(suspenseful music)
- I think so, but what does done mean?
(laughs) - Yeah.
- Text has this illusion of comprehensiveness.
(paper flipping)
Even if you've read something once,
it doesn't mean that you understand it.
So I sort of like to play with language
and making something either very, very legible
or making something very, very opaque.
And encouraging people to do the work of understanding it,
it's really an invitation,
come think with me.
(paper rustling) - Oh yeah.
Of all the family members,
I'm the most organizationally inclined.
So I have taken, whenever I go home,
steal a few more photos each time.
So my dad was converted to Islam in the early 1980s.
He basically was learning Islam by typewriting these notes.
(typewriter keyboard thumping)
He would photocopy pieces of religious texts,
and he would then paste them on a sheet of paper,
and they he would annotate them.
He came to make sense of things through this
repeated reading and rereading process.
I thought this was so lovely because I was thinking
about this idea of talking back to a text.
A text itself is never finished,
each time we read something new,
we're either annotating on the page
or annotating in our brain,
and we're creating what literally are new texts.
This active collaboration between the reader and the writer,
the text is there not to offer us a final meaning,
but it's actually there as an invitation
for us to actively engage with it.
(papers rustling)
If you look at (laughs) my dad and I's notes,
what he did as a study tool is basically my art practice.
(suspenseful music building)
(papers rustling)
Huh, that's literally exactly what I do now, I read a lot and do arts. (laughs)
Feel like our young selves know exactly what we wanna do.
(bright electronic music)
There's nothing that I've done in my life
that hasn't been focused on text.
I'm really interested in what words convey,
but also how they appear on the page,
on walls,
and public space.
What might it mean to see this
every Tuesday when you walk by?
What it means to sort of engage with the text
over and over and over?
Rereading as this ritual.
I'm really interested in the concept of the word
and what it carries,
as well it's actually trying to say or do.
(papers rustling)
When I'm looking for texts,
I'm usually not looking for a particular sentence.
I'm looking for a particular shape of a letter
or a shape of a word.
So I'll flip through any texts on my bookshelf
looking for the perfect A or the perfect B.
In a lot of ways I'm trying to figure out
the individual letter and then start piecing letters
and words together from there.
(suspenseful music)
So the one that I'm writing now from all these pieces
is "Should they be circling the echo mouth
that's sloped upward?"
Do I know what that means at this particular moment?
No, but there is something interesting to me
about the idea of circling an echo.
How do I take something that could be said
very, very plainly, and code it or use cryptography
to make it harder to understand?
We circle ambulate the affiliate's solution.
Sort of inviting people to go slow
instead of trying to rush to understanding.
If you read a sentence that immediately doesn't make sense,
you have two options, right?
You can ignore the sentence and move on,
or you can spend a bit of time unpacking it.
(gentle music)
It's almost a proxy for thinking
about how we can move through other ways
of reading the world with a bit more care and slowness.
Would ask that we spend a bit more time with things
that are confusing instead of writing them off.
I think a lot about what it actually means
to make myself legible, invisible.
When am I being intentionally opaque
and ensuring that not everyone can get in,
and when am I being very open and wanting
for more people to have access?
How you present yourself to the world that's legible
and appeasing to people,
versus I'm not gonna make myself known until I'm ready?
(gentle music)