venka & Kesegi. (1/2)

These names seem insanely incongruous with the Chinese landscape depicted, especially when contrasted with the 蘇妲己, 姜子牙, 哪吒, Fang Runin and other more obviously/culturally mandarin ones. Some of them (ex. Nikara and Kesegi) even sound vaguely Japanese which is so ironic given the history the book draws on. I’m not trying to nitpick but they literally kept pulling me out of the reading experience. Just wondered whether you had any thoughts on that? Hope you have a great 2023💕 (2/2)

hi anon! this is a fascinating question, because R.F. Kuang's deliberate decision to make the naming conventions in The Poppy War trilogy inconsistent (i.e. rather than all Mandarin-derived, or all made up) actually has a lot of layers of thought and craft to it on a metafictional level that tbh I never thought of until this ask??

Kuang has made no secret of the fact that the trilogy places 20th century Chinese history in a Song Dynasty-esque setting; her characters have direct counterparts in Chinese history, literature, and culture (most notably, Fang Runin being a reception of Mao Zedong). that being said, despite the fairly obvious expies in the world of The Poppy War (Nikara for China, Hesperia for the UK, etc etc), the series still remains fundamentally secondary-world fantasy

the genre distinction is important here: R.F. Kuang deliberately chose to write secondary-world fantasy, not historical fantasy. maybe she didn't want to deal with research and historical accuracy (unlikely, given her methodology in Babel). maybe she wanted to dig her hands into Song Dynasty aesthetics (extremely valid of her). maybe she wanted to be inspired by history but not bound to it, as remixing historical events into secondary-world fantasy reads differently from rewriting historical events and changing the course of history. maybe situating the violence and the war crimes of the narrative in a secondary world was critical for her writing process (she has, I believe, mentioned in interviews how in many ways The Poppy War was born out of her negotiating generational trauma and academic research). I don't know for sure! she might've said so in an interview, maybe not. the point is, The Poppy War trilogy is secondary-world fantasy, and that matters on a fictional and metafictional level

if you'll let me, er, quote myself here for a bit:

Particularly in the Chinese tradition, there are three thousand years of thinkers, philosophers, essayists, poets, novelists, and satirists that contributed to the culture. There are schools of thought that metastasize and spill over into squabbling branches that snipe at each other for subsequent centuries; there are critics and scholars and libraries full of annotations buried in intertextual commentary. Faced with this unwieldy, ponderous inheritance, each author working with the Chinese tradition has to choose—how much of the tradition will they lay claim to, to reimagine and reinvent?

Language, history, and culture are so inextricably bound together in any culture or civilization that borrowing a single element from the Chinese tradition—worldbuilding, literary references, character names, genre tropes—necessarily involves translation both figurative and literal. On a linguistic level, how do you render terms that lack an English counterpart? On a cultural level, how do you do justice to the tiny details and customs that form the fabric of a familiar-unfamiliar world? For secondary-world silkpunk like Ken Liu’s epic trilogy The Dandelion Dynasty, Liu files off the serial numbers on ancient Chinese schools of thought, pitting Ruism, Daoism, and Legalism against each other under different names (cheekily, he renames the Confucius figure “Kon Fiji” and comments on his stuffy rigidity), while Chinese poems such as Liu Bang’s 《大风歌》 Da Feng Ge / Song of Great Wind cameo in his text as the lyrics of “mournful old Cocru folk tune[s].” Layered through translation and one degree removed from their original sources, Liu’s reception of the Chinese tradition takes the historical Chu-Han contention as a springboard into a secondary-world fantasy epic that veers sharply away from its historical analog by the second book.

In contrast, R.F. Kuang calls directly upon classical thinkers and characters by name in The Poppy War. Though likewise set in a fantastic secondary world, The Poppy War sees its protagonists studying recognizable Chinese classical thinkers like Zhuangzi and Sunzi in school, while legendary figures like Su Daji and Jiang Ziya from 《封神演义》 Feng Shen Yan Yi / Investiture of the Gods (a 16th century Ming Dynasty novel) walk the earth as unspeakably powerful shamans. In doing so, Kuang angles her trilogy towards an explosive confrontation between history and modernity, science and magic, the rigidity of a traditional past and the mutability of a devastating future.

so! while The Poppy War clearly and lovingly borrows aspects of its worldbuilding and construction from Chinese history, literature, and culture, I think R.F. Kuang’s decisions to break away from, for lack of better phrasing, making the world “too authentically Chinese” in the series is critical to the text’s role as a diasporic reception of Chinese history, literature, and culture. the things that are familiar are familiar. the things that are unfamiliar are deliberately unfamiliar. the story may resemble Chinese history, but it is not Chinese history

being able to make this distinction frees Kuang to do much more exploration in the series, both in terms of following the implications of intensely destructive, magical drug-powered warfare as well as experimenting with “what if” scenarios that are absent from or adjacent to actual 20th century Chinese history. I don’t think it’s an accident that the characters and names that are most distinctively Chinese (Su Daji, Jiang Ziya, and to an extent Nezha) are the ones that are most associated with history, tradition, an older world order. meanwhile, characters with “less Chinese” names (Chen Kitay and Fang Runin, since in no conceivable variation of Chinese I know would “Runin” ever be abbreviated as “Rin” yet here we are) are the young generation, the receivers and remixers and destroyers and recreators of the very traditional culture that Kuang borrows for her worldbuilding. Kitay, Rin, and Nezha in the narrative inherit the Chinese literary and historical tradition, and over the course of the trilogy, they rewrite it in blood as Nikara limps into the modern day

I also think it’s worthwhile to point out that Kuang’s Nikara — fantasy China if you will — is very conscious of its diversity and colorism. colorism deeply shapes Rin’s childhood and resentment towards the world around her; other characters like Altan Trengsin and Chaghan Suren are deliberately and distinctively not Han. in diversifying the naming of The Poppy War world, Kuang destabilizes the image of a monolithic, Han-only (fantasy) China in a powerfully receptive, diasporic, and postcolonial manner

all of which is to say: I agree with you! the naming definitely pulled me out of the narrative when I was reading it too, but I think the choice to do so was intentional on R.F. Kuang’s part, since examining the naming as a level of worldbuilding and craft yields a lot of metafictional nuance and value

[wickymicky]

is it bad or wrong to think that yoohyeon might have adhd? like idk it’s probably not great to headcanon things like that about a real person, idk... but... i kinda think she might and that just makes me happy and makes me feel good about myself so idk. im not actually gonna like ask her or believe that it’s true, i’m just gonna notice little things she does that i also do, and smile about those things. 

[meichenxi]

Dear ‘White guy speaks perfect X and shocks Y!’ language YouTubers: STOP

A rant about every single fucking video by Xiaomanyc and similar YouTubers all titled things like CLUELESS WHITE GUY/GIRL LEARNS [INSERT NON-WHITE LANGUAGE HERE] AND SHOCKS [INSERT PLACE].

Disclaimer: I am white British, and I am also very often a moron. I'm trying to inform myself more, and would like to learn. So let me know if there is anything I should change, anything I’ve got wrong or any terminology I can change. 

So this evening I opened YouTube to get some quality Hikaru no Go content, and saw yet another video recommended to me about Xiaomanyc called Clueless white guy orders in perfect Chinese, shocks patrons and staff!!!!

Really? Really. Ok, his Chinese certainly is good - but it isn't great. And it isn’t necessarily any better than people I've seen in the higher levels of a class at university who have spent some time in China. It's solidly intermediate. That's not an insult - that level of Chinese is hard to attain, and definitely worth celebrating!! Hell, I celebrate every new word I learn. But while it may be unusual, it doesn't forgive the clickbait type videos like 'White guy speaks perfect Chinese and wows [insert place]'. 

These kind of clickbait titles rest on a number of assumptions. Before I say any more, I just want to make a note about terminology. Note that ’majority’ and ‘minority’ are not necessarily helpful labels, because they imply both a) a higher number of speakers in a certain place, and b) socially prestigious in some way. Of course a language like standard Mandarin is not a minority in China, but it might be in Germany. Talking about ‘minority’ languages that have a large speaker base outside of the country, like Chinese, is also not the same as talking about languages that have been systematically surpressed by a colonising, dominant language in their original communities, like indigenous languages. In many communities, especially in colonial and post-colonial situations, the language spoken by the majority is not one of prestige at all. Or some languages may be prestigious and expected in oral contexts, but not written - and so on. I use these terms here as best I can, but don't expect them to work 100% of the time.

So let’s unpack these assumptions a little. 

1) That there is something inherently more ‘worthy’ in somebody who learns languages because they want to, rather than because they have to: and that, correspondingly, the people who want to are white (spoilers: much of Europe is multilingual, and white immigrants in majority white countries also exist, as well as discrimination against them e.g. Polish people in the UK), and that those who have to learn are not (spoilers: really? There are plenty of non-white monolinguals who are either happy being monolingual, don’t have access to learning, or don’t have to learn another language but are interested in it).

2) That everybody from a certain background automatically speaks all ‘those’ languages already, or that childhood multilingualism is a free pass - spoilers, it isn’t. Achieving high levels of fluency in multiple languages is hard, especially for languages with different writing systems, because no matter how perfect your upbringing, you’re still ultimately exposed to it maximum 50% of the time of monolingual speakers. Realistically, most people get far less exposure than 50% in any of their languages. Also, situations of multilingualism in many parts of the world are far more complex than home language / social language. You might speak one language with your father and his father, another with your mother and her family, another in the community, and another at school. Which one is your native language then? Monolinguals tell horror stories of ‘both cups half empty’ scenarios, but come on - how on earth do you expect a person to have the same size vocabulary in a language they hear only 25% of the time? Also, languages are spoken in different domains, to different people, in different social situations: just because someone hears Farsi at home doesn’t mean they can give a talk on the filing system at their local library. If something is outside of a multilingual person’s langauge domain, they might have to learn the vocabulary for it just like monolinguals. There’s no such thing as the ‘perfect bilingual’. 

3) That learning another language imperfectly for leisure is laudable, but learning one imperfectly for work or survival is not. If you’re a speaker of a minority language, learning another language is necessary, ‘just what you have to do’, and if you don’t do it ‘properly’, that’s because of your lack of intelligence / laziness etc. It’s cool for the seconday school student to speak a bit of bad Japanese, but not so cool for the Indian guy who runs her favourite restaurant in Tokyo. 

4) That majority speakers learning a minority language is somehow an act of surprising benevolence that should not go unrewarded. Languages are intrinsically tied up with identity - and access to them may not be a right, but a gift. Don’t assume that because you get a good reception with some speakers of one language that speakers of another will be grateful you’re learning their language, or that everyone will react the same. One of the reasons these videos are possible at all is that many Chinese speakers, in my experience, are incredibly welcoming and enthusiastic to non-natives learning Chinese. Some languages and linguistic groups have been so heavily persecuted that imagining such thing as an ‘apolitical’ language learner is a fundamental misunderstanding of the context in which the language is spoken, and essentially an impossibility when the act of speaking claims ownership to a group. Many people will not want you to learn their language, because it has been suppressed for hundreds of years - it’s theirs, not yours. We respect that. Whilst it’s great to learn a minority language, don’t do it for the YouTube likes - do it because you’re genuinely interested in the language, people, culture and history. We don’t deserve anything special for having done so. 

5) That speaking a ‘foreign’ (i.e. culturally impressive / prestigious) language is much more impressive and socially acceptable than speaking a heritage language, home language or indigenous language. There are harmful language policies all around the world that simultaneously encourage the learning of ‘educational’ languages like Spanish, and at the same time forbid the use of the child’s mother tongue in class. And many non-majority languages are not foreign at all - they were spoken here, wherever you are, before English or Spanish or Russian or, yes, standard Mandarin Chinese. Policies that encourage standardised testing in English from a very young age like the ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy in the US disproportionately affect indigenous communities that are trying to revitalise their language against overwhelming callousness and cruelty - they expect bilingual children to attain the same level of English as a monolingual in first grade, which in an immersion school, they obviously won’t (and shouldn’t - they’ll get enough exposure to English as they grow up to make it not matter later down the line). But if the schools want funding, their kids have to pass those tests. 

There’s more to cover - that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Some people’s response to these videos and why the titles are ‘wrong’ would be: does it matter that he's white? Shouldn't it just be 'second language learner speaks perfect Chinese'? This is the same sort of attitude as ‘I don’t see race’. I think it does matter that he is white - because communities of many languages around the world are so used to them having to learn a second language and colonial powers not bothering to learn theirs. You wouldn't get the same reactions in these videos if he were Asian American but grew up speaking / hearing no Chinese - because then it would be expected. You also wouldn't get the same reaction if he were an immigrant in a Chinese-speaking community from somewhere else in Asia.

It also implies that all white people = monolingual Americans with no interest in other cultures. While we all are complacent and complicit in failing to educate ourselves about the effects of historical and modern colonialism, titles like this perpetuate a very harmful stereotype - and I don't mean harmful as in 'poor Xiaomanyc', but harmful in that it suggests that this attitude is ok, it's part of 'being white', and therefore doesn't need to change. The reaction when someone doesn't engage with other cultures and isn't willing to learn about them shouldn't be 'lmao classic white guy'. That not only puts the subject in a group with other 'classic white guys', but puts a nice acceptable label on what really is privilege, a lack of curiosity, ignorance, and the opportunity (which most non-white people don't have) to have everything you learn in school and university be about you. If you're ignorant - ok. We are all about many things. But you don't have any excuse not to educate yourself. The 'foreigner experience' that white people get in places like China is not the same as immigrants in a predominantly monolingual, predominantly white English speaking area. As we can see in those kind of videos, white foreigners may be stared at, but ultimately enjoy huge privilege in many places around the world. It's not the same. 

