What do you mean is an exploration of the frustrations and shortcomings of language. Stream-of-conscious writing and imagery illustrate the search for understanding alongside the pain of being unheard. Language is what we navigate our lives with and form our selves with/around, yet it ultimately lacks and fails us, against our strongest feelings and desires. This piece looks to highlight the fundamentally strange and often uncomfortable nature of language and how we communicate and validate ourselves through it. The translation from our sensations, ultimate reality, into spoken and written language will always turn up a loss.

The imagery featured on the cover and throughout the book was generated by warping handwritten Latin calligraphy using a scanner. The product looks somewhat like it could still be legible if you tried, but also possesses what I lovingly call an “orientalisma” about it—something like Chinese grass script, or asemic writing. This method pushed along the idea of a space at once within and outside of language. Alongside these, the book has hand-drawn and found images.

The flow of the book was a point of focus: visual density/chaos/intensity builds and erupts and cools off as the reader progresses. Pages printed on vellum reoccur throughout as both a nod to previous term work, and as a way to play with the experience of paging through.

What do you mean is overall a playful (but serious, but exasperated, but frustrated) hands-thrown-in-the-air about language and the ways it is bound to leave us lost and longing and confused.