Seær

Seær

Seær a new media text delivery system that uses photoluminescent surfaces, custom software, and lasers in order to display conventional (legible) and asemic* (non-legible) writing.  The series explores the materiality of inscription substrates, and the perceptual experience in the act of reading.  Seær manifests John Cayley’s notion of the ‘catastophic moment’ — the boundary points of signification — when visual forms slip between non-specificity to legibility, between the graphic and the symbolic.  The Seær text delivery system allows the author to shift meaning more fluidly and with finer granularity than that afforded by the conventional atoms of expressivity in language:  the word, the letter, the stroke.

Seær hinges on two major components in the act of reading:  a) the perception of fading text and the resultant expectation that the inscription is transient; b) the reader’s memory of previously inscribed text.  Text that remains entirely legible but is selectively transformed, or alternatively, text that can be read in unconventional orientations (e.g., ambigrams) are further extended with Seær’s method of presentation. In this way, Seær enables the visual form to enact its semantic content, creating moments when the visual-grammar and linguistic-grammar are inextricable.

In this way, Seær’s exploration of the emergent possibilities in authorship manifests the new processes and practice of writing and reading using digital media, as inscription surfaces are regarded as more inherently mutable than they are perceived to be today.

*asemic — “having no specific semantic content”

Works during the Tenure Track:  Acquaintance [He](2017);  Acquaintance [She](2017)

Articles during the Tenure Track:  Novel Perceptual Phenomena in Reading Mutable Inscription Systems (2019).

A paper detailing the authoring processes with Seær was accepted for presentation at the 14th Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology.  Following the Woven Heritage ( نسيج ثقافي ) International Miniature Printmaking Exhibition in 2017, two Seær works, Acquaintance [He] and Acquaintance [She], were entered into Zayed University’s permanent collection, and was featured in 2019 in a juried exhibition at the Loading Dock Gallery.  More information about the conceptual underpinnings that drive the creative trajectory can be found in my paper about Novel Perceptual Phenomena in Reading Mutable Inscription Systems (2019) currently under review for the special edition of the Journal of IPR Comparative Literature and Aesthetics on Electronic Literature.