It also ignores, well, essentially the whole of Europe outside the UK and Ireland and many other places around the globe, where multilingualism is incredibly common - and where the racial dichotomy commonly heard in America isn't quite appropriate, or an oversimplification of many complex ethnic/national/racial/religious/linguistic etc factors that all influence discrimination and privilege. Actually many 'white guys' in Europe and places all around the world speak four or five languages to get by - some in highly privileged upbringings and school systems, yes, but others because they have grown up in a border town, or because they are immigrants and want to give their children a better start than they did, or because they want to work abroad and send home money. Many, like people all around the world, don't get a chance to learn to read and write their first language or dialect, which is considered 'lesser' than the majority language (French, Russian, English etc); many people, like Gaelic speakers in Scotland or speakers of Basque in France, have faced historical persecution and have been denied opportunities for speaking their mother tongue. My mother was beaten and my grandparents denied jobs for being Gaelic speakers. They are white, and they have benefited from being white in lots of other ways - but their linguistic experience is light-years from Xiaomanyc's. 

It isn't 'white' to be surprised at a white person speaking another language - it's just ignorant. But the two ARE correlated, because who in modern America can afford to go through twenty one years and still be ignorant? People who have never had to learn a second language; people who have always had everybody adapt to THEIR linguistic needs, and not the other way around. People who have had all media, all books, centred around people who look like them and speak like them. And even in America, that's not just 'white' - that's specifically white (often middle class) English monolinguals.

I'm not saying everybody who doesn't speak a language should feel guilty for not learning one ( it's understandably not the priority for everyone - economic reasons, family, only so many hours in the day - there are plenty of reasons why language learning when you don’t have to is also not accessible to everyone).  But be aware of the double standards we have as a society towards other socially/racially/religiously disadvantaged groups versus white college grads. You can't demonise one whilst lauding the other. 

To all language YouTubers - do yourself a favour, and stop doing this. Your skills are impressive - that's enough. 

 tldr; clickbait titles like this rely on double standards and perpetuate harmful ideas - don't write them, and let your own language skills do the talking please.

[bestworstcase]

How'd you learn so much about languages, if you don't mind me asking? I've always wanted to try my hand at building a language of my own, but never had even the faintest clue of where to start and how to do it correctly

i never mind questions!!

anyway, i don’t know a lot about languages, really. i know enough to leverage a very powerful conlang-building tool to get a result that feels Real Enough For Fantasy, which is very different from having true expertise in linguistics, which are very complicated and very confusing. i have wikipedia-level knowledge, but as a writer that’s really all you need, though of course genuine expertise or experience is always helpful.

some tips for expanding your general knowledge:

familiarize yourself with IPA notation, phonemes, and basic phonological concepts — vulgarlang actually has a decent basic rundown of this here and an IPA chart with audio here. this is important because the first thing you need to know about a language is what phonemes it uses.

pick a language. look it up on wikipedia. read the whole article, and look up any terms you don’t understand. pay attention not just to the discussions of syntax, morphology, spelling, phonology, but also to any information about the historical and cultural context of the language itself. culture is intrinsically linked to language, and this is something to keep in the back of your mind when you’re building a conlang. repeat this step frequently, with many different languages.

study the grammar of any languages you speak. this is especially important if you are a native english speaker who grew up in the united states in the last couple decades, because that means you probably weren’t taught english grammar in school beyond the absolute basics. a good way to strengthen your understanding of grammar in that case is actually to go looking for ESL resources, like this.

the goal here isn’t to become An Expert but rather to just get yourself a basic grasp of the fundamental building blocks that make up a language, so you can take them apart and put them back together in a naturalistic way.

now as for the actual process of conlanging, that goes basically like this:

#1: decide on phonemes and orthography, ie what the sounds are and how they are spelled. for example, here’s the consonants saporian uses (phonetic IPA on top, spelling on bottom)

k | χ | d | ð | ʝ | x | l | m | n | p | ɾ | s | ɕ | ʃ | t | θ | z | ʑ | ʒ c | ch| d | dh| gh| h | l | m | n | p | r | s | ś | sh| t | th| z | ź | zh

and there’s the broad vowels (same deal): 

a | ɑ | ʏ | ɪ | ɔ a | ā | ē | ī | o

and the slender vowels: 

æ| ɛ | i | eɪ̯ a | e | i | ae/ay

(*saporian has something called vowel harmony, which is where you have two classes of vowels that must match within a word. so in saporian every word is either broad, with broad vowels, or slender, and all prefixes/suffixes have a broad and slender version, there’s rules for compounding mismatched words etc. etc.)

(**eɪ̯ is a diphthong and it makes the sound “ay” as in “day.” you can find every other character here on an IPA chart if you’re interested in the pronunciation.) 

at this stage you also want to decide what, if any, illegal combinations there are: are there sounds that are never allowed to go together in a word? for example, in saporian, you can’t have two fricatives in a row [fricatives being ch, dh, gh, h, s, ś, sh, th, z, ź, zh]. 

and finally, what kind of sound changes are there? for example in saporian, the phoneme “k” changes into a “χ” (c→ch) at the end of a word and when it occurs in front of a broad vowel other than ɔ (o) or the slender vowels ɛ and i. or as another example, in english the letter “c” turns from a k into an s if it’s before the letter e or i. [i think in general with a conlang, you should apply sound change rules with an eye towards making things easier to pronounce]

this all gives you the basic “sound” of a language. again using saporian as an example—notice how many of the consonants here are fricatives? that makes saporian a very sibilant, somewhat phlegmy language. 

#2: decide on word structure. what sounds and combinations of sounds tend to occur at the beginning of words? in the middle? at the end? does your language have a consistent stress pattern and if so what is it (and if not, does stress encode lexical meaning—are there words that are otherwise identical but have different meanings based on where they’re stressed? eg in saporian—cathay (cathAY) is the god of the dead, but cáthay (CATHay) is the number five.) 

#3: based on all this, start creating words. [or pop these settings into vulgarlang and let it generate words for you.] if you’re creating words by hand, think about things like shared etymological roots and how a given word can be morphed into other, related words, like this: 

Turn a Verb into an Adjective resulting from the Verb to torture → tortured Remove the infinitive ending. Shift the vowels (broad ↔ slender). Turn a Verb into an Adjective causing the Verb to torture → torturous Remove the infinitive ending. Shift the vowels. Append the appropriate suffix (-ɪʃ or -iʃ). Turn a Verb into a Noun that is the act of the Verb to torture → torture Remove the infinitive ending. Turn a Verb into a Noun that is the product of the Verb to torture → trauma Remove the infinitive ending. Append the appropriate suffix (-ɑn or -æn). Turn a Verb into a Noun that is doing the Verb to torture → torturer Remove the infinitive ending. Append the appropriate suffix (-aɾ or -eɪ̯ɾ).

this part is important because it produces a language that feels cohesive and like something that could have developed naturally over time. words that are related to each other should sound similar to each other. if you’re using vulgarlang you can do this part automatically by setting up affixes, which are pretty impressively robust in terms of what you can do with a bit of regex and basic understanding of how if/then/else statements:

VERB.TO.PRODUCT.NOUN = IF (ɪʝ)# THEN (ɪʝ) > ɑn IF (iɾ)# THEN (iɾ) > æn IF (æm)# THEN (æm) > æn IF (eɪ̯)# THEN eɪ̯ >> æn IF (i|ɛ|æ)# THEN V >> æn IF (i|ɛ|æ) THEN -æn IF (a|ɔ|ɪ|ʏ|ɑ)# THEN V >> ɑn IF (a|ɔ|ɪ|ʏ|ɑ) THEN -ɑn "to torture → torture Remove the infinitive ending. Append the appropriate suffix (-ɑn or -æn).

#4: at this stage you also want to start thinking about grammar. what is the basic word order—subject-verb-object, like in english? VSO? OSV? SOV?—and what about other parts of speech? do adjectives come before or after the nouns they modify? what about adverbs? 

how does your language do adpositions—are they prepositions (like in english) or postpositions, or is that meaning conveyed in other ways (eg through verb conjugation, noun case, or affixes?) 

how do you create questions? how do you negate a phrase? how does counting work? how do you encode temporal or spatial meaning? 

how does noun declension work in your language, and how many different noun cases are there? what about verb conjugation—do you have just one conjugation for your basic tenses, or does additional information get encoded in a conjugated verb (ie english i ran, you ran, he ran, we ran, you all ran, they ran, vs german ich lief, du liefst, er lief, wir liefen, ihr lieft, sie/Sie liefen). how are plurals created? 

does your language have an informal and formal you? and what other pronouns are there? (for example, saporian has four gendered third person pronouns: za (she), śa (he), źa (neuter), and ān (it)—but only one “you,” sā (singular) and dhām (plural), because formality/respect is encoded through different means.) 

#5: finally, what are some exceptions to the rules? all real languages have them. are there irregular verbs, and if so how are they conjugated? are there situations in which morphological or phonological rules don’t apply? i would keep this part pretty simple, but do try to work in a small handful of exceptions because it does make a conlang feel a lot more real.

for example: 

in saporian, most adverbs begin with the prefix ɕʏ- (śē-) or ɕɛ- (śe-), but a handful [those beginning with any vowel or x (h), unless they are derived from an adjective] do not. so āram (now) and hagh (maybe/perhaps) are adverbs that lack the prefix.

and with most affixes, the prefix or suffix replaces the vowel at the beginning or end of the word being affixed, but the two honorific prefixes [ʒa- (zha-) or ʒæ- (zha-), kɾʏ- (crē-) or kɾɛ- (cre-)] instead lose their vowels if they’re being affixed to a word that begins with a vowel. 

and i’ve been kicking around ideas for a handful of irregular verbs that don’t end with the three standard infinitive endings [-ɪʝ (-īgh), iɾ (-ir), or -æm (-am)] and are conjugated differently but i haven’t settled on precisely how yet so For Now those irregular verbs still take the standard conjugation suffixes. 

[ailinaline]

The Untamed: unsorted

Well... I am nothing, if not eccentric, after all. Why not publish a huge post all of a sudden? :)

The Untamed (СQL) is an abyss, and I am still falling, grasping at some scattered thoughts... that tend to arrange themselves in equally chaotic blocks of thoughts, which, in turn, multiply questions successfully.

Spoilers ahead, I guess...

I.

The timeline of СQL is more than a little blurry, and when I try to calculate, how old Wei Ying was, when he died, I come up with the sorrowful conclusion he couldn’t be more that 21, probably younger. Which, in turn, means that the post-time-skip Sizhui is, actually, of the same age or even older than Wei Ying and Lan Wangji were, when they did a lot of things I honestly can’t imagine the new generation pulling off, even physically/magically, let alone psychologically (although I wouldn’t go as far as to call young LWJ and WWX mature - they clearly were not, and that was a huge part of the tragedy foundation, in my opinion). The young disciples are referred to as ‘children’, and they truly are. Compared to 16-17 year old LWJ and WWX, they are very, very young, inexperienced and not especially capable – while still being quite skilled and smart. And it’s both fabulous and painful to watch. Fabulous because it’s a very vivid and authentic demonstration of how exceptionally gifted LWJ and WWX are (and were); and painful because, unfortunately, not all of their greatness comes just from inborn talents.

II.

I am easily charmed by languages, but СQL, being the third Chinese dorama I have ever watched, is still the first one to so profusely tempt me to learn Chinese – in order to translate the songs and to understand the subtleties of the dialogues.

III.

I can’t get rid of the impression that the concept of rules/order breaking and punishment/atonement is fundamental for СQL (and its world). As far as I am aware, the Chinese culture does tend to be quite severe in this regard, but right now I am considering the symbolic layer of the process rather than the harm/good/efficiency of any particular method.  And I wonder, whether I am imagining things or Wangji’s history of ‘transgressions’ and punishments within his sect is really openly symbolic and not merely coincidental.

My interpretation certainly lacks some special cultural insight because I can’t help being of European origin, so I read all the codes as a European would, first, and only then make an attempt to switch lenses and decipher the message, taking into account my scarce knowledge of the Chinese (and Asian) culture.

And yet...

The first time (drinking) Wangji is not only completely innocent, but also a ‘victim’ of Wei Ying’s careless (and questionable) mischief. They share the punishment (and we encounter the number 300, by the way), but Wangji is obviously (and rather fiercely) on his own here, and evidently by choice, despite Wei Ying’s sincere efforts first to exclude and then to include him. Wangji, just as obviously, truly believes he deserves the punishment – not for drinking as such, I think, but for lowering his guard and being not attentive enough: internally, he substitutes one transgression with another, and the equation works for him (actually, it might be unfair, but quite fortunate for their future relationship that Wangji blames himself or, at least, blames himself more than Wei Ying). To put it in a nutshell, for Wangji, the system and order are intact and non-contradictory: he is understandably upset, even angry, but hardly shaken, and simply intends to do better than that in the future, so to say. It’s hard to speculate, if this is Wangji’s most unpleasant experience so far or not, but in any case, the psychological pressure is minimal and reproach is rather mild (and I am really surprised, Lan Xichen didn’t find all that story highly suspicious… or was it his indirect method of showing WWX that he hadn’t been told on?..)

