Final work - the process

I began looking at conceptual writing in a huge way, and I looked at work by Vito Acconci, Victor Burgin and so on. I saw how importance was placed on pre-existing content and manipulation of it, finding relevance in existing texts in an entirely different manner. One of my favourite works was how the novel Nana was reduced simply to every sentence in the book that described light. The whole field remains absolutely fascinating to me, and I shall be working with it extensively in my spare time. 

After another task in the course that sealed my concept - we were told to find what we considered an "Indian face" and sum up what stereotypes and personal views summed up our view of the typical "Indian" - I decided to experiment with short, concise sentences against extremely basic images. 

My main concept - which again related closely with my personal work - was to show the negation of "sight", visuals, and how this leads to perception. I wanted to show how much of perception was affected by sight, and this co-related with my feeling of negating these visuals, and accepting only thought and ideas, and information. I was at a point where I felt at my wits end with the complex nature of making any field - whether it be visuals or writing - "perfect". So much of had to do with technicality and decoration, and I felt that I wanted to sum up these feelings with the most basic of raw material. I wanted to make text and place it against visuals that would simply negate itself, making the text more important in the image. This had the purpose of exploring text and words itself as a medium rather than writing as such, and also negating what is visually pleasing for what is conceptually significant. 

I had begun to form short, concise and yet vague sentences that summed up what my ideas were. The first of these was this sentence: I might as well be blind.

Some of the other sentences were these: 

This may be relevant to just one person 

They didn’t see it coming

I didn’t see it coming 

You didn’t see it coming 

Words that mean so much 

We used to know how to fly

Big and small have been reversed 

Fill in the blank with a memory

I eventually decided to stick to the first sentence, as it was the sentence that was most relevant to our exhibition. I placed the text against a red background first, and my initial concept was as simple as this: the colour red triggers an obvious emotional response in a viewer. Red is associated to many things,and regardless of the author, every colour has an impact on a viewer that is relevant to the viewer at that particular time. However, this visual impact is easily negated and mundane: it is a response that is momentary and vanishes immediately. So, what is the point of seeing this? What is the point of beholding an image to have an emotional reaction if something as simple as the colour red can trigger this? How is this truly impacting or changing anything? Hence, I might as well be blind.