User:Queenfeline/What has been done so far

"Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

I read that quote on the declaration website and that pretty much sums up why i think language is so fascinating.

at the same time / during / parallel to

NOTATION

How is notation a language we can read, write and understand?

What (even) is language?

What is in it that we think we understand?

What are the objects of understanding, what is there to understand?

What does it even mean to understand?

I was very intrigued by the many ways of notation and how humans can learn to read them. Thinking about notation further as graphic events made me think: What sound does a square make? In what way is that different to a circle or a triangle? What other ways are possible as a notation system? Thats when i listened to music and started drawing many different ways of how i imagine notation to look.

How do we feel the music? How is there emotion released through sounds? Is it something learned from movies and theater? Or is it something inherently human?

What kind of information goes from the consciousness of the composer into the consciousness of the listener? How is the information stored in the message?

Language has linguistic abilities - we just don't know much about them.

because it can be heard it therefore has to convey a certain content, some kind of meaning gets transported through it.

– and because Musik happens in public spaces and has a kind of communicative function. Grounded in that lies the assumption that it has to be some kind of language.

IDIOTICON

Doing a masters program in a different language than your mother tongue is challenging. A lot of new words I never heard are flying through the air and I can not really grasp all of them. It was in that moment i realized i need my own dictionary. A place to put all the words that doesn't make sense to me. Going hand in hand with our Alphabet Soup i quite like the idea, that there is not just one single meaning of a word, but because we're from all over the world, being raised and socialised in different cultures, a word has different meanings and translations for all of us. And there's a value in exactly that.

A funny thing about the name is, that Idioticon is a synonym for dictionary and the definition says: A reference book listing alphabetically terms or names important to a particular subject or activity along with discussion of their meanings and applications. I meaaaaan come on!!! Besser wird's nicht. It is so perfect because it is not just a dry dictionary, it is my personal collection of words. I annotate them and write my thoughts related to them. Some of them are new to me and i didn't knew the meaning so i looked them up. For others i knew one meaning, but another way of interpreting emerged out of reading a text or discussing something in class.

I see this as an ever evolving project. I'm putting new words as they find me. Thinking and annotating. Whenever. Maybe this will become part of my masters, maybe it is its own project and i will make a little booklet out of it. Who knows, but for now this is much fun and i'm looking forward to continue working on that!

unfinished business

I started a documentation document on the debriefs of our radio shows. Unfortunately somewhere along the way i stopped the process and never looked into that document again. Now i cannot find the pads and all the memories are in the very back of my mind... I'm kinda sad now, that i didn't continued with it! That could've turned out super cool.

What is may take away from that? Well i should definitely document the process better. I think I stopped, because there was so much documentation all around me so i got lazy and thought, well this isn't just my project but everyones... Now I know that this is a stupid thought! Documentation is always worth it and is for me from me. Even more important: what everyone else is doing should not control what i do or not do!

Ideas that haven't been brought into existence

Define definition

A website (API?) made from a dictionary. There will only be one sentence on the screen. Starting with the definition of the word definition. Then the definition will use different words, that also needs to be defined. So one can click themselves through the definitions of all the words that are linked to one another. (I would have done that, but i pretty soon noticed, that im not as fit in coding as i though i was. Even though we had a lesson on APIs – without any help, this stays just the idea it is right now.)

click and draw

A website where you can press keys and it will display a designated graphic form on a random place and in a random size on the screen. Every key gets its own form. Additionally the mouse will leave a line behind, so one can kinda like draw with the mouse.(I'm thinking now, maybe a screenshot button?) I'M hoping for that to create a nice random layout/composition.

When code (CSS) is a way of designing with language to what extend is it poetry?

Doriane brought up this question and she is doing research on the poetic materiality of CSS and i think that is dope! It kinda connects to the question of how notation is a language. While notation is a system of symbols and can be learned, CSS is more like a poem-ishy thing. You design with actual words.

• own little zine from screenshots?
• web extensions
• wool webside