Another of the things I’ve been working on is a little artistic endeavour with a friend.
We’re hoping it’ll turn into something larger: an installation or an exhibition, perhaps, or maybe even a staged reading of sorts.
Not too sure how it’s gonna pan out, but as everything in life, we’ll eventually get to where we’re supposed to go.
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Human progress and evolution have moved in tandem with the ability to communicate ideas between people and across spaces. As technologies emerge and develop over the years, humans have been better-enabled to communicate in more forms and at greater speeds than ever before.
While better means of communication have predisposed us to communicating more (from a quantitative perspective), we seem to be communicating less, from a qualitative perspective: people are glued to their phones as opposed to talking face-to-face; the human propensity for and inclination toward reading lengthy tomes and responding to messages and ideas have been reduced to quick sound-bites and quickly-typed out texts, limited to anything between 140 to 160 characters, depending on the medium of transmission and largely hinging upon our desire for instantaneous response; our need for speed.
What will happen to communication when forcible restraints on time and space are imposed upon it? Is language limited when limits are imposed on language?
Inspired from a conversation about correspondence, communication, procrastination and “The Quiet World” (a poem by Jeffrey McDaniel), Quiet Worlds: The 167 Project is a response to two artists’ desire to understand communication in a modern world through relatively “anachronistic” means.
Follow the correspondence between Magdalen Chua, a visual artist in Scotland, and Laremy Lee, a writer in Singapore, as they use snail mail to exchange postcards containing messages of no more than 167 characters in length to investigate and explore the confines (or the lack thereof) of language and human communication.
