Languages

 

After a lot of deliberation in the past few days, I have come to a decision on the artefact I want to create.

Given the themes around dance as language, emotion as language, emotion as story, and story as language that have been threaded through my inquiry, it felt right to use these as the base for the artefact.

At first I considered creating a dance, as this seemed completely logical for dance, emotion, and language themes. However, the more I thought about it, the more this didn't feel right. It felt as if I could have done that before the inquiry, and even before the BAPP course. I didn't think it really showed that I had learned and progressed.

But the idea of languages and also story as being the 'how' rather than 'what' of dance was stuck in my head.

I also thought about the inquiry process and how the language of my keyboard was used to conduct the whole thing - researching, writing blogs, zoom interviews, writing the report etc. These were such involved themes and a dance on its own just didn't really seem to cut it in my eyes.


So naturally, my next thought was I should make a keyboard.

Now, whatever level your skills in technology sit at, I'm willing to bet mine are at least a little bit below that, so building and programming an actual keyboard from scratch was out of the realm of possibility, though if I possessed the skill, I would have.

Manifesting this keyboard into reality therefore had two options. Craft a keyboard out of cardboard, wood,  paper, and generally any other materials that might help. Or, get an actual keyboard and do something with that. We went with option two.

So I now have a functioning, wireless keyboard (given it was obtained cheaply from eBay I'm amazed it does actually work, small wins) that I plan on relabelling with words and concepts that each mean something to my inquiry, inquiry process, and learning. 

The premise of this is you can take any word, phrase, or piece of text that means something to you and/or your practice and then translate it with the keyboard into a code of words and functions. This code would then be used to create an emotion/story-based piece in your practice (for me, dance) by reflecting on what the words in the code mean to you individually, and what they mean in the context of each other. That way, you have a unique, emotion-based story to create with that allows you to explore your feelings and experiences at the same time.


I'm excited to see how this concept evolves and what the final product will be!

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