Letter to Grandma
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Letter to Grandma
(typed on a mac air computer)
I dipped my fingers in ink, placed the paper over the keyboard and typed an apology to my grandma explaining why I was late in sending her a Valentine’s Day card. The images, which looked like a print series, with dots sparsely and erratically placed across their surface, recorded the sequential phrases from the letter: “Dear Grandma,” “How is the garden?” “I wanted to tell you, I’m sorry,” “I love you,” etc. The reconfiguring of ink with gesture forces one to reconsider one’s assumptions of technology as both cold and solitary.
Technology and the Evolving Shape of Language
(typed on a Macbook Air laptop and an iPhone 6)
This new set of drawings is a variation on the Letter to Grandma series and was created during a two-month residency at Sculpture Space. With this piece, I was considering cell phones, laptops, and tablets (the current technologies that we use to both write and communicate) in comparison to various other technologies used in the past: from carving into stone to recording our thoughts onto paper with a pencil to other instruments like the telegraph, the rotisserie phone, the typewriter. Due to the mechanics of each of these devised they are necessarily connected to a specific set of gestures and lend a particular choreography and shape to symbols, letters, numbers, and language. Each of these drawings records the position and routine that our fingers take to record specific words and phrases. The larger drawings on the left record standard greeting and closure phases that we so habitually use when writing emails. The smaller rectangular drawing on the right documents standard texts and messages that are so often typed across an iPhone's keyboard.