The copying of the rules happens after a considerable amount of… experience, if not time. And the transgression is not specified, but hinted at very heavily. I also wonder, if Lan Qiren realized an additional message he conveyed through his choice as well as through his general treatment of his nephew during that meeting: a strict reminder that, a war hero or not, LWJ is still too young to have an opinion. Wangji accepts the book of rules reverently, accepts the punishment… the word, that springs to mind is ‘habitually’: he doesn’t disregard it, per se, he doesn’t devalue the fact his uncle is not happy with him, he still wants to do better, but… there are things of greater importance to him now, and LWJ is so focused on them that he makes the request about the restricted books at the least suitable moment, really. (And I believe this dismissal does cut him rather deep.) The system still works, but the seed of the conflict is already planted.

The third episode seems pivotal in itself: we actually don’t know, what the punishment for letting WWX and the Wens go was, except for having to kneel, while being lectured, but this time this is a result of a conscious choice to do something that definitely wouldn’t be approved. And I can’t remember a single second of the screen-time, when Wangji would look repentant: conflicted, upset, slapped (when Lan Qiren mentions his mother), stressed (his uncle uses some pretty cruel techniques that border on manipulation, to my mind), but not sorry at all – not for letting the fugitives go, at least.  And comparing the shades of Wangji’s silence here and on the previous occasion, this one seems somehow more determined. And closed-off. And there is no intention to do better, in regard to this transgression: the alternative he is being pushed to is unacceptable.

Kneeling again, for the whole day, in the cold, lifting a… what is it, as a matter of fact? It does look like a slightly smaller version of ‘the discipline whip’ we’ll see later, and if it is really so, then it’s beyond prophetic symbolic – it looks more like a promise on Lan Qiren’s part. :/ Anyway, my impression is that, for the first time in the series, LWJ is actively absent from the scene of his own punishment: he doesn’t reflect on it (I think he expected something like that), he also doesn’t mentally substitute one transgression with another to restore the balance (his inability to help Wei Ying is not something to atone for by kneeling). He simply endures. And thinks. And feels. Just not what he is expected and obliged to be thinking and feeling at the moment. And through all of this, Wangji is utterly, hopelessly and stoically alone and unaccepted. His concerns have been dismissed and care rejected by Wei Ying. His actions and decisions have been castigated by a significant authority figure (whom he loves and respects). If I am not mistaken, in the special edition Wangji’s loss-and-loneliness are somewhat artificially heightened through the pseudo-contrast because his moments are mixed with the moments of Wei Ying’s drinking with his new family, who values and appreciates him. (In reality their situations are just the same: they are both in anguish and feel helpless to change things they wish to change.) And, a cherry on top: we don’t know, what has been said initially, and by whom, however, we see that Wangji is released not by his uncle, but by some adept (or disciple). It might be a normal procedure, but it completes the picture of being unequivocally separated from any supportive figure and hints at a lack of closure, in a way, as there was no forgivenes-and-reconnection after the punishment.  

I am struggling to verbalize, why exactly, but to me, this scene is, in a sense, more bitter than the next one, despite the circumstances.

During the next punishment Wangji is as actively present as he was absent during the previous one. And if then he was frozen in sadness, now he is all fire (fueled by grief, and guilt, and fury, and despair, yes, but fire, nonetheless). And the system and order get burned down: what Wangji re-builds during his seclusion is his very own set of rules. They do coincide with the Gusu Lan set, but not fully. And this is a point of no return because, filtered through Wangji’s own system of values, now they are more than just the elders’ lessons learned and tested – they are the only valid reference point for recognizing transgressions and ‘living with no regrets’.

(On another level, I am more than a little puzzled by several details here:

1) linguistics: do they really call this thing a discipline ‘whip’ in Chinese?

2) cultural message: as literally nothing could get in the way of filming a beating with an actual whip, the type of instrument has to make some sense, doesn’t it? (For now, I can’t think of any reason to choose this tool, though. Except the number 300 as 300 lashes are hardly survivable, even with a golden core.)

3) application: I can understand, why Wangji has his shirt on (although this is a more dangerous and torturous option: such a thin layer is no protection at all, but it will be hell to clean the wounds afterwards), but why is his hair down his back like that?..

4) consequences: the scarring looks rather odd, considering. (And again: it was definitely not a problem to paint whatever they had to, so – why?)

The only (and vague) explanation I can come up with is that the type and form of the tool is not important at all: it’s the intent and sentence that count, so the wounds and pain would be the same, even if the instrument looked like a rod or a cane. (Still doesn’t explain the hair, though.) And as for the scars, perhaps, not all of them have to stay forever, especially if the cultivator is very strong.

Well, no: unsatisfactory...)

IV.

I wonder... My first impression after watching the scene, where Lan Wangji cuts off Jin Guangyao’s  arm, was that he was actually saving him from Baxia, separating Guangyao from the mark on his hand. And the only reason, why the spirit of the sword attacks Jin Ling next, are the drops of the bad/damned blood on the boy’s shoulder. But after the special edition I am not so sure.

V.

Lacunae and plotholes (or what I subjectively perceive as such) are extremely challenging and thought-provoking in this series. Right now, I wonder about the Wens: Wen Qing clearly stated she had asked one of the clansmen to look after WWX, so not all of them were going to surrender. Could it be that they were attacked at the Burial Mounds, when seeing the siblings off, and taken away by force?

...Enough. For now.

[orihara-infobroker]

Hobbies and Criticism

I sat on this when it happened, and again yesterday but it’s something I do want to speak about because I’ve seen it happen often enough that it merits discussion. There are a few separate elements here and I will try to be cohesive in stringing them together.

It’s long so it’s going under a cut... Sorrynotsorry XD

On Unsolicited Criticism

Fan art and fan fiction are, fundamentally, hobbies. I am not addressing commissions here. I am talking about artists who create their art out of their own desire to make something based on whatever inspired them. Some people love sharing that art with the world. Some people don’t. They are not doing so because they are being paid for their work but because they want to create something out of personal love for it. Those who share it with the world are not obligated to. It is a gift. A gift, by virtue of the internet, that you are not required to accept or like - certainly I don’t like every fanfiction written about my fave pair. In fact I don’t like most of them. It is still a gift, however and the mannerly thing to do when you come across a gift that isn’t to your liking, is to simply pass on it. It’s very easy to do on the internet. Hit the back button. Scroll past it. Block the artist if you find their art repulsive. The fundamental rule of mature fandom behavior on the internet. Curate your own experience.

Further to this, when a person offers up a gift, it isn’t your place to critique them, unsolicited. You aren’t doing anyone a good turn by pointing out where they are fucking up. You may think you are somehow contributing to fandom by “helping” a struggling artist to improve their works by providing unsolicited criticism but you aren’t. In fact, from what I have seen and heard from artists, it’s usually the opposite. Many fan artists aren’t professionals. Some might be, more so I’ve noticed in the graphic art sphere than in the writer sphere, but most aren’t. Many fan artists are beginners. Many fan artists are students of their art. Many are learning as they are doing. Most importantly, many are doing this for fun, as a hobby, and aren’t aiming to become professionals. 

Many fan artists who are either learning as they go or just doing this for fun when they have time are more than aware that they aren’t professionals. They know that they aren’t the best. They usually have an idea of where their weaknesses are. Sharing their art often takes a great deal of courage for them because they know they are offering something up that isn’t perfect but they love it enough to share it in the hopes that other people will love it too. Coming into their space after they’ve shared a work of love and pointing out all the things that are wrong with it is more likely to cause a new writer or artist to recoil and give up than it is to cause them to double down and try to get better. This isn’t theoretical for me. I’ve heard former artists and writers say that they gave up because all they ever heard was how bad they were. Again, not people who wanted to be professionals. People who just wanted to create things for fun. Who had that fun stripped away from them by strangers who thought it acceptable to enter their space and shit on their work.

When a child is learning to do something we do not take the picture they drew of their stick people families and smiley suns and tell them “Honey, the sun doesn’t have a face. People aren’t sticks. That’s not how to draw hair.”

We do not do that because it is not productive. It is hurtful. We know this and yet fans seem to think it’s “helpful” and acceptable to do this to other adults. Assuming the artists are adults, which is a fallacy. Many are teens as well. Under the assumption that adults aren’t going to burst into tears because you pointed out their failings, you shovel your criticisms over them without stopping to consider that maybe, just maybe, they will because they know they aren’t that perfect. They know they can’t draw hands. They know that their grammar isn’t the best. But they’re trying and they’re creating and they just want to share their ideas. They want to share their love with people who love the thing too. 

They didn’t ask for criticism. They provided a gift and had someone take a shit on it. This is not kind and helpful and certainly I would not be inclined to continue to provide gifts to anyone who treated me in such a way. Unsolicited criticism does not improve artists, it drives them away.

On Solicited Criticism and Being Constructive

I’m going to talk from a writer’s perspective here because I am a writer and I don’t entirely understand artists methods because I never took any sort of art classes. I still think the overall theme of this applies to artists as well, especially when discussing the purpose of criticism and the method of delivery.

Many artists and writers do want to improve and would appreciate genuine criticism of their works. This is a double-edged sword, of course because in my experience we aren’t taught how to take criticism as a flaw in our skill without feeling like it is a flaw in ourselves. We associate our worth very strongly with our ability to do things and as such, addressing our flaws can become a very emotional battle.

When an artist solicits for constructive criticism, they aren’t asking you to point out everything that is wrong with their work. That isn’t what criticism in this situation is meant to be. They are asking for explanations on why things don’t work. They are asking for guidance on how to improve. If you cannot provide that kind of feedback, don’t give the criticism in the first place. 

As a writer I do wonder if I am perhaps more attuned to the way words work than the average reader. As such, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to word choices and I want to talk about that a bit as it relates to online conversations around criticism. We give tone to certain words. A single word’s meaning might not be negative but how we use it in day-to-day conversation can very much instill a level of emotional subtext to that word that translates into how people write and read that word. 

When giving feedback to a person, it’s easy to make a checklist of all the things they got wrong. In some cases, this can be acceptable, such as with basic grammar mistakes. If you’re asking me to proofread your work for grammar, I’m just going to red pen it and note the corrections in the margins because this is simply the mechanics of writing and I know plenty of native English speakers who don’t understand the full complexities of the language. I speak about English (which is the literal worst language in existence) because it’s my native tongue but this can apply to any language.

However, when you begin to delve into deeper things like characterization, themes, plot and so on, this becomes significantly less straightforward. When you add a writer’s voice (or an artist’s vision) into the mix, it gets very messy.

The one thing that should never change when giving criticism is tone. One should not be cruel or harsh in delivering criticism. One should be kind and understanding. The artist is opening themselves up and asking for help which is difficult enough on its own. The response should be patient and helpful. Take care to choose your words to support and uplift the artist, not to tear them down. For every criticism you offer, you should also try to offer a solution or a guideline for the artist. If the criticism is about how the pacing of the story is too slow, making the story drag, then explain what makes it feel slow and why that is a negative thing. Offer suggestions on what might improve the pacing. 

Ex. I noticed that in this chapter it felt like nothing was really happening to further the plot and that left me feeling bored. Perhaps you could improve the pacing of this chapter by including some reference to how this affects the greater plot? Or add something to the end of the chapter to bring us back around to where the plot is headed?

As many “beta readers” are also not professionals, it’s understandable that maybe you don’t know how to offer constructive criticism. Maybe you just have a feeling that something doesn’t look or read write but you don’t know linguistics well enough to identify the why behind it. That’s ok too, as long as you convey that honestly and kindly.

Ex. When I was reading this part of the chapter it didn’t feel like it flowed very well but I’m not sure why. If you have another editor, maybe ask them for their opinion on it?

Because sometimes when we are reading something our own internal biases will create problems where there are none, or catch problems without knowing why they are problems. This is especially useful if you’re being asked for your opinion on whether or not someone is handling a sensitive topic well (race, sex, sexual orientation etc.). 

When it comes to the writer’s voice, this is where criticism is very difficult. If an author loves their purple prose (overly flowery descriptions of everything) and it bothers you as a reader, you’re probably not their audience and criticizing them for it isn’t actually helpful. It’s fine to ask them if they mean to write in that manner, or ask if it serves a specific purpose to them but if their response is that it is the way they enjoy writing, then it is not a topic that is open for criticism.

Conclusion

Artists - Nay, People grow by learning from their mistakes but they need support in understanding what those mistakes are and how to improve them. They do not grow by constantly being told to “get better”. Respect those who are gifting you with their art. Give them the respect they deserve for being kind and brave enough to post their creations. If they don’t want criticism, respect that boundary. If they do want criticism, give it in a kind and helpful way.

Lastly, and especially because this is what bothered me the most about the incident that caused me to write this:

Artists grow by doing. They cannot get better without doing and making mistakes and doing more and making more mistakes. This is the literal process of learning a skill. Do not ever tell an artist to stop creating because they aren’t good enough. It doesn’t make you ‘helpful’. It makes you a giant fucking douchebag.

