Väinölä Laura
My meme is speech. The ability to speak is not innate in human beings, but it is a skill that the baby learns through interacting with other people. Usually it is the mother who plants the seed of speech in to the baby. Sure, the baby has the fertile soil for the speech meme to grow, but never the less, it’s just a soil. Speech and language are a defenite meme, a thing planted into you by your mother. Children who have for some reason grown outside of society, be it in caves with wolves, or at the bottom of a well, will never have the capability to communicate themselves verbally. People also learn a lots of different types of speech memes. In the schoolyard we learn and mimic the first cursewords, hanging out round your neighbourhood you learn the proper dialect of your area and social class, and at the working place you adapt the proper jargon of your trade. All this happens through mimicking memes. Speech is defenitely the most efficient communicative skill of a person. It is often being said that something like 90% of our communication is nonverbal. But I dare you to try ask the clerk of your grocerystore, where you can find a carton of eggs, using only your bodylanguage. You’d have to be Kylie Minogue to succeed in that.
In my meme project I plan to depict speech, by photographing mouths forming the different alphabets. I’m going to try to present the character and quality of each syllable though picture, sound and typography. As you press a letter on your computer keyboard, a mouth appears, making the right noise, and spitting out an type character. Then the character will set itself on a baseline. On this baseline you can collect words with the characters.
I want to apologize to Lucas for myself being absent on some of the classes. The reason is that I’m designing a 200 page book for our Institute of Design, that will be first shown at a design fair in Milano in april. I’m working under a tight schedule, trying to organise everything, photoshoots, interviews, gathering of the materials, doing the design.. It is the usual story that the promised material never comes in time, but you have to remind everyone personally. It’s a real shame that this book project is happening at the same time, since I was looking forward to this workshop a lot. I hope I’ll find the time somewhere to finish my meme before friday.
Working version in NodeBox:
looks good.
I have done some similar grafics recently. Check thisso out! http://www.hairespace.com/
- Markus