Object and Anti-matter.

This project presented an initial struggle for me as I was unable to respond in my normal way to this title and despite my best efforts I was unable too. Eventually I was able to shift myself to thinking about what the phrase "anti-matter" actually meant. Wether it was something simply being of no matter to someone, something that doesn't exist, being the polar opposite of an already existing object. At the time in the news there was a lot of controversy over freedom of speech, and when it stops being the use of one's rights and become's instead the abuse of rights to inflict verbal damage upon people.

I found this subject quite intriguing as when I was younger I played a lot of online video games where it seemed the norm was to push boundaries when attempting to verbally abuse someone. I always found this to be quite hilariously grotesque as the mixture of abhorrent slurs became almost comical in the end. However when I took a step back and saw people actually writing out these insults on formats of social media such as twitter it hit me as being much more real tan it had before, as if when written down these words were so much more impactful than previously. 

This thought appealed to me and I examined why I found words written on the internet were so much more impactful than speech was. I concluded that what it boiled down to for me was that when something is said and goes unrecorded through speech it's a lot more fleeting and seems more detached from the person that it came from, whilst when something is written down in a format such as twitter, which, to an extent allows some degree of anonymity but never completely, a person seems to be standing by what they have said to a greater extent, as it is much easy to document what someone has put down on twitter. Initially I started to compile a list of tweets from all sorts of different people where I felt they were acting as if their hate filled messages would never bring back any consequences to them. However I concluded this seemed too flimsy in any way to present and that the means of presenting them would always looked forced or fake and never truly what I felt was represented in this subject. 

I decided instead to look at thought as it's own form of anti-matter, as a persons complete thoughts are never fully presented, what goes on within their head whilst perhaps creating clear cut images and speech to them is just a series of synapses opening and closing. This progressed to being amused by the notion that people always think in their own language (French, Spanish, English Swedish etc), and really only when you start to learn another language do you become aware of this. I noticed this when I had learnt french for a while in my secondary school as I found myself starting to think certain words in French when I was mulling things over. I decided then to try and create a piece of work presenting the language barrier created by text in general, how a book for one person can create an entirely new world, whilst for others it's just a series of meaningless symbols all jumbled together. I decided to gather all the books I owned and to turn them spine down and photograph them together to have this interlinking body of knowledge and imagination rendered blank and vacant and ultimately unknown.

I was happy with the concept for this project but never gave it the full bodied form that I felt it deserved. The photos of the books on the floor  seemed messy so i wanted to experiment with taking smaller closeups of the books and piecing them together in photoshop, which was interesting but seemingly just creating another form of the work for the sake of it. I put all my books back into their shelf and took photos of them again which did seem a cleaner and more natural habitat for them. I concluded that if I were to revisit this thought process i would like to explore an installation piece, inviting the audience to fill in blank books with whatever they liked and to place them back in a bookshelf when they had finished, to create a collection of documented thought, hopefully spanning many different formats so almost everyone would be able to understand something in it somewhere.