[vileart]

Burrowing Dramaturgy: Andy Edwards @ Tron

 In Burrows

A new performance in BSL and spoken word, created by Andy Edwards, presenting at Tron Theatre on March 23rd and 24th. 

credits: Julia Bauer

The performance frames the act of description through a series of choreographies, investigating the relationship between spoken language, sign and meaning, and exploring perspective and how we engage with the world around us. In Burrows will be accompanied by a number of guest performances. Musician Blair Coron will perform a composition developed especially for the event. Petre Dobre and Adriana Navarro will present the short performance Words, who needs them?  What was the inspiration for this performance?

In Burrows began as a short piece, first performed at Only Skin’s SCRATCH back in October 2016. In the work I would describe an image to the audience, an image that was placed onstage so that they couldn’t see it, in 1500 words. What inspired this performance was a desire to make the easiest piece of work I could possibly make, that offered the maximum amount to the audience it could while carrying with it as little as possible. So it made sense to work with an audiences imaginations. Then I also wanted a piece of work I could just turn up and do, make up on the spot, so it made sense to play with improvisation.

The method of improvisation I employ was developed as part of the ground, the highest point a duet of text and dance I performed with Paul Hughes at a couple of festivals during 2015. Initially it very strongly drew from (or, less charitably, stole) Tim Etchell’s solo practice but since then it has departed considerably, and I’ve improvised poetry across a wider range of contexts, developing my own particular set of enquiries. Those enquires are primarily linguistic – I’m interested in how language works.

When offered to present In Burrows at Tron I was posed with the problem of how to take a very solid short work and evolve it into something three times the length, without just dragging it out. I’d been curious about working with a British Sign Language interpreter for a while, largely out of a desire to make my work more accessible to an audience I’d previously not made any work for and also because I was curious about the language itself. Placing Amy Cheskin into the work has been brilliant. A simple act that has produced lots of tensions, questions, that have driven the work forward.  Thinking about translation, interpretation and the fuzzy areas in

between has given the project a new lease of life – and certainly inspired me to push forward with it. Rehearsals are thundering along and we’re both pretty buzzed by how fascinating language is, and how it intersects – both producing and being produced by – what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, how you’re trying to position yourself to others and the world around you.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?

It is a good launch-pad for the public discussion of ideas – and then, that discussion, happens after the performance has taken place. Any good discourse is advanced by someone making a claim about something, and then other people assessing that claim. Me saying that I think this gives you something to react off of.

The way I go about making performance is to think that each performance I make is an act of making a claim about something, taking up a position, and that by taking up a position I’m inviting others to observe, discuss and criticise that position. That’s the basic task that I’m up to – trying to hold someone’s attention long enough for them to know what it is I’m claiming but with a relaxed enough grip so that they can react to it. And then things that I’m doing are hugely informed by the ideas I’ve previously discussed that have led me up to this point.

I think that’s why art in general is a good space for the public discussion of ideas – because it is often people making statements about the world that have a smaller impact on that world. That isn’t to say that impact is negligible. Not at all. Or that it doesn’t have a significant impact on the world. It most definitely does – and that isn’t always a positive one. But there’s something both flimsy and robust about art that means the stakes are low enough so that we can discuss it but that also our discussion of it won’t kill the thing stone dead. So yes, in that sense, it’s has the potential to be a great space to discuss ideas.

That’s all potential though, because if only a small segment of people can access the space in which the discussion takes place then it won’t be much of a discussion at all. So, it depends on what the performance is, where it is being held and who is allowed in.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I’m not particularly sure. I came about it the long way around and avoided it for a while, in part due to a certain type of pressure applied to me when I was younger, and in part due to being scared that I’d be totally rubbish at it. As a teenager I found acting, with characters and lines and arcs, such a release for a build up of emotions I’d not learnt how to deal with. I did a GCSE, then A-Level, in drama. Then fell in with the theatre crowd at University – after a brief attempt to avoid doing it – then did a masters – after another brief attempt to avoid doing it – and since then I continually flip flop between wanting to knock Shakespeare off his perch and “getting a job in a bank”, forgetting of course that getting a job in a bank is probably quite difficult / the banks might not be particularly in desperate need of my services.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

Me and Amy work in a manner where the creative responsibility is a little imbalanced. Given Amy is a translator, that’s a really necessary thing for her to do her job, but it leads to the interesting tension where if the work is crap it isn’t her fault, it’s mine. So it is interesting how labour divides up as a result of that. The pattern is that we meet once a week and for three hours throw things about, try something and note what happens. Then I’ll go away and write something, some notes, a script, or whatever – and then we’ll come back together again and throw what’s left together again. So we move forward like that – and it’s going super well I think.

Thinking about our general approach, we spend a lot of time asking what the audience will be getting from the work, and how audiences with different abilities will receive the work differently. The work will be accessible to a range of audiences including those who are D/deaf, hard of hearing, partially sighted or blind, with integrated BSL interpretation and audio description. This desire to make a piece of work that offers a rich theatrical experience to these audiences informs a lot of decisions we make. Rather than to offer one blanket experience of the work, we’re curious as to what we can offer each of these specific audiences in turn. The work, as a whole, is concerned with a very specific relationship to each and every one of its audience members. It’ll be a bit different for everyone, given that a lot of it will take place inside their heads.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

While I’ve performed my work before, most recently as part of Andy Arnold’s group show NOWHERE during Take Me Somewhere 2017, I am more commonly found as a playwright. Typically I write text for others, in a ‘New Writing’ context, whereas for In Burrows I’m speaking text that has never been written down.

There’s a thread that runs through all this work though, which is about being in control of language. That sentence sounds a bit gross, reading it back. With In Burrows I’m making that process more explicit to the audience then if I were to write a play, which I’d typically do out of sight.

So while it will look very different to a lot of my other work, I think the underlying mechanics are fundamentally the same.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

The dramaturg for In Burrows, Paul Hughes, wrote this note to me after a development weekend: “I’m looking at a photograph by Andy Goldsworthy currently on display in the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art: a line of upturned leaves placed on dense patch of bracken, the stark white undersides standing out from the vivid green of the forest. It doesn’t impress the viewer in how it has acquired huge or rare or precious materials, or on how many people the artist holds in their command, or even in how it has hoodwinked and mocked the institution that houses it. No sustained physical commitment was required to produce this; in fact, the action so simple that we can imagine the exact steps with which it was undertaken. The gesture points towards the artist themself as much as any material circumstance or image.

Is this an alchemical transformation? Do we perceive the artist as a magician, effortlessly transforming reality around them? This can only be determined on a case-by-case basis, depending on the individual viewer’s tastes, affiliations and readiness to go along with the trick. What’s more clear is the particular sense of romance, of the poetic, within the artist: of the ways in which they read charm and delight in the world around them. Perhaps in this work - and obviously I’m talking about In Burrows too - the artist is inviting us to briefly see the world through their eyes - not as a way to seduce us, but to share with us a way in which we might allow ourselves to be seduced. We stand before an intimate proposition; the individual’s un/abashed offer of their very personal relationship to beauty”

So perhaps that sums it up, perhaps it doesn’t. I’m wanting the audience to have the experience of observing something very personal to themselves, namely their relationship to language, memory, imagination and image. It’ll be small, quiet, and hopefully full of stuff for them to latch on to and play with.

Both In Burrows and Words, Who Needs Them? have been created for the enjoyment of hearing, hard-of-hearing and D/deaf audiences. In Burrows also features integrated audio description for blind or partially sighted audiences. from the vileblog http://ift.tt/2ohvYuv

[piercepenniless]

On Assembly

On Friday I was joined by Michael Hardt on Novara to talk about his new book - co-authored with Toni Negri - Assembly. It’s a follow-up to the Empire trilogy and a serious and ambitious intervention. Empire is one of those books which I think suffered from its success; its theses were often broadened out and vulgarised. That’s the fate of any successful book (how Benedict Anderson must have come to hate the phrase ‘imagined communities’) but I think it was especially bad here. I imagine the same will happen here, but the book is very much worth reading, and even though I have some substantial disagreements with parts of it, I was struck by how much I had missed its ambition and brio – it is an attempt to think the current political moment in its totality, from the practical activity of the ‘movement’ (especially, for H&N, the arc of protests and struggles extending from Tunisia to 15M to Occupy, though not exclusively) to the current form of capitalism and emergent forms of cooperation and solidarity. Their ambition is to operate beyond the political per se and enter the ‘hidden abode’ of economic and social need which is its matrix. It’s a good ambition and the book repays careful reading.

It is a less politically theoretical book than the previous work: there is no lengthy digression on Spinozist ‘multitude’, or careful genealogy of the concept of sovereignty. That’s partly because the book rests on the earlier theoretical work, but also because of the different historical moments in which they have been written: Empire, especially, was written as a way of seeking a theoretical articulation of a global political ‘moment’ in its crescendo; the situation now is decidedly more mixed. The theoretical slant of the book is a tussle with Rousseau, especially, although it’s only carried out obliquely, save in chapter 3; I’d have liked to see it pursued a bit more.

But it struck me while reading how different the fruits of ‘Western Marxism’ – which they defend, correctly I think, in a late section of the book – are between intellectual traditions. Their two preferred figures are a little strange –Lukács and the later Merleau-Ponty – but it allowed me to understand their project as part of a line of work which blends Marxism primarily with philosophy, which allows for their systemic ambition, but only briefly dallies with history. This is quite different from another Western Marxism, one strain of which is Anglophone, which blends Marxism with history: think EP Thompson, Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson, or even Peter Linebaugh (the line is certainly heterogeneous). It might have been fruitful to grapple with Anderson’s insight that the secret signature of all Western Marxism is failure, and operate from there. That kind of thinking might have been especially useful in suggesting that H&N proceed from the specific problems of particular moments of struggle (what did people think they were doing? what did they want? what future did they see? what were they struggling against?) rather than allowing them to appear just as examples of broader, overarching arguments. But then that would have been a different book.

There are two specific things I find awkward in the book:

The first is the idea of ‘nonsovereignty’, which I don’t think is ever fully articulated. I suspect H&N have painted themselves into a philosophical corner here. In brief, nonsovereignty is a conceptual polemic against all political conceptions framed around sovereignty, which they see as inevitably (re)producing relations of domination – against this they propose a somewhat murky idea of ‘nonsovereign’ institutions which emerge from the matrix of pre-existing co-operation and sociality coming into self-consciousness. But here things get problematic. Not only does this skirt the historical question – why do so many contemporary movements, right and left, articulate themselves in terms of sovereignty? – but it seems to smuggle in sovereignty under the rubric of nonsovereignty. In other words, nonsovereign institutions are sovereign institutions (i.e., fully autonomous ones which set their own rules, determine their own nature and limits etc) but with sovereignty used for other, non-dominating ends. I think that’s good! I just don’t see the need for the term.

But I understand where it comes from: not only a generalised suspicion of the ‘political’ per se – hence the polemic against the ‘autonomy of the political’ which we argue about a little in the show – but a long commitment to the idea that capitalism produces new, resistant subjects, with resources which surpass capital’s attempts to exploit them. That is what Negri was doing with the baroque figure of the ‘operaio sociale’ decades ago, and it’s the same here. But the theoretical consequences of this orientation cuts off any consideration that political concepts are themselves sites of struggle for meaning – and therefore politics is only conceived of as their total negation.

The second matter I struggle with is related – it is about a ‘resistant subject’ and also about political concepts. In a way it is a minor thing, but also an indicative one. H&N write:

“Migrants, for example, who play such a fundamental role in shaping the contemporary world, who cross borders and nations, deserts and seas, who are forced to live precariously in ghettos and take the most humiliating work in order to survive, who risk the violence of police and anti-immigrant mobs, demonstrate the central connections between the processes of translation and the experience of “commoning”: multitudes of strangers, in transit and staying put, invent new means of communicating with others, new modes of acting together, new sites of encounter and assembly���in short, they constitute a new common without ever losing their singularities.Through processes of translation, the singularities together form a multitude. Migrants are a coming community, poor but rich in languages, pushed down by fatigue but open to physical, linguistic, and social cooperation. Any political subjectivities seeking to take the word with legitimacy today must learn how to speak (and to act, live, and create) like migrants.” (pp.152-3)

Now, on one level, I can appreciate the transvaluation going on here – instead of conceiving of migrants as absolutely wretched, objects of pity at best and hatred at worst, H&N are trying to conceive the migrant as subject, and follow the arc of political potential which therefore emerges. I think that’s valuable as far as it goes, and actually in its own terms, as a gesture against much of predominant discourse, I think it’s fine. It’s also a common move among those influenced by Negri and working on migration, especially Sandro Mezzadra. But there’s something missing here. Most migrants don’t want to be migrants: either they don’t want to have migrated at all, or they want something quite at odds with the way H&N conceive of them here – stability and citizenship. For many, the most fervent hope is that ‘migrant’ is a temporary position. One of the things that’s awkward about the polemical dismissal of the body of concepts emanating from the republican tradition is that H&N lose the ability to operate in this conceptual realm, the realm which frames most political desires articulated by their resistant subjects. It seems to me a more difficult, but more rewarding thing to attempt to think through and beyond those terms, as especially ‘sovereignty’ and ‘citizenship’ are two of the key sites of struggle for the next few decades.

