Dotting Is and crossing Ts (I)

I thought about the idea of using language as a way of developing an intermedia art work when I was reading about the critical strategy of deconstruction, how languages, and by extension individual words, can be edited and truncated to form different meanings and different visual interpretations. I am reminded of a quote from a Prefab Sprout song from 1985 called "I couldn't bear to be special", in which Paddy MacAloon wails: "Words are trains for moving past what really has no name."

The meaning here, though, is clear, that words them selves hold no intrinsic value - they belong to no one, their origins are often mysterious, in the English language, words come from multiple sources and single words can have multiple meanings and synonyms. It is, in Jacques Derrida's terminology, "a question of how representation inhabits the real world, the antonymous relationship between perception and reality". *

Words are signifiers, signposts to meaning, and therefore, those meanings are subject to mis- and re-interpretation. As an example of what I mean by this, I have found a list of homonyms that can alter perception of a word. We must assume here that written words are not secondary to speech, as maintained by many exponents of deconstruction. But for the purposes of this exercise, the words must be spoken out loud to see the full impact of how definition is relative:

male/mail

aisle/isle

knight/night

grate/great

lyre/liar

pawn/porn

right/write

and so on ...

These examples of homonyms - innocent enough, but it east to how they can be misconstrued.

* "Deconstruction and Graphic Design" by Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, from Design Writing Research - Writing on Graphic Design (Phaidon, 2006)