I had been transliterating poems from french earlier this year for a school project and ended up trying it again this last quarter. My focus was always on translating from languages that I couldn't read or speak so I thought that it would be great if I could make my translations as inaccessible to someone else as the original work had been for me. At first I thought I could make a new alphabet, more like a typographic experiment like an illegible font, but then I found the Gregg method of shorthand.

The forms that the Gregg method takes resemble arabic at times and are just visually appealing to me but what interested me most was that the indecipherable shapes of the words weren't in a foreign language it was just another way to write something in english. These are some words in shorthand.

I'll put part of my project up here when it's finished.

These are some photos that I took for a class project. My goal was to emulate a general style of impressionistic painting through color photo. One of my favorite Impressionist painters is J.M.W Turner and I wanted to keep his work in mind.

I got these developed and scanned them at school but I think that the negative scanners there have a tendency to scratch the negatives so next time I'll have to use a different method. I would have used these next two pictures but the scratches on the negatives are too apparent.

I haven't written about anything in a while. I have a couple of projects I've been working on (more or less) for school. One I've been working on in different stages since the winter quarter, I've been transliterating poetry from a languages I don't speak by means of homophonic and visual translation or association to create new poems. So far I've only used a couple of french poets and their styles are pretty similar. The first poet I tried it with was Stephane Mallarmé, he wrote a poem called Un Coup De Des that never got published the way that he intended until almost a hundred years after he died. This is a picture of two of the pages.

Mallarmé used the space between the lines of his poetry to strip the connotational or contextual value away from individual words. I guess a new language could be created that way, if you understood the old word in a new way. He had specific instructions for how he wanted the poem to be printed, the size of the pages, the typeface, the size of the type and the two page format which allows printing into the gutter of the page. Anyway, no one ever printed the poem the way he would have wanted it until 1980. Here's an example of an earlier publication of the poem that ignores a lot of Mallarmé's specifications.

The two pages in this format are actually four pages of the original and the font isn't right. What I ended up doing was re-writing the poem in english using the homophonic and visual transliteration and making the words conform to Mallarmé's spacial specifications so it looks like this 

then I take out the original french to have an interpretation of the poem that, while not being a true to language translation, comes a lot closer than any other translation in english because all of the original spacial specifications are employed. I printed a full copy and bound it, my mom has it now. This is getting to be awfully long I'll write about the other projects another time.