Abstract
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a shift in the vocabulary that we absorb, process, and speak back into the world. The term “social distancing” and the parting words “stay safe,” among countless other idioms, quickly became familiar additions to our communal vocabulary conveying our lived experience. “Sacred Texts” engages this dialogue as an installation pairing popular pandemic phrases with vinyl-cut illuminations from ancient manuscripts to explore how repetition can participate in both the generation and the destruction of meaning. As each phrase is repeated throughout the installation, the letter-forms increasingly break apart into fields of illegible markings. The designs that surround and connect the bodies of text draw from the artists’ backgrounds, combining patterns and imagery from Persian and Irish illuminated manuscripts. While the decorative elements in the Sacred Texts installation strive to elevate the text’s self-importance with sacred cloaking, they simultaneously undermine its value with cheap digital materiality and the overt absence of a painstaking handmade process. The fields of dissolving characters prompt viewers to consider repetition itself as a medium and how this medium navigates the complexities of semantic satiation, in which repeated words lose their meaning, and the illusory truth effect, in which repeated statements construct and reinforce meaning. This tension reflects the way we filter the constant streams of information broadcast at us and questions whether this repetition helps us to remember or encourages us to forget as we block out redundancies.
Presenters
Brian FranklinAssociate Professor, Wonsook Kim School of Art, Illinois State University, Illinois, United States Ladan Bahmani
Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, Wonsook Kim School of Art, Illinois State University, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Repetition, Language, Semantic Satiation, Illusory Truth Effect, Asemic, Illumination, Arduino