Anyway –– listen to the interview! Read the book!

[gbsoriginals-blog]

the study of signs (w2)

This week we looked at semiology and how data for semiotic analysis can be gathered using web scraping tools.

Reading

Semiology 

Chandler begins to explain semiology by showing what a broad sweep it takes in its study - it could include linguistics, art, film, written language, even music.

My favourite definition was Barthes’, who declared that 'semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all of these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification' (Barthes 1967, 9). I think of semiology as the process by which we understand what we see, and it’s interesting to think of how that extends beyond sight.

Chandler defined some other terms that crop up in analysis, I liked the definition of a ‘text’, as recorded in some way so it is physically independent of the sender or receiver. A text is something we can engage in, detached from its creator. However, it’s interesting to think of ‘dynamic’ texts - for example, I analysed an app interface last semester. The app was developed as a dynamic interface which is personalised by the user - it was impossible for my experience of it to be detached from me as the ‘receiver’.

Chandler talked about how a medium becomes transparent the more it is used by people, so we write instinctively on a computer because it has become the natural way to record things. However, media is a subject which decisively interrupts our ‘unthinking’ ways of communication. I am really interested in how using different messaging applications (e.g. Whatsapp vs. Messenger) changes the way people communicate. This research question would involve some semiotic analysis of interface design, and inextricably the message content and patterns of communication.

Using social semiotic analysis: beyond the self(ie)

Zhao, S. and Zappavigna, M. (2018) ‘Beyond the self: Intersubjectivity and the social semiotic interpretation of the selfie’, New Media & Society, 20(5), pp. 1735–1754.

This paper sets out to "problematise some fundamental assumptions of the selfie" (1748).  I like the idea of a "micro-autobiography of the present moment" (Schesler, 2014) (1739). Selfies convey the 'hereness' of that person in that moment in that place. It's not just "look at this place" or "look at me" it's look at me, here in this place in this moment. The selfie is diary-esque in its logging. With snapchat it’s not even about recording or remembering, it's about capturing the fleeting moment only to be shared briefly. 

It’s interesting to think about selfies in relation to the way women are seen or how they see themselves.  In traditional photography there is the viewer, the subject and the photographer, in a selfie, photographer and subject are one  (1741). As women grow up with an understanding that they are the ‘object’ (Berger), does the selfie subject-ify them? Is the selfie a way of reclaiming the dynamic of observed vs. observer? (1740) The selfie may tell others to look at us, but we are the artist. While we may be criticised for our vanity, we put the mirror in our own hand (ref. to Berger).

I disagreed with some of the arguments being made in this paper. The writers argue that a selfie is about showing one’s perspective, more than oneself. I think this may be true for some kinds of selfies, but as someone who has (a) taken a fair few selfies and (b) spent some time on instagram. I would argue that selfies can be about situating oneself in a situation, but seem a compromised way of showing one's perspective. Surely a thoughtfully taken photo of what you are seeing or experiencing is a better reflection of your perspective? Surely taking a picture of yourself, if that shows your perspective, suggests your focus is self-orientated, inward looking rather than outward looking? I think a photo taken by a person, says “look at what I’m seeing”, whereas a selfie says “look at me”.

Project

The accessible icon project: design activism

The project was started by Sara Hendren and Brian Glenney in Boston. Sara ran a blog called "Abler" where she wrote about "about prosthetics in the ordinary sense, but also about assistive technologies in the far less ordinary sense: low tech tools, hybrid technologies, art works, and more" (source: ablersite.org). 

This project, which was originally a street art project, recognises that design influences the way we see people, and semiotics have an impact on our judgements about the world. So many of the signs (understood in the general sense, like toilet signs) we see on a daily basis are abstract or iconic symbols which we have learned to associate a meaning to, to the point where we are not conscious of the signification process. A 99% Invisible podcast episode ‘Icons for Access’ looks at this project. The podcast is about the designed world, and this specific episode explores the value of internationally recognised icons, an implicit consideration of the importance of semiotics in communication.

This project reminds me that I feel embarrassed and sad about the way us able-bodied people are willing to ‘other’ people with disabilities. Even the improved symbol draws upon a stereotype of what a person with a disability looks like. How can invisible disabilities be respresented? What compromises are we making when we choose icons to represent abstract ideas? I believe inclusive icon design is important, especially where a person is supposed to select an icon and say “yes, this is me” or walk through a door which tells them “this is where you belong. See Clue’s take on inclusive icon design.

Design activism is designed to challenge ways of thinking, and interrogate exisiting and accepted design principles. This project is activism because it speaks to a wider issue of ableism in society. The purpose of the (original) icon is to provide access to people who are disabled, allowing them to navigate public spaces designed for able-bodied people.

“Feeling nostalgic” or feeling-nostalgic.png

Task - scraping

to view the data I had to be on the page where I found it I chose a site where every image had it's own page, I couldn't figure out how to group them so I had to scrape individually chose to scrape a smaller sample to make this do-able some of the data I scraped didn't feel super useful, and the data I actually wanted (the images) I had to manually scrape. at my level of understanding, the scraper didn't feel very useful. it was cool to see the website dissected, almost in parts instead of as a functioning whole

Analysis: the name of the comic is not designed to introduce it or 'anchor' it (Barthes), it functions as a placeholder, taking words from the relay text so the image has a name. The name does not allude to the story in the comic at all.

[hunxi-after-hours]

Have you read any of the official English translations of danmei novels? Would you recommend them to someone who is practicing reading in Chinese but not quite at the level of understanding everything, and wants to double check the meanings with translations?

nope, haven't read any of the licensed English translations! I generally figure if I've read them in the original I don't need to re-read them in translation, so alas I cannot offer any comment on their merit as potentially instructive texts

if you're looking for a book to practice reading comprehension, I'd actually suggest going the other way around — finding a novel that has been translated into Chinese, like a Chinese edition of Harry Potter or The Little Prince, because then you're operating on the sure footing of knowing the original text. or you can look into higher level language textbooks, the ones that start pulling selections from novels and short stories as their reading material — I know they're not as fun and sexy and narrative as what we want to be reading, but I think it's significant that language textbooks are written for the express purpose of accuracy and education, whereas translated (web)novels from any language into any language are usually going to shift their focus toward entertainment rather than linguistic fidelity

translations are, by nature, inherently interpretive and subjective; it's hard for me to recommend "double checking the meaning" of something against a translation because that assumes that translations and their original texts are fundamentally the same, or that translations are, in a way, an answer key of sorts to the original text. to conflate the two personally makes me deeply uncomfortable, but then again, I'm one to talk given that I have access to both versions

at the end of the day, I think you should do whatever you think would bring you the most joy in your language learning. you should feel free to try anything and everything, from diving into a book with nothing but a dictionary app in hand to trying out the first few chapters of a text while glancing between versions in different languages to approximate an understanding of it. and you should feel free to give up on anything if it isn't working for you — I get it, you get far enough on your journey and you are simply done with textbooks, no matter how well-intentioned their authors are

the last thing I want to say is that this is gonna suck. language learning is a slow process of level-grinding (逆水行舟，不进则退), and no matter how much you love a text you're working through, no matter how enthusiastic and starry-eyed you are going in, you are going to hit rough patches. books will feel like they never end; your reading speed will feel unbearably slow, especially since you keep having to stop, look up an unfamiliar word, and then re-read the entire page again to find where you were and how this new word fits into your understanding of what's happening. learning a new language — particularly attaining reading comprehension and speed in that language — is not an endeavor for fair-weather fans. all of which is to say — prepare yourself emotionally going in. be brave. be determined. be foolhardy. bite off more than you can chew. trick yourself into succeeding. read a chapter a day. read a chapter a month. set goals for yourself. and most importantly, be forgiving

[meichenxi]

Benefits of watching target language media without subtitles!

Or: why watching media without subtitles is not limited to advanced learners, and why you should incorporate it into your routine!

SO this is prompted by a personal anecdote: Yesterday I watched an episode of my favourite show (the untamed, go and watch it, heathens, it's gay and pretty and has beautiful sword fights and necromancers and revenge and insane character development and), and rather than keeping the subtitles on, I rather dubiously turned them off.

So no subs in Chinese or English.

And lo and behold - I could understand most things! Not everything, especially not specialised vocab or formal speech, but enough (with good knowledge of the plot already) to comfortably follow most conversations. Yeah, this was a surprise.

Watching media in your target language without subtitles is something that a lot of people think is restricted to advanced learners - learners at the stage where they can understand almost everything wihh subtitles in the target language (henceforth TL) itself, and is just used to train listening practice.

If you wait until you're at that stage to incorporate this into your language learning routine, though, you're missing out. And here's why.

Firstly, personal-situation specific: I usually learn best via reading, but my Chinese reading ability is much worse than my listening ability (immersion yay), and so turning on the Chinese subs just makes me annoyed and frustrated because I can't follow them quickly enough. I realise that for many people this may be the opposite way around, but for heritage speakers of languages that use an unfamiliar alphabet, or those (like me) who are not heritage speakers but because of various factors have had intense spoken immersion and little formal education (and thus some - SOME - of the same difficulties), subtitles can be a hindrance rather than a help. There are many posts targeting improving listening skills, but not so many looking at it the other way around, so it's important to remember such learners exist.

I found to my surprise that I picked up significantly more vocab with the subs off than with them on. Firstly, if you know the general plot and know enough to pick up the outline of the conversation, you contextualise any word automatically at the same time as using the context to provide clues for what the word could be - the example sentence defines the word, and the word comes automatically with an example sentence, which cements it in your memory far better than if you heard it in isolation. This fits nicely into the functionalist approach to language learning (which systems like Glossika try to utilise to varying degrees of success), where vocabulary and different variations and pronunciations of different words serve as individual instantiations of a particular token - in this case, it could be the vocabulary word itself, but that's not all the information you're getting. You're also getting instantiations of the actual SOUNDS of the language, as well as the grammar.

You're picking up information on the permittable pronunciation of certain phonemes and phonological patterns, to inform your brain how much variation is acceptable within native speech. So for example the finals <n> and <ng> in pinyin are notoriously difficult in Mandarin, with some native speakers doing away with it altogether. What the input tells you is how much like an /n/ the <ng> is allowed to sound whilst still being perceived as an <ng> by speakers - and thus what the range of permissable differences is, that you, as a non native speaker, can play with.

As I've already written about, one of my first hills to die on is the tone/intonation interplay. And listening to audio without subs is fantastic for teaching you how intonation works not only on an emotional level, but also how it helps people understand sentence structure - it teaches you which parts of an utterance to pay attention to. Even if you don't understand the word itself, you will gradually learn what is the focus point of the sentence and what is peripheral information. Why is this particularly effective without subtitles? Especially in languages that have differing sentence structure (like Chinese in longer sentences), you need to rely on the intonation to guide you towards finding the focal point of the sentence. With subtitles, you get lazy and you don't utilise your ear in the same way. And again, again, you're drumming these patterns into your head. Frequency = success!

Thirdly, by training your ear to listen for intonation, you are necessarily listening for grammar patterns that give you a clue about who is playing what role in the sentence. Our brains are fundamentally lazy (effecient)- they only pay attention to what is necessary to complete the task. Have you seen that video where you are asked to count how many times a basketball is passed? And then at the end they ask you if you noticed the bear? There is a lot of linguistic debate about what role exactly attention plays in the process of language learning, but for our purposes it suffices to say that both actively noticing a pattern and hearing it confirmed again and again when you are not specifically looking for it help us hugely when it comes to not only memorising, but also internalising, that grammatical pattern.

Going back to the attention thing, let's talk about another problem no subs solves: if you are reading subtitles in your native language (and even more so in your TL), you are much less likely to bring the full force of your listening abilities into play. Why? Well, because the answer is right there in front of you. Listening without subs forces you to use context, social cues like smiles or frowns, as well as supra segmental factors like tone of voice or volume, to determine what exactly is being said - in other words, the same social interaction and outside stimulus that many functional linguists believe is absolutely critical to the development of the language faculty in children. Of course, you're not actually interacted with the media, but being actively forced to pay attention to these things makes it a much more holistic process. Suddenly, your brain is fired up: it needs to pay attention to everything in order to understand. In other words, the vocabulary and grammar and intonation you're hearing has suddenly become relevant.

And what happens when it's relevant? We learn it - sometimes without even knowing that's what's happening.

For all of these reasons, then, whatever your level, I'd suggest listening and watching media in your target language without subtitles. The expectations you have at each level, from beginner to advanced, should not, however, be the same. Unless you find incredibly good targeted media, or the language is sufficiently similar to one you know, you're unlikely to understand even what's going on when you first start out.

That's ok. Your brain is processing things - it's learning how to recognise nouns, verbs, questions, declarative sentences, the way the language expresses surprise or fear or love. It's learning that some phonetic distinctions that you don't have in your native language are important in your TL. It's heading patterns of vocabulary and grammar and phonology again and again and again. Don't expect to understand everything - but try copying it, out loud, if you can. It will help you get an ear for word boundaries, which is crucial for parsing the boundless speech-stream that's suddenly presented to you.

If you're at an intermediate level, enjoy spotting common verbs and watching the action, even if you don't know 100% what's going on. Even more than the beginner level, you're getting used to the speed of the language and its rhythms, as well as challenging yourself to understand more.

