I have been looking at the use of Surrealist Games as a way of producing arrangements of language to use as material. J and I played 'The Exquisite Corpse' game involving a number of players writing down articles, nouns, verbs and adjectives in a specific order before concealing them and passing the paper on, the picture equivalent is the well known heads, bodies and legs game, although it didn't seem to work very well. I am quite interested in the results of the questions game. Players write down questions before concealing them and passing the paper on. The next player writes a set of answers. Some examples: Do you like music? Absolutely pointless.

What's making you smile like that? The sound of rain.

What is your idea of a good time? Really boring.

What are you reading? Yes. Definitely.

How do you play the game? No way to say goodbye.

Is it raining outside? Very enjoyable.

Where are you from? I know the answer.

Are you awake? Just like honey.

Will you come with me? Very early in the morning.

Can you explain? I don't want to say it out loud.

What the fuck is that about? Being alive.

Do you like trees? It's making me want to die.

Why do you like it? Lots of information.

How are you? Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

What's a computer? Tired.

How do you live? The music of Sonic Youth.

How does it feel? A possibility.

Why am I confused? The way it was meant to be.

What does this mean? A girl sat naked on a chair.

What does it all mean? The dark outside.

What is the answer? My reason for living.

Just what is it that you want to do? In the universe.

Are you asleep?Upstairs.

What do you want from me? No.

There are lots of variations of this game, some seem quite complicated, this is one of the simplier ones, where the outcome would almost always read in the right way and rely purely on chance rather than intellegence.

'The surrealists initiated the most radically liberating critique of reason of the century. Their brilliant investigations were conducted through art and polemic, manifesto and demonstration, love and politics. But most specially and remarkably, it was through games, play, techniques of suprise and methodologies of the fantastic that they subverted academic modes of enquiry, and undermined the complacent certanties of the resonable and respectable. Playful procedures and systematic strategems provided keys to unlock the door to the unconscious and to release the visual and verbal poetry of collective creativity.'

I like the idea of the games being a pretty much pointless but fun exercise. The idea that they are intended to free words from the constraints of rational order. I feel like I want to continue experimenting playing the games, involving lots of people, perhaps I could do this through the blog, apparantly you can conceal the comments, if I figure out how to do this, then if people send me random questions and answers, I could compile the list, just a thought.

I think there are many ways I could realise this idea, visuals, sound. Although at the moment I am thinking about perhaps compiling a massive list of outcomes from the game, and playing around with formats, and different ways of presenting the infomation. This is an image I made from an english language pronounciation guide. I am attracted to the diagram aesthetically, the instructional desciption is interesting as an image. I have briefly looked into pronunciation of language. My aim in doing this is to discover how I can somehow convey a message of something which is invisible, liminal, shown in somekind of physical realm. This is all very vague really... I am very interested in how all this stuff ive been doing can be translated, I like how the diagram 'fine as in fine' articulates and defines the word. The visible word read as 'fine' can be read a million different ways. The diagram is instructional and concentrates upon the action of speech, phonetics. Syllables are counted as units of sound (phones) that they use in their language. The branch of linguistics which studies these units of sound is phonetics. Phones which play the same role are grouped together into classes called phonemes; the study of these is phonemics or phonematics or phonology.

I have started to think more about where my work fits in, at present i havn't made anything actually physical, i'm not sure i feel like like i should, writing things down seems to get things more clear in my mind. It was suggested to me that i think about thoughts as my material, handing on to the viewer a new thought. All i know is that i am interested in.. Lists Text Experimental Wordplay Signs Deciphering Information Keywords Search Engines Codes Misinterpreting Information Letter/Word Counts Punctuation Descriptions Formats of Text Having vague thoughts about different ways to reach an audience, through subconcious, instead of concious, indirectly, unintentionally, non-visually maybe. Thoughts as a material, invisible, liminal, figments. Thoughts are separate to the act of talking, spoken words, and separate to written words, breaks in communication. I came across a program called 'Text Arc'. A TextArc is a visual represention of a text, the entire text, on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning. http://www.textarc.org/

I briefly looked at 'Death of the Author', by Roland Barthes. In his essay, Barthes criticizes the reader's tendency to consider aspects of the author's identity; his political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes, to distill meaning from the work. This theory is applied to the interpretation of text, but is relevant when thinking about the way in which we view art. "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." Readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables), for each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a famous quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," drawn from "innumerable centers of culture," rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience. No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority.") The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate." Every work is "eternally written here and now," with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader. Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot.

In Art this could open up ideas about how work is exhibited, how being as important as what. Fundamentally, each individual will read work according to their own personal choice, cultural background etc. The 'Author' cannot possibly be in control of how their work is widely read. I have been thinking about my personal approach when viewing work. When I make myself aware of it, I think I often tend to look quite passively. Perhaps in a gallery situation people can become desensitised to the work due to being forced to actively look at things, looking being predominant. The physicality could be an obstruction as it requires somekind of immediate response. The natural tendancy to form a definitive evaluation of things, forces you to search for the artists statement about the work. There is confusion between what you initially think, then what you should think now you know the true meaning.

I watched the culture show the another night, there was a feature about the current exhibition at The Whitworth Gallery in Manchester called Subversive Spaces: Surrealism + Contemporary Art. Uneasy and disoriented visitors to Gregor Schneider’s Kinderzimmer will find themselves groping their way into the blacked-out space of the usually sunlit South Gallery of The Whitworth Art Gallery, moving toward an eerily lit nursery. The children’s rooms have been recovered from a village in Schneider’s Rhineland home, erased to make way for opencast mining. I'm not sure if the presenters reaction was genuine or not, but the works purpose seemed to be concerned with giving the audience somekind of disturbing experience. The work could only be seen by going through the dark, confined space one person at a time, so perhaps this could effect the individuals response. This is something i have been thinking about, the gallery space as a social environment contains distractions, it would be interesting to regulate this in someway.