Linda Sgoluppi's posterous

Blue - So what does it mean? Orange - What you mean what does it mean? Blue - Well it’s a simple enough question, what does it mean? Orange - What does what mean? Blue - The meaning of no meaning of course, you can’t talk about no meaning without saying what it is you mean! Orange - Well, that’s the problem, I’m trying to talk about no meaning and I keep coming up against meanings, they’re all over the place!

I don’t know how this conversation would have developed, because my cat woke me from my dream, the strangeness was gone but the question remained.

So, what is the meaning of no meaning?  It’s a question I’ve visited at intervals over the years since I was at University.

Some time ago I saw a Curse Bowl on temporary display in the British Museum that had a very specific curse inscribed in it.

Curse Bowls are also known as Incantation or Blessing Bowls, depending on their content and purpose.  While searching for the particular curse bowl I’d seen in the British Museum, I discovered some bowls have pseudo or fake inscriptions in them.  That got me thinking again about the meaning of no meaning, and especially when the meaninglessness is intentional.

The bowls with pseudo inscriptions are more intriguing to me than those written in a real language.  While the bowls with meaningful curses, incantations and blessings might tell something specific about the society that created them, the bowls with intentionally meaningless inscriptions might also have something to say about the society that created them.

I’m an artist, not a historian, and I look at what is available to me to help me explore ideas for my art.  Already the real language curse bowl has inspired one of my art works, the Curse Bowl Altar. However the idea of exploring ideas around fake text was and is a compelling one.  I’ve used fake and non-fake script in artworks before, but in the process of thinking about meanings and non-meanings I wanted to be able to generate script that had a rhythm and a ‘visual’ cadence of actual languages.

It’s possible to make up fake words and even the odd sentence but pretty soon it becomes more difficult not to end up with too much of the same sort of repetition. I have great respect for the writers of those ancient fake curse bowls.

I couldn’t find anything that really matched what I wanted on-line although I did find something called a Markov chain and that led me to websites that allowed me to generate a few individual fake words.  However, I wanted something that would create text that appears to be written in a real language.

Then I began collaborating with Carl Ingalls of Embossing Technologies who understood what I was looking for and we ended up with a program that generates synthetic text that matches the pattern found within a sample of input text that I type in (or copy from somewhere).  It duplicates the punctuation, the appearance of grammar, and the rhythm and visual cadence of whatever is fed into it, without duplicating any of the words.

It named itself Forkostraph, a synthetic word that came from my first encounter with the program.

But what, exactly, do I mean by “it”?  Is Forkostraph the program, or what it creates?  Is it an algorithm or a method or a tool?  None of these seem adequate.  It can’t be the name of a language (or pseudo-language), because that comes out very differently every time I use a different input text.  Perhaps “it” is a work of art in itself?

Now that I have the name, I’m struggling to create a meaning for it, while appreciating the irony of my difficulty.  Since Forkostraph came out of my quest for a source of text with no intended meaning, it seems fitting that it should resist my intention of defining it.  Meaning begins with usage, and ends with definition.  For now, I shall just use the word, Forkostraph. 

I have a way to go in the consideration of meaningless, or meaning within meaningless; for there cannot be a meaningless because any definition of meaningless is inherently contradictory.  There are implicit meanings in meaningless, and meaninglessness has its own special meaning.

I’m intrigued by the idea of 'generated' 'no meaning' languages. Even languages that have apparently no meaning have a meaning.  I’ve used Forkostraph on recent artworks, and will be using it on future ones.

The recent artworks are giving me trouble, they are ‘complete’ as far as the making of them, yet they’re holding out on me.  It is as if they have something to tell me that I should know, but I don’t know what it is. I’ve titled them ‘Tords’ which is Forkostraphian.

In Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, I read that it appears the development of writing has changed our brain’s development, ergo our development as human beings.

‘To imagine what the Sumerian brain eventually looked like, we can do tricky things.  First we can return to the findings of Raichle’s group, who looked at what happens when meaning is added to words. For example, they studied how the brain reads pseudo words like “mbli” and real words “limb,” in which the letters were the same but only one combination of them was meaningful. In each case, the same visual areas initially activated, but the pseudo words stimulated little activity beyond their identification in the visual association regions. For real words, however, the brain became a beehive of activity.  A network of processes went to work: the visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words, called phonemes:  and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meanings, functions and connections to other real words. ‘

It’s been a long time since I studied Deconstruction, Semiotics, read Derrida, Straus etc. Even so I’m wondering if, in teasing apart the idea of ascribing a no meaning to a painting or artwork while it is being created, there is a parallel to the Forkostraph of generating meaningless text in pseudo-languages.

In an email communication with Dr Anna Lovatt from the Nottingham University Department of Art History, Dr Lovatt wrote:

‘I wonder if you are familiar with this statement by Eva Hesse: “I wanted to get to non-art, non-connotive, non-anthropomorphic, non-geometric, non-nothing; everything…It’s not the new, it is what is yet not known, thought, seen, touched; but really completed what is not and that is,’

I am familiar with it, being an admirer of Eva Hess’s work. Yet despite what Hess wanted during the making of her work, there appears to be meanings in the completed pieces, or is it that we each bring our own meaning to what we encounter? Can we really make work with no meaning? It’s a great pity that Hess didn’t live long enough to give her own perspective with the benefit of hindsight.

Thinking of the extract from Proust and the Squid above, I’m wondering if something has changed from the early time of the development of writing to now?  If I seek a no-meaning or meaninglessness in the execution of a painting, does the process of creating it and subsequent views of it use only a limited amount of neural pathways and cortex, or is it an abhorred void waiting to be filled with meaning?  Is it a generator of possibilities or is this a false trail head I’m on? Or is it as Derrida would posit that deconstruction of the piece, its meanings or non meaning, is inherently in the architecture of the work?  If that is the case, there is meaning even if I work hard to get no meaning.