If you're at an advanced level, this is perfect for you. You'll understand more than you suspect. And if you don't, who cares, it's meant to be difficult. I never would have thought that I could understand and comfortably enjoy most of an episode of my show. And there were certainly conversations where I was totally lost!! But that's ok. You don't need 95% comprehension to survive - 50%, while incredibly frustrating, is good enough - as long as it's the right 50%! All you need is one key word - especially if you're watching media you're familiar with, which I recommend - and then click! You've got it.

加油！

[zipgrowth]

Conrad Wolfram: Let’s Build a New Math Curriculum That Assumes Computers Exist

Has the math brand become toxic? That was the provocative question posed by Conrad Wolfram in a blog post earlier this summer. “Sadly,” he wrote, “I’ve started to conclude that the answer is yes.”

That conclusion may seem startling, especially as Wolfram is the strategic director of Wolfram Research, and one of the brainchild behind Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica, a system widely used in technical fields to process complex computations and calculations. His critique, in a nutshell: math instruction has become too fixated on computation—solving for x, for example—and removed from real-world applications and data.

Today, Wolfram is the founder of Computers-Based Math, an effort that he described as “building a new math curriculum that assumes computers exist.” In the following interview with EdSurge, he explains what exactly that means. (Note: the interview has been edited for clarity.)

Conrad Wolfram

EdSurge: How did your interest in math begin? When? And, were you always good at math as a child?

Wolfram: Like many people who kind of enjoy math, the reasons I enjoyed it at first was because I beat my friends at school. I wasn’t interested in the actual structure of it and how it worked. What really interested me was applying it in physics or in other areas. I found it quite fun, and the fact that I seemed somewhat more successful than some of my friends drove me forwards.

Your recent work and writing has focused on math education. Today there are many math instructional software and tools. But in what ways do you think we’re still missing the point when it comes to teaching math or getting kids engaged in the subject?

Fundamentally, I think it’s somewhat the wrong subject. It’s kind of shocking to many people that I would say that. But math to me is a problem-solving system, and with some logic and computation, you can come out with an answer.

Today, computation now gets done fantastically well by computers—better than anyone could ever have imagined 1,500 years ago. But what we’re doing in education right now is making people learn how to calculate by hand, but not learn how to do problem solving at a high level. They’re learning how to do computation, and not leaving that to the machines. Until we fix that fundamental issue, we’re not going to have the subject of math converging with what we need in the real world.

When you bring up the word math, many people tense up. And it got me thinking: Is the brand itself, the word “math,” actually causing us a lot of problems? We’ve got to figure out what people are going to do with math after education. When you think about what math is actually for, and how people really use it in the real world, you realize that people actually use computers to do the calculating to help us solve harder and messier problems.

Your current education effort is called computer-based maths. What is it, in a nutshell?

We’re trying to build a math curriculum that assumes computers exist, and that they can calculate things for you. So what do you have to learn, as a human, in order to be able to use the full power of math?

You don’t necessarily need to learn every step needed to solve a quadratic equation. You probably need to know what a quadratic equation is. You need to know how to set up the equation. You need to know how to verify the results, make sure that somehow you didn’t fooled. But most crucially, you need to know when you’re going to set up an equation, and why—which very few people coming out of school actually know.

Computer-based math is a project to redefine the subject based on computers doing the calculating. Rebuild the curriculum, the pedagogy, the approach. The basic idea is to be able to use technology as you would in real life and solve much harder problems. So, for example, an early module we made was for teenager, asking “Am I Normal?” What does normal mean? Maybe we define it as, how’s my foot size compared to other’s? Can we use math to help us figure that out? Maybe we can’t.

It’s tough to teach something if you yourself can’t really understand how or when you’d use it.

And then a bit later we have questions like, “Are Girls Better at Math?” But what does that mean? What does “better” mean? As you see, these thing are quite fuzzy, they’re not like traditional math questions. What we’re trying to do is get people to tackle hard questions with no clear answer, and that involves a mixture of defining the problem and actually doing calculations.

Are a lot of the problems that you present interdisciplinary by nature?

Absolutely. Math is this general-purpose subject at school, but if it isn’t interdisciplinary, well, why not? If it isn’t serving history, English, geography and all the other subjects, why not? If you study English in school, it’s servicing all of those other subjects.

When I think about math, I quite like the term “computational thinking.” It’s a way of thinking about life. The point about computational thinking is under the surface of any subject, there is a process you can run, and we have fantastic machinery to work out complex computations.

Sometimes you need to come out with a number or specific answer. Sometimes I think you don’t have a clear-cut answer. Sometimes, you need to know how to think about how to weigh risks or assess how, for example, politicians explain different kinds of facts. Most problems in business, or in other walks of life, are not multi-choice questions. You don’t get five choices, one of which is right and the other four are wrong.

We should think about applying computational thinking across different subjects—like computational history, computational English.

What would be an example of a computational English kind of problem?

It might be looking at the linguistics of a novel. Can we do sentiment analysis through a book, to see if we can pick out when it was happy and sad and other things? A colleague of mine, John McLoone, wrote a blog post about this with [“Lord of the Flies”].

We also have an example for history, where we were looking at the most common words used in inaugural addresses by presidents. That could get one thinking: Do these words ultimately reflect what they did during their term in office?

As new technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to evolve, how do they shape computers-based math, or what students will need to know to be prepared for the future?

What we need to do is to figure out, what’s the tool set that we really need, and how well should people know how use to use them?

...what we’re doing in education right now is making people learn how to calculate by hand, but not learn how to do problem solving at a high level.

One of the big problems is that people learning math are using a very small computational tool set. They’re learning how to solve a quadratic equation, how to stitch a graph, these sorts of things. But the tool set out there right now is massive. There is machine learning. There is calculus of all sorts. There’s data science, of course. The ways in which people will communicate with the computer will change, but we need them to know how to use the technology available.

Today we need people to learn how to code. It’s what I call step two of the problem-solving process. The first is trying to define the problem. Step two is extract to the language of math, which today is usually code. You want to write it so the computer can understand it, but so you can also communicate it. Step three is calculating, what we’ve been discussing, and hopefully you get a computer to do that.

It seems there’s been a lot of momentum, in the U.S. and U.K. to introduce coding into the curriculum. Would you consider yourself a fan or a proponent of this push?

I think it’s great that this has come up as a movement. Coding is crucial. If you think about coding as learning how to abstract a problem, which I think is really hard especially the fuzzier and more complex the problem gets, then I think it’s good we’re seeing this being encouraged.

But I’m not sure we’ve completely got the angle quite right yet. I think we need to make sure that coding education is not too purist. Like in math: if you’re one of the top people who enjoy it, that’s great and wonderful, I’m all for that. But most people don’t enjoy it, and it’s no good writing the whole curriculum assuming that it’s a great piece of enjoyment for everyone.

With coding, we’ve done really well with the people who are already interested. I think we haven’t done quite so well yet with many other people who don’t quite connect with coding, and just want to use it as a means to an end in school.

I think that tying math together with computational thinking and other subjects, and combining it with code, would be the absolutely ideal direction for the future. And I think it will happen in one form or another over time.

How widespread has computers-based math been adopted?

Early on we’ve got Estonia. I think we’ve got interest from some other European countries. We’ve also had project in Egypt, and also some interest in Australia.

One of the issues we’ve had is that, in the end, everyone has to take tests. And the problem is that the assessments don’t match with our vision, because they are basically about how to calculate things. It’s been a slow process because you’re trying to get the tests adjusted, and to get governments and others onboard.

There’s no problem with the idea of a quantitative assessment of computer-based math. We just have to have a different set of questions, where the answer isn’t necessarily “right or wrong” in the traditional sense. Instead of “solve the following quadratic equation,” the questions should be: “Here are two data sets, what can you figure out about them?”

I love asking politicians, “When was the last time you used a quadratic equation?” They all say we all have to do them, but other than helping their kids do their math homework, I haven’t found a politician who actually has used one in their own life.

And then we’ve got teachers trying to teach this, and often they get criticized [when students don’t do well]. But then you realize, maybe the teacher doesn’t quite know why they’re teaching this either, really. It’s tough to teach something if you yourself can’t really understand how or when you’d use it.

Conrad Wolfram: Let’s Build a New Math Curriculum That Assumes Computers Exist published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

[topmixtrends]

ALISA GANIEVA’S APPEARANCE in the world of Russian literature took everyone by surprise, in the literal sense. A critic by training, she published her first work of fiction, the novella Salam, Dalgat! (Salam tebe, Dalgat!), when she was 25, under a male pseudonym; when the novella received the Debut Prize in 2009, Ganieva outed herself as a woman at the awards ceremony. Two novels written under her own name followed, enjoying similar critical success: The Mountain and the Wall (Prazdnichnaia gora, 2012) was longlisted for Russia’s National Bestseller award, while Bride and Groom (Zhenikh i nevesta, 2015) made the shortlist for the Russian Booker. What sets Ganieva apart from most other contemporary Russian writers has to do with what being a “Russian writer” actually means. Her background is culturally and linguistically hybrid. She was born in Moscow but is ethnically Avar, the Avars being the largest ethnic group in Dagestan, a Muslim-majority republic of the Russian Federation located in the North Caucasus. (It neighbors the more sadly famous Chechnya.) Although Ganieva later returned to Moscow, she grew up in Dagestan. As she explains in an interview, her first language was Avar, but she writes in Russian, with which she also grew up, as it is Dagestan’s lingua franca.

This movement between places, cultures, and languages is characteristic of Bride and Groom. Like her previous works, the novel is set in Dagestan, in the small village where Patya and Marat — the bride and the groom — are from and to which they have come back to visit their families. Marat works as a defense lawyer in Moscow, where Patya has just spent a year working in a courthouse copying documents. They are both intimately familiar with village culture and comfortable with Moscow’s modern ways. Intermingling in the novel also occurs on the linguistic level: while Ganieva writes in standard Russian, she injects many words and expressions from Avar and Arabic, making hers a specifically Dagestani Russian variant. In Ganieva’s original texts, these words and expressions are translated into Russian in footnotes, which presents her English-language translator, Carol Apollonio, with the question of how best to handle them in translation. Apollonio opts for two different approaches: in The Mountain and the Wall, she puts these terms in a glossary at the end, whereas in Bride and Groom, possibly because there are fewer of them, she italicizes them to mark their foreignness but leaves them untranslated, asking readers to rely on context for a general understanding of their meaning.

Literature by Dagestani writers is virtually unknown in the West. The press release by Ganieva’s United States publisher, Deep Vellum, notes that The Mountain and the Wall is the first novel by a Dagestani writer to be translated into English (making Bride and Groom the second). Yet even those living in the Russian Federation are poorly versed in writing from Dagestan, having been raised, as was Ganieva herself, on a Russian literary canon overwhelmingly made up of writers of European descent. The rise of a Dagestani author with Dagestani-themed works challenges this hegemony and alters the way the Caucasus, which occupies a prominent place in Russian writing, has been traditionally represented.

As part of its colonial expansion during the 19th century, the Russian Empire sought to bring the region under its control through a series of military campaigns, a conflict that resumed in the late 20th century, as Russia attempted to suppress separatism in Chechnya. Before he became a pacifist and insufferable moralist, the young profligate Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) went to the Caucasus and joined the army after piling up gambling debts. Several writers were exiled to the remote region for displeasing tsarist authorities — notably Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), who fought in the military there. Indeed, the Caucasus as a literary setting is most often associated with Russian Romanticism and Lermontov, its most famous practitioner. His novel A Hero of Our Time (1840), whose Byronic protagonist finds himself stationed in the Caucasus like his creator, serves as a foundational text of the Russian novelistic tradition. This work highlights the way many European Russian authors exoticized the Caucasus as the polar opposite of European Russia: warm, lush, romantic, and full of adventure, yet also a foreign, non-Christian space of savagery and violence.

If the Caucasus has for the most part been written about from the point of view of Russocentric outsiders, Ganieva represents it as an insider focusing on Dagestani people and events, while sending up Russians who have no cultural understanding of the region. In the novel’s opening chapter — the only one set in Moscow — Patya becomes the object of fascination for a group of Russians when she goes to an acquaintance’s dacha for a party. When one of the guests begins describing his time in the Caucasus while serving in the army, she laughs at him — “You must be mixing up the nineteen-nineties with the nineteenth century” — and subsequently decides that it is easier not to argue when he asks whether she has to undergo a “gynecological exam every month” to ensure that she is still a virgin.

Ganieva’s works show a society that is much more nuanced than these Russian stereotypes suggest. Dagestan is a place where tradition vies with modernization. Those with hardline religious views chat up prospective partners on the internet: for example, Timur, a fundamentalist political youth organizer and denier of evolution, insists that he and Patya are meant to marry because they have been corresponding for several months. Crucially, Ganieva depicts a range of characters’ Islamic practices. Patya and Marat are modern secular Muslims. Patya tells Timur, “I don’t pray. That’s not happening,” while Marat refuses to consider marrying a woman who wears a headscarf and throws a proselytizer out of a cafe in which he and Patya are on a date — itself a modern concept. Marat’s friend, Rusik-the-Nail, eccentric by his society’s standards, walks out into the street with a placard declaring, “I am an agnostic,” for which he unsurprisingly suffers immense consequences. While most of the society is religious, there is a definitive split between families like Patya’s and Marat’s, who practice a conventional form of Islam, and those like Timur and his friends, who represent the Wahhabi fundamentalism encroaching on the region, which many of the other characters find abhorrent. This split is embodied in the two warring mosques in the village: the regular “mosque on the avenue” and the extremist one “across the tracks” that radicalizes its attendees. While fundamentalism is spreading — more women are wearing hijabs and there are violent clashes between the mosques — it has not completely taken hold. Ganieva has stated that she sees the tendency toward hardline practices as a problem in the region, and her works capture Dagestan in a moment of flux, the path it will head down still unfinalized.

