Week 6/52

Week 6/52

Theme: Words

This week I found myself getting wrapped up in philosophy and semiotics (thank you, New Art History). I also found myself gagging at some of the cutesy submissions for the Project 52 group. As Valentine's is on Monday, I suppose this is to be expected, but I swear people... 'Love' is just ONE word and there are plenty more to chose from! And hearts are officially overrated: I never want to look at another one of those sweetheart candies again. Ick.

Anyway, back to philosophy and semiotics. The old adage of 'a picture is worth a thousand words' got me thinking. Aren't words just pictures, images, and shapes that we arbitrarily assign meaning to? Saussure defined words as signifiers, than enable meaning to be found if one is able to decode with the appropriate sign-system conventions. Although meaning itself is something entirely different and debatable, as cat, for example, means something entirely different from one person to the next. I am sure that everyone is aware of the fake study attributed to Cambridge University about the way we read words, but I think there is a certain element of truth to some of the things that are said: 'function words' enable better comprehension, but also that we do, to a certain extent, read and recognize words as a whole rather than letter by letter. This idea is largely corroborated by studies like this one emphasizing that we read through 'Bouma shapes'; the overall shape of a collection of letters rather than each individual letter itself. And if that doesn't make words pictures then I don't know what does.

So, in the manner of pictures I decided I would find graffiti to photograph. Great idea. Except that our city upped an anti-graffiti ordinance a few years ago, and hooligans and vagabonds are hard to come by in our neck of the woods. No matter. Enter trains that pass through lots of other cities with plenty of unsavory, artistic folk who like to decorate rusty carriages. Perfect. All it took was a trip down to the industrial (read: scary) part of town, with maybe or maybe not some trespassing, and a pair of bribed toddlers, and we get this:

Yay, graffiti. This was the picture I submitted to the group. Although it was a tough call between that and this:

And now you get to look through the other ones that I took, because I had fun, and I can't understand why you wouldn't want to see them.

Now that I look at them all together they look kind of grungy and tilt-y and sun-flare-y. Maybe it's my mood...

In other news, Evan had a very exciting day and got some big news. We are very happy. School is going great. And kids are (mostly) wonderful and growing-up-too-quickly, too.