The map is not the territory

Pad 18.09: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/methodsSeshOne

Exercise:what, how, why

Illustrated dictionary of fictional etymology

“Illustrated dictionary of fictional etymology” is an illustrated dictionary offering a personal rewriting of existing terms which are given a different meaning from the actual one. It consists as a book containing 81 words with two definitions, an actual one and a fictional one together with 61 illustrations depicting the unauthentic terms.
I started to select several words from the Italian dictionary, basing my choice on mostly compound and less know words which could be related, as a fist approach, with other definitions. For instance, I used the word “falsabraca”, a compound word which could be split in two existing terms: falsa, which means fake, and braca which means trousers. I rewrote the definition basing it on this spontaneous explanation ( =“fake trousers”) whereas the real meaning of the word is “a middle age machinery used during sieges”. The following passage consisted of putting the two definitions next to each other together with the illustration related to the fictional meaning.
The idea of the project was born some years before the starting of the project: i used to make this game and to get into etymology related topics with a friend of mine during boring winter evenings. My aim was to create a book which could get the reader involved in process of automate thinking and learning at the same time, making them acquire unused and obsolete words of the Italian language in a funny way, which could be enjoyable by both children and adults. The illustrated dictionary open itself to a reflection about language and the impact of previous knowledge in linguistic topics.

Lemon porn

Lemon porn is a 40 pages illustrated fanzine designed for the communication agency and online printing company “Lemon Print”. I took part in its realisation as a member of an illustration collective composed by two persons. The fanzine assume the form of a 70ies styled porn magazine depicting erotic scenes involving both human and lemons characters, to create a curious connection with the company name.
Due to of the short deadline set by the company we had to complete the project in a week. Since the fanzine is made by two illustrators we initially selected a strict gamma of four colours to create a common style. After that we decided to paint the scenes splitting the amount of the pages in two. All the illustrations took their visual inspiration from scenes from popular porn magazines.
The aim of the company that we had to pursue was to create a funny and amusing fanzine, which could attract the attention of their possible clients: in this particular case the target was made by publishers and graphic designers who may need online printing services. All the stylistic decision that we made about subjects, characters and scenes served the idea of using a “fake” porn language to attire people interest on the company’s services.

Readings

"The world of the symbolic-a world of the machine” F. Kittler

“Methodological distinctions”

In this essay the theorist Friedrich Kittler reads the difference in positions on media in Freud’s and Lacan’s work. Since the two authors are separated by the invention of the computer, Lacan is able to consider this event and to move forward from the idea of psychology as a natural science.
Lacan shaped his “methodological distinctions” assigning a category of media to the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. Because of the nature of its language, Lacan recognises the computer as the medium of symbolic.
Differently, he thinks that the medium of the imaginary needs to be found in a more optical shape, following both the patterns of gestalt theory and the cartesian geometry.
Ultimately, since it is necessary to find a medium for reality, Lacan found it a place inside the existence of analog storage devices like phonograph records. This kind of storage systems exists in their materiality and they are not equipped with true or false, absence or presence functions.

“The Mirror stage”

Precisely the same year in which Alan Turing was working on his Universal Discrete Machine, Jacques Lacan was developing his idea of the Mirror stage, a psychological theory which moves itself from the belief that infants can perceive their reflection in a mirror as unitarian from the age of six months. Mirrors are able to give humans the optical illusion of unity in the same way humans are not able to perceive the fragmentation of images existing in cinema, making them appear as a continuum image.

"On the Endless Infrastructural Reach of a Phoneme",Pedro Oliveira

from Affective Infrastructures, Transmediale/art&digitalculture Issue #3

“[…]what are the words, the scenes, the shapes that may elicit you to pick up the phone and call home?”
The assay focuses on the emotional, cultural and linguistic aspects concerning the telephone medium. According to the author the using of the telephone is able to evoke a sense of familiarity in both the speaker and the listener: it is a familiar medium, not only used to bring us home but also to shape it.
Aiming to articulate this point the author mentions the work of Gloria Anzaldùa, a poet and writer who touched the topics of the evocative power of objects and the role of the storytellers. An object, in non-westerns cosmologies, is filled with the power of the relationships it contains. Power resides in the relationships occuring between the object and the body because our bodies change when touched by an object. This alliance creates the affective infastructures that dwell inside us, changing our world.
This story, which depends on the telephone, is not only about the storyteller but it also concentrates on the algorithm that is going to process it, to convert it and to measure its coefficients. In this story we are facing two elements, both human and machinic. The telephone is a device that is not able to bring us home but it is certainly capable of recreating the sense of it: it is “[…]connected to the wall, connected to the network, connected to the system. Connected to the border.”

Asylum Seeker

In sociolinguistic research, when it comes to record conversations between two or more speakers, a particular technique had revealed itself as more efficient. Since the presence of the researcher is able to affect considerably the result they are opting for recording conversations between speakers with a familiar presence, removing their physical presence.
In other cases the power relationships reveale themself, becoming even hypervisible. In order to clarify the nationality of the applicant in 2017 the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (known as BAMF) started to use an accent recognition software provided by the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. The software’s database for speech and accent recogntion, the speech corpora, is particularly focused on speakers of Levantine, Egyptian and variations of Arabic. The error margin of the software is 20 percent. Regardless, it is interesting to notice that the most popular “arabic-oriented” databases had been named “Call friend” or “Call home”.
In this power relationship we can easily feel the contrast between what is the value of the content of the speech for the teller and the importance of the form for the listener. The attempt of making people speak naturally can move the research into a dangerous ethical field since the telephone could be used to recreate a sense of familiarity, using emotional topics but also creating familiar scenes and shapes. Telephone may be used to “[…] remind to the asylum seeker that “home” is always elsewhere. Home, it seems, is forever out of reach.”