Moreover, as a woman writer, Ganieva injects a different gender dynamic into the Caucasus narrative. The Russians who wrote about the region were largely men writing about male protagonists; Ganieva’s own Salam, Dalgat! and The Mountain and the Wall also feature male protagonists, with the latter especially depicting women as secondary characters in largely clichéd terms. But she takes a different approach in Bride and Groom, alternating the chapters between Patya’s and Marat’s points of view. Arguably, Patya’s point of view predominates, at least until the very end, since her chapters are in first person, while Marat’s are in third person. As a character, Patya is independent and headstrong, with ideas that conflict with the traditional mores of her society, which brand women sluts for sleeping with their boyfriends, as happens to her friend, and even prohibit them from wearing pants in public. She questions the narrowly domestic roles women are expected to assume in a society obsessed with marriage; as she wryly observes when she goes into town, “A wedding salon on every block […] Weddings, weddings, weddings. As though there was nothing else to do.”

To be sure, this society insists on marriage for men as well as women. Marat comes home to his village because his parents have rented out the banquet hall for his wedding and a bride must be found in short order. His mother personally escorts him to meet the women on the list she has compiled for this purpose. Yet marriage demands affect women’s lives more. While his parents will lose their deposit on the banquet hall if a wife is not found, Marat can return to his job in Moscow. In contrast, Patya’s mother refuses to let her go back to Moscow, insisting that she must stay in the village and find a husband; at 25, she is reminded at every turn that she is “[a] little long in the tooth for a bride.” While she eventually becomes engaged to Marat, she does so on her own terms. Even though everyone strongly encourages her to marry Timur, she rejects him because he treats her like an object, and although her family ultimately agrees with her choice of groom, it initially goes against their wishes. At the same time, Ganieva does not always depict Patya consistently. In the scene of their declaring their love for each other, which occurs toward the end of the novel, Patya’s responses to Marat — for example, she assures him, “Go ahead and tell me. I will understand,” when she clearly doesn’t — seem as though Ganieva is relying on cultural clichés of how women in love should talk to the men they are in love with. (In Apollonio’s translation the scene reads more neutrally than in Russian.)

Patya and Marat’s courtship unfolds against the social and political tensions around them, which form the backbone of the story and ultimately determine its outcome. The central event occupying everyone as the two arrive in the village is the arrest and imprisonment of Khalilbek, a man whose status in the community is nothing short of mythic:

Khalilbek was omnipotent, omnipresent, and more […] He had a finger in every pie and knew the details of the most minor matters; at the same time, he was behind all major shifts in power, missing persons cases, and fateful decisions.

Because of his epic powers, many believe he is “Khidr, a prophet,” a man of God and divine wisdom. At the same time, he is imprisoned on charges of corruption and murder and is directly responsible for the death of Adik, Marat’s half-brother and his father’s illegitimate son, whom Khalilbek ran over in his car several years previously. Although Khalilbek’s highly ambiguous nature is never fully resolved, the surprising reason behind Adik’s murder and Khalilbek’s role in the closing scene of the novel does suggest a particular reading. It is the confluence of external circumstances — Adik’s past actions, the jealousy of Marat’s ex-lover, the unscrupulousness of the local police in their efforts to root out fundamentalism — that ultimately decides the private fates of Patya and Marat, underscoring individuals’ precarious position in a world largely out of their control.

The novel’s ambiguous ending, while not entirely satisfying, works well enough. What works markedly less well is Ganieva’s decision to include an afterword in the English version, whose aim, as she explains, “is to address a quiet but very important subtext of the novel that has to do with Sufism, an esoteric Muslim teaching.” To be sure, Sufism is not a topic with which most of her English-speaking readership will be familiar, and it is understandable why she feels the need to elaborate (although she seems not to have felt this need with her Russian audience, most of whom would be equally unfamiliar with it). Looking back at the novel with this subtext in mind does change one’s perception, including the interpretation of the ending, which is Ganieva’s goal. However, adding an afterword in which an author instructs her readers how to read her novel is decidedly an overreach. This misstep aside, Bride and Groom is an intelligent and interesting read that brings into focus a little-known part of the world while challenging cultural and literary clichés that have clustered around it. The fact that this corrective is the work of a woman author and a woman translator may be coincidental, but it is hardly surprising.

¤

Yelena Furman teaches Russian language and literature at UCLA. Her research interests include contemporary Russian women’s literature, Russian-American literature, and Anton Chekhov.

The post A Voice from the Caucasus: On Alisa Ganieva’s “Bride and Groom” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2MQKSSt

[liv--andletlive]

viva viva: beginning a contextual report

viva script [revisited] ZAO acts as a prologue. Its trajectory serves as an early iteration of what I now understand to be the intricacies and nuances of both my process and practise. ZAO established four fundamental themes; 1. Collaborations / Collectives             2. Language as Object                      3. Experimental Research Methods                               4. Narrative

The nature of briefs often demands engagement with spaces that are deliciously rich, yet equally knotty and complex. The weight of navigating these spaces individually can be incapacitating. Yet working as a collective established a culture in which humour and play are the toolkit to toy with muddy social, political and cultural ecologies. The collective is a negotiation of four individuals agency, ego and ownership to exist, think and intervene as one body. Although I present this as a surrendering of sorts, in retrospect, I think it was a kind of self-medication. I bore easily, I am easily distracted. The collective became more of a group of friends trying to make each other laugh but weirdly, this was where I found myself most productive, engaged and excited.

ZAO itself began with a deconstruction of language and narrative. The lecture series contextualising ZAO established a narrative of a particular tone. Its defined ZAO could be identified by the dehumanised presentations of social groups. However, the lectures failed to consider the opposite of this, ‘othering’ through a process of elevation, fetishisation or glorification. It was the unpicking of this subtlety within the presented narrative which formed the conceptual site for intervention.

24HR CULT:  AN ODE TO MY HUMMUS FETISH:  ELEPHANT AND CASTLE TIL I D1E: HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Sarnoff Mednicks articulation is useful when trying to explain what experimental research methods actually are. Mednicks suggests ‘creativity is an associative memory that works exceptionally well.’ Experimental methodologies exploit this ‘associative memory’ of language and its material culture comprised of practices, politics, behaviours, norms, materials, processes and cultural narratives. They are a physical articulation of the subject matter and an unpicking of the ecology they inhabit. 

Around week three we encountered what Dom described as a ‘wobble’, although this felt unproductive and uncomfortable, in retrospect this was one of the most telling moments of the project. Maxine Naylor and Ralph Ball discuss the ‘biological rivalry between the eye and the vocal chords’ in ‘Form Follows Idea’, articulating how language can pose problematic in design contexts. Design itself a visual language and discourse stating:

  ‘words allow us to live in our heads where we can always remain mentally pregnant with ideas, ideas are safe and protected in the deliciously speculative womb. Giving birth is a much more painful reality’. This is useful when attempting to understand the realities of executing these methodologies. ‘The 24hr Cult’ was a kind of labour, disjointed, frantic and ridiculous, soon the body of ’The Channel’ lay in our arms but we were all blind to what it demanded nor what it even was. Experimental research methods are physical explorations of the ecology of a subject, but the disparity between our linguistic and visual language results in a psychodrama. The ‘wobble’ draining and gruelling, but it was a translation process, it was a stretching of our associative memory. It wasn’t until we happened upon a meme that visually and linguistically articulated that which we were trying to say all along that we could decipher that which our project was missing, narrative. THE CHANNEL: 

If language was our object, our design is narrative. This is how Exercise Easy came to be. When we realised our ambition was to manufacture the extravagant facade of truth, toeing to line between the ridiculous and incomprehensible, establishing the scenario was relatively easy. GET MOIST - EXERCISE EASY: 

“Narrative is one of the large categories or systems of understanding that we use in negotiations with reality.” I feel this is critical when considering the tone of these films, they’re playful, light hearted and funny, I suppose, and comedy has been paramount to engage both myself as the designer and the audience as the ‘user’ in the subject. I think its useful to note a few things that were touched upon in ‘Critical Design in Context’ (Matt Malpass) in regards to the function of satire in design and discourse.

Horatian satire: ‘optimistic, less political, humorous [but] identifies folly […] through techniques of antithesis, burlesque and metaphor’. This is what Exercise Easy crystallised, using satire as an instrument to execute this narrative, ‘we are extending our understanding of function and our understanding of agency.(Matt Malpass)’ A joke operates by establishing a preconceived notion and its the abrupt swerve of the expected  evokes laughter, in the disparity between the expected conclusion and the punchline lies an opportunity to highlight, subvert, challenge and critique. However, my practise does so through physical objects and design poetics, when language is comedically clumsy or linguistically restrictive, design poetics can afford a sensitive kind of audience engagement. Satire acts as the mechanics and provoking laughter is its function, ultimately this serves to underscore my design practise as a discourse and a mode of critical reflection of our inherited cultural narratives.

ZAO was productive and ridiculous and fun, but reestablished anxieties that the summer had long numbed me to.

I do bore

 I am easily distracted

   I am highly self-critical

     I have in the past had incapacitating fear of failure

       I am damningly competitive

         and most of all, I am annoyingly self-aware

but I am far from a rarity, I am product of my time. My language choice here is critical. During this reflection of my practise I’ve touched upon notions of my perceived ‘productivity’ a handful of times and I think it’s important to note the presence of the language of capital and capitalism. Collective agency really is my self-medication to the anaesthesia of individualism. This struck me during the project itself as I’d noticed the absence of a certain weight in my chest, and resultantly, my behaviours and choices felt unapologetic, undiluted versions of myself. Before ‘escape’ there were talks of trying to work with new people in alternative ways. After a few disparaging comments rang through the studios about everything being done before, I suppose a large portion of us were in a state of reflexive impotence. Our value, productivity felt invalid as our contribution to our creative market was redundant. CorpDes was a tantrum, a reactionary fit of frustration.

Although language did not seemingly play as poignant a role in ‘escape’, its use did draw parallels to both 2.1 and 2.4. When we begin to build fictions, these fictions develop a kind of logic, in turn, words begin to ascertain new meaning. From ‘ultimate consumption’, ‘disposable cults’, ‘decentralised film’ to ‘charity work’ to ‘Alfonso Jack’, an evolving language is imperative to embellishing these narratives and broader fictions, as it allows for them to grow into their own living kind of ecology.

PT 1: Narrative  Build    Graphics.

Narrative: write brief company history. establish timelines, frameworks and rules within to begin ficitionalising. E.g All personnel to be randomly assigned a department, each person to write self a CV.   [OLIVIA FITZPATRICK: A VER GD AND COOL DESIGNER, A CV]

Build: responsible for props, set. Each ‘employee’ to have standardised cubicle space. 

Graphics: Establishing company ID. 

PT 2: Thinking through performance. Each ‘department’ responsible for group activity.   Design - Charity event      Logistics(?) - PR vid         Human Resources - ‘Faking it’ workshop. 

2.2 established experimental research methods which sought to appropriate the mundane and exaggerate, toy with and parody its material culture. These methodologies were established through organising ourselves into smaller groups and departments of around six or seven. These smaller collaborations were a continuous negotiation of concept working towards a series of micro-deadlines. These restrictions and rules were the intrinsic fabric of our process, stimulating alternative modes of thinking and problem solving. Micro-deadlines drove our productivity to construct the physical space of CorpDes. “invention now lies more in reconnecting, and building authentic, narrative layers of meaning back into objects that have lost meaningful sig- ni cance, rationale and value under the shear proliferation of bad copies.”

Thus, “it is important to re-establish visual contemplation and communication [...] Its time to provide critical, ironic and playful commentary on our condition and our cultures of consumption of both material and in- formation.”. In turn, physicalising our narrative in such away was just as integral to our process. It established a space into which we could think through not just making but equally, performance.

THE BBBC: A mockumentary seeking to uncover the illegal activities of CorpDes, its CEO and untrustworthy employees. Filmed over two days, broken down into a timeline by narrative during week one.

Timeline:

The central concept of CorpDes itself wasn’t an attempt to be a knock off version of the office, but rather utilising a large enough framework to encompass 36 practitioners. The nuances of this were conceived through a series of defined rules and performances. Although the narrative itself I wouldn’t say was particularly original, its wider narrative as a kind of protest in the context of an art school education is one I think epitomises my responsibilities as a practitioner. The pervading narrative of our increasingly marketised education system (especially in the context of neoliberalism) is one machiavellian competition, both on a micro and macro level. CorpDes as a vehicle to allow 36 practitioners to collaborate allowed for us to reclaim the learning space as our own, not a space of which we have bought and so must conform to the bureaucracies and rigid limitations of. Ultimately, CorpDes acts as institutional critique. Its full context allows for the reframing of our thinking of educational spaces. But herein lies a paradox. The limitations of an art school education imposed the very restrictions which provoked and allowed for CorpDes to exist.

