Project 1: Draft 1 & Designer's Statement

Project 1: Draft 1

Designer's Statement:

          Material, from the context of several subjects, even those excluding literature, can essentially be defined as the items from which an item is comprised; what something is made of. The exhibit I have devised for Project 1 could be enlarged and placed in a museum that highlights important factors of texts and evolution, the agents of technogenesis (the coevolution and codependency of humans and text). The audience would be comprised of anyone who wishes to expand their knowledge on text forms and people who are interested in various art forms, more specifically the creative process and how one chooses material based on the message. This project could serve as a blueprint being that it is miniature. The base of it is Styrofoam board; multicolored sheets of construction paper, which would show the subcategories of the exhibit, represent the flooring. There is a wooden deck placed on top of the flooring that consists of artifacts that are older forms of material, such as newspaper, knitting materials, and the Bible (a bonded book). After construction, audience members would navigate the exhibit freely and read plaques located on the wooden podiums to which the artifacts are attached describing their purposes, what they created, and what messages they are predominantly chosen to convey. The unique sectioning by floor color code is unusual and definitely a way to get the audience in a curious mood to perhaps try to figure out how and why the exhibit is set the way it is. The audience knows to engage with the exhibit because nothing is blocked off with rope or security and there are plaques for them to read if they wish to delve even further into understanding a specific artifact. The materials I used to create the exhibit allowed me to be more creative and offer a realistic setting of what a physical exhibit in an abstractly designed museum would look like. This design is based off of museums I have been to before. Genre conventions of museums and exhibits are typically plaque-cards, subsections, podiums, artifacts, and a sign labeling the exhibit.

The term "material" is represented in this miniature exhibit with the showcasing of various material items used to construct texts and establish rhetorical motives. The pieces of the exhibit are organized by classic materials, electronic devices, educational tools, and tools of creative expression. Each material evokes different responses when paired with certain messages to be conveyed. For instance, an obituary could be found in a newspaper, a miniature that can be located in the section for classic material, but definitely not found on a chalkboard or conveyed with the use of paint. This is because material has a large impact on meaning and purpose as interpreted by the audience, and finding a text in an "inappropriate" form, can cause confusion, as it disagrees with certain norms. The only constraints I have encountered in designing this exhibit are having to decipher which artifacts to showcase out of the many materials that exist and organization, as some subcategories overlap others.

            My understanding of material as a term and concept comes from classes I have taken prior to WEPO and texts I have reviewed such as How We Think by Katherine Hayles and In Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication by Gunther Kress. These texts allowed me to understand text and modes of texts (including hybrids) as things that are not restricted to one dimension.

My goal is to have the audience understand that "text" encompasses a wide-range of products as showcased by this exhibit, and not only written word. With an understanding of this, one's sense of material, rhetoric, and what processes comprise the overall creative process will surely broaden. 

Throughout designing and procuring this project, I have realized how complex the concept of text and materiality can be to a person who has no concept of it, as it involves a variety of ideas that may seem unrelated to each other, but in fact play crucial roles in the strength of a text and it’s ability to impact all audience members. It opens up a web of connections and provides explanation as to how thought and intention create the need for material and then a need for a product from that material which I suppose would be the exigency material responds to. After that it is just a matter of choosing the appropriate material, design features (color, font, size, key, etc.), and creating the text to properly represent the thoughts of the creator.

Works Cited

Kress, Gunther.“Multimodal Orchestrationsand Ensembles of Meaning.”In Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge,2009. 159-73

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. University Of Chicago Press, 2012.

          “Material | Definition of Material in English by Oxford Dictionaries.” Oxford Dictionaries | English, Oxford Dictionaries, en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/material.

“Material.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/material.

“Material.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Jan. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material.