telewriting

Four pieces from Meaning in Mistakes, a series of 10 etched mirrors.

I began Meaning in Mistakes a few months ago. The initial idea came to me after receiving an email from a friend containing a short description of an experiment carried out at Carnegie Melon by the linguistics department. The research demonstrated the ability of readers to understand a block of text where the first character and last character of each word remain in place but the order of the inner characters is altered. For exmalpe lkie tihs. Most readers have little to no difficulty understanding a sentence like the former and this ease is attributed to the way in which we read; we look at the overall shape of a word rather than the individual letters. However, context must also play a part in this “reconstruction” as there must be a series of characters with the potential to be seen as at least 2 different words.

There are baseball infiedls.

There are non-religious infiedls.

Above, the character set infiedls is exactly a single character transposition from infidels or infields.

What interests me here is the notion of perception as an active rather than passive activity and the associations which may emerge between the coupled words. The viewer forms the set of characters into one more familiar. In this movement the viewer maintains their essential part in the relationship between the object being perceived and the subject perceiving the object. Tautologically, we see the world the way we do because that’s what we do.