CorpDes’s conclusion did not satisfy my yearning for collective agency. Decentralised was a collective of ten.

Acted as the bridge between our immaterial subject matter, blockchain for example, and orchestrating the physical metaphors that acted as a means of understanding their mechanics. Like 2.1, language was the initial area of interrogation in order to establish experimental research methods. BLOCKCHAIN PIZZA, BLOCKCHAIN SANDWICHES: 

The research methods deployed in the live brief echoed characteristics seen in 2.1 and 2.4. Our process was constructed through a continuous use of limitations and restrictions. We had to work as a body of ten. We could not impose our will over the decision making process, but rather this was down to chance and timing. However, the face of these research methods changed as our mode of conceptualising them changed. As we dealt with immaterial subject matters of abstract systems and structures, drawing became integral to understanding. In turn, we used drawings to restructure ourselves as a collective, in turn changing the fundamental configuration of our experimental research methods. This further serves to echo Ball and Naylor’s meditations on language in design as a discourse. As a collective of most likely visual thinkers, drawing became our most effective was of communication. This laid the foundations of our development. FRESH WITHIN, THEREFORE A FATHER:  ALSO, BRUTALIST MAYHEM: 

Decentralised film attempted to restructure the film making process to relinquish our individual agency, control and ego over its outcome. In turn, we wanted to establish a framework of which would facilitate this. As a means of doing so we began to build a body of film footage comprised of varying sorts of shots. Our ambition was for this to act as a library from which anyone could construct a narrative.

Ultimately, our narrative was a provocation of enquiry to speculate on a kind of alternative future, to consider how decentralised systems will impact our cultural ones. To conclude, this exemplifies my purpose as a practitioner. Designing as a method, design allows for speculation, interrogation and enquiry. As epitomised in Fiction as Method, ‘fictioning can be thought instead as an invitation that we strategically extend to the radical unknowability of the future’

viva viva ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- feedback:  evidence/detail processes in explicit detail to make critiques accessible to ppl unfamiliar w projects

[terrapaxmovement-blog]

Pantheism

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

You both like philosophy.

Stranger: Hasta La Vista

You: What is your opinion on Boredom?

Stranger: I think it's bad, but it's pretty low down on the scale of bad things.

You: Why do we feel boredom?

You: especially when there is always so much to do

Stranger: My mother always says, 'A bored person is a boring person'.

Stranger: Which is kinda ironic if you think about it.

You: I think your mother is a sensible woman

You: I think we also feel bored because we are almost always overly stimulated

You: No more room for our imaginations to breathe and explore

Stranger: I agree. I blame TV ande computers.

Stranger: When I was a kinder I played with spoons and pencils.

You: Always, we are pushed to do things, look at things, distractions

Stranger: Short attention-spans.

You: a kinder hahaa are you german?

Stranger: No I just felt like adopting that word.

You: I admire your linguistic diversity. What do you think the purpose of language is?

Stranger: To communicate ideas.

You: Can we ever really do that though?

You: Is the idea I have the same for you when I paint it with words?

Stranger: I dunno, if I say 'there are three elephants in the next valley', and you have some picture involving elephants and three of them, I think I got what I needed.

You: I suppose in an evolutionary way, but isn't language more than that? I'm reading a book on the evolution of the homo sapiens and it discusses how language is much more meaningful

You: Other animals have language too then

Stranger: Grunts and ooks.

You: A dolphin can communicate an idea as well as we can, what makes our language different?

Stranger: We can probably communicate more complicated ideas.

Stranger: I've never seen a dolphin in a calculus class.

You: hahhah touché

You: Calculus is funny

You: Do you think mathematics are inherently part of the UniverseÉ

You: ?

Stranger: Oh that's a question of Platonis

Stranger: *platonism

You: Indeed. Pythagoreans seemed to think that mathematics were the independent substrate of reality.

You: So, did we invent mathematics or discover them?

You: And what does that say about the universe we live in?

Stranger: That's an interesting question.

Stranger: I guess I could say 'did we invent temperature?'

Stranger: The concept and its interrelations are always there, surely

Stranger: But it wasn't called 'celsius' and measured in degrees

Stranger: It just was

Stranger: *fahrenheit for the Americans

You: Yes I see your point. But what about mathematical constants that we use in this constructed language of measurements?

You: What would life be like if Plank's constant was different?

You: If Avogadro's number was off by 1 or 2

You: Would life have evolved differently, if at all?

Stranger: Some people say so; they believe everything has to be finely tuned for the universe to enjoy life, mankind and Oprah

Stranger: (the next evolution of mankind)

You: hahahah you have a dry wit about you that I can't help but smile at, friend.

You: I often wonder if I am the only one who wonders these things. It appears I am not.

You: I am very uncomfortable in the world we live in, and I'm not sure why. All of it seems so very alien at times.

Stranger: The natural world, or the man-made world?

You: Civilization

You: I enjoy taking retreats into Nature

You: I feel more at peace with things, less worried about everything

You: Knowing I am in good hands

Stranger: Yes, you're definitely not alone in that. It's the reason city-slickers long for countryside holidays.

You: Isn't it funny how we long for the every day interaction of the city life, but sometimes feel equally compelled to simply leave it all behind? Humans are strange and paradoxical creatures

You: We are never comfortable and always need just that little something more

You: We long for that which we cannot have

Stranger: It's almost poetically tragic. The poor and aspirant dream of wealth, and zealously work the accrue it. The rich find their treasures empty and unfulfilling, and eye the integrity and homeliness of simple life.

Stranger: *to accrue

You: I won't ask you what humans want, but I would like to know what you, as a human being (presumably) want/

You: What do you want to experience?

Stranger: I'm a complex mish-mash of base desires and intellectual hopes mixing together.

Stranger: On some levels, I want to be rich, famous and desired.

Stranger: On others, I want to know everything and study the mysteries of life.

Stranger: And on another, I just want to be a better person.

You: I couldn't have said it better myself

You: It's amazing how despite all our disparities, our distinctions seem to be bridges rather than barriers

Stranger: A community is a union of unlikes.

You: Do you think it is possible that we are all fundamentally the same consciousness?

You: That we are that which has been created?

You: first we wanted to make, then we wanted to experience what we had made?

Stranger: That's some crazy talk. I definitely think (most) people have many points of common interest, similar ways of viewing the world (this is why jokes and books work), and such in common.

Stranger: Perhaps this is the result of us all having basically the same DNA.

Stranger: Compared to a potato, anyway.

Stranger: On the other hand, we are individuals. When I talk to someone with a radically different political or philosophical worldview to my own, I come up against how two people can take the same thing and go in very different directions with it.

You: But isn't the multiplicity of perspectives the purpose of life? To learn and to have fun in any and every way imaginable? Do distinctions take away from the tangential experiences all of us as a collective would have wanted to experience life?

You: We are not all the same, what I am suggesting is that we all receive our conscious logos from the same place

You: For example, what would you do if you were a God?

You: Would you only want to create worlds and watch them from the outside?

You: Or would you want to partake in the life you have sprung from your hands, take all of its different twists and turns and feel surprised because you don't know where it will take you

Stranger: I think you're a closet pantheist.

Stranger: It's OK - it's 2018.

You: I'm not in the closet, I am an open pantheist

You: I'm merely sharing my world view with you

You: But my views are much more complex than that

You: Unfortunately I have to make it to a class on the other side of campus

You: It has been quite a pleasure, stranger

Stranger: It's a been a rare and genuine delight. I wish you all the good things in life.

You: To you as well, conversations like this are what keep me from ending it all

You: Much love

Stranger: Adios, muchacho.

You have disconnected.

[researchmethodologies]

27/10/2017 Visual Research I decided to spend the afternoon in the library to gain a better understanding of what ”Research Methodologies” means in relation to my own practice as a graphic designer. After a while, I came across an interesting book called ”Visual Research” by Ian Noble and Russell Bestley, which is part of the essential reading list for this module. I found it defines key terms very well and provides a clear introduction to the different areas of research methodologies across practical and theoretical applications. At this, the authors underline the importance of “making and doing”, as opposed to research’s predominately analytical nature in academic reading and writing. Through a number of projects by students, design studios and independent industry professionals, “Visual Research” analyses the methodology that led to these outcomes. I think it is always really great to see how sophisticated bodies of research and experimentation influence the final visual solutions.

Research in graphic design stretches across different areas. It is the process of observation, discovery and recording (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 54) and often provides the foundations in the design process of problem solving. For me, research is a central and defining activity in my practice as I believe it can inform my approach and generate a way of developing new ideas and techniques of thinking and making. As a constant process of enquiry, the researcher should approach a design problem in a focused and systematic way to evaluate strategies in which meaningful and effective solutions can be created. This requires the construction of rational and logical systems of design thinking to investigate the contexts in which the design problem exists (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 54). Finding answers to the factors what, where, when, why, who and how often provides a good starting point for further inspection. As information are gathered, they are then collated into a meaningful whole in order to evaluate and test hypotheses or design proposals (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 54). Central to the work as a visual communicator, it is also vital to reflect on how well a design outcome responds to the needs of the audience and/or meets the demands of a client’s brief. Research is not a linear process so going back in time, reconsidering applied strategies and testing again will be part of it too.

As my main interest for this module lies in the role of the audience in the design process, I was particularly interested in the following two chapters: In ”Audience and Message - The Receiving End”, Noble and Bestley introduced the notion of authorship as well as the social and cultural responsibility that comes with being a creative practitioner. To communicate with the audience, the designer first has to understand the cultural and social values that shape them. At this, two definitions were given: The term “social” relates to human society and its members; It describes the context in which we humans live together in communities or organised groups, the interaction, communication and conflicts between individuals (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 132) and how demographic similarities and differences can be combined. On the other hand, the term “culture” describes the society at large at a particular time and place. It encompasses complex areas such as attitudes and behaviour that are characteristic of a specific social group or organisation. As an extremely broad theme, “culture” also touches a number of parallel and distinct areas (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 132). The production of design within these social, cultural and political contexts places the designer and the audience as co-participants within predefined frameworks (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 130), where audience research can establish a foundation for effective, meaningful and relevant user-centred solutions.

Responding to an audience’s needs and communicating in a language that they are able to understand isn’t always easy. In an earlier chapter right at the beginning of the book, Noble and Bestley introduced the theories of denotation and connotation, which are also closely linked to the concept of semiotics. The term denotation is used to describe the primary, literal meaning of an image or a piece of communication, usually in relation to a particular target audience or group of readers (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 46). In other words, it discusses what an object is, rather than what it means or metaphorically could stand for. Connotation, on the other hand refers to the range of secondary meanings, either intended or unintended, within a form of communication (text, written, verbal or visual): the range of meanings and interpretations of an object or thing, its qualities and impressions in the eyes of the reader (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 46). According to Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, language can be understood as a system of signs, made of a signifier (an object) and a signified message (it’s meaning) (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 92). This relationship of encoding (the designer) and decoding (the audience) is fundamental to all forms of communication (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 46). Generally, the meaning of the image is not fixed by its creator or author but equally determined by the reader as she or he brings with a range of personal knowledge and experience (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 46). I am really fascinated in what people see, what these impression are based on and how experiences might differ. This has been widely discussed throughout psychological fields in semiotics, a term developed by American philosopher, lexicographer and polymath Charles S. Pierce. He was concerned with the world we inhabit and how we use language and signs to understand it. In many of his writings he stated that there are three principal kinds of signs; iconic signs, indexical signs and symbolic signs (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 92)

Iconic signs are likenesses that convey the idea of the thing they represent by imitating them.

Indexical signs convey information by indicating their physical connection with the thing they represent.

Symbolic signs are general signs that have become associated with their meanings by conventional usage.

Communicating through direct and indirect means involves different levels of audience interaction. I am very interested in the different positions the audience takes in the design process, from passive spectators to active participants who decode and construct meaning within visual communication (Noble and Bestley, 2011: 92). In terms of problem solving, I believe it is important to let the audience be involved right from the beginning of the research stage up to the presentation of finalised design solutions.

People often associate research with academic reading and writing, but it is far more than that. Research can be made about Design (design histories, styles, influences, models and approaches), into Design (exploration of design methods and practices, including visual testing and experimentation) and through Design (investigating and articulating a particular subject area through the development of new visual artefacts). Generally, as a very organised and pragmatic person, I believe that research should be structured and follow a specific aim. Especially for problem solving it is important to find answers to the questions what, where, when, why, who and how as they can build a foundation and bring relevance to the design outcome. However, with an emphasis on the three different types of research in graphic design, the interesting thing about creative professions is that often you don’t really know what you are looking for. It’s not a linear process, but can take rather unexpected turns sometimes. The book helped me to better understand the different ways of doing research and how I can incorporate them into my practice. I enjoyed reading about audience involvement in the design process and will continue to research into the direct and indirect messages encoded in pieces of visual communication.

Sources: Noble, I. and Bestley, R. (2011). Visual research, 2nd Edition. London: Bloomsbury. Photograph by Merbecks, V. (2017)