A seminar-workshop-presentation-installation on the multi-faceted developments of writing systems presented by Baxton Alexander.
Share and learn about various writing systems around the globe and their political/religious/aesthetic/technological contexts.
Create and brainstorm new systems of written communication. Augment, reconfigure, and/or deconstruct the old ones.
Come and go as you please throughout our 6 hour time frame. As an information vomitorium, collect, reject, consider, debate, utilize, as you please.
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Below is a working outline, subject to change:
+Theoretical Preliminaries:
-Definitions of writing
-The relationship between writing and speaking
-Free exploration of Asemic writing
-Semiographic developments and examples (hobo signs, mathematics, etc.),
-Logographic developments and examples
-Phonographic developments and examples
+Philosophical and Mystical Developments
-Greek approaches to the Alphabet
-Egyptian Hieroglyphs lost in translation become foundation of Western Mystic aesthetics
-Kabbalah
+General Politics of Script
-Geopolitical examples (From the Americas, to the Caucuses to East Asia)
-Consequences of the printing press and other writing technologies
+Theoretical Potentialities
-The future of writing technologies and expressions?
-Writing as augmenting language rather than writing as merely visual representation of language
-Communal ciphers?