A-Z Reflection

Since I had to leave early from class I was not able to share my ideas with the class but I did have lots to think about when I got home that night. I realized in my investigations of the letters of my name that I spent a lot of time focusing on where each letter originated from and how they compared to each other as far as purpose and shape were concerned but I did not really explore any ideas of my own on how I would like to use these letters in my project. I thought about this idea of shape and how each letter is just simply a shape but it's society that has given these shapes such extensive meaning. After listening to some members of the class explain their different ideas I realized what I was interested in was this human relationship between humans themselves and a letter. I want to somehow explore this relationship through exploring how humans interact with letters through how they pronounce them, how they use them in communication, and how they physically interact with them through writing. All the different fonts came to mind when I was thinking about using letters and I found that fact one single letter can be written in thousands of different fonts as well as millions different languages. Again going back to human relationship with letters, it's fascinating how different cultures have taken the same letter and has given it a different pronunciation or meaning while still keeping the same shape. 

I am currently helping my boyfriend with a project for one of his classes where he is exploring the world of graffiti art in Berlin. As I was helping him find information and examples of many of the art that decorates the dark walls of Berlin, I started thinking about this letter project and how graffiti artists deal with letters. They use letters as a means of expression whether they are signing their name or writing a phrase they treat those letters as pieces of art. This sort of goes back to my initial interest in the shape of each letter. 

I have a lot of different ideas running through my head about how to investigate this human-letter relationship but I find that my thoughts get rather jumbled when I try to write them down with words (also an interesting aspect about letters) and I think my goal this Spring Break is to turn my thoughts and ideas into sketches. Hopefully this will help organize my thoughts and I can present a more concrete idea for this project later next week. 

Stay tuned...