Origins of conversation games
My influences:
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poetry outside Edinburgh impacted my thoughts after seeing large chunks of slate laid out in the garden hilltop with letters hewn out.
Jenny Holzer’s truisms that condense philosophical writing to a more accessible phrase and then placing the phrases on lamp posts furthering their accessibility and then the dialogue created, inspired me.
Yoko Ono’s YES captivated me, the idea of taking a magnifying glass up a tall ladder to view this tiny word yes. It speaks on many levels especially giving a certain tone to the word and a resonance.
Lisa Love and Nathaniel Kohn’s article This That, and the Other: Fraught Possibilities of the Souvenir has been a major influence on me. Phrases about the Souvenir ‘. . . powerful facilitators, empowering props in the play of everyday life. They mention Clifford’s notion on the positive fetish … souvenir owners to gain sensibilities and to find the strength to negotiate their lives and their worlds.
It has lead me to thoughts about how objects can be souvenirs of other events or of relationships. Also the idea that objects of art may be a memory aid (souvenir) to types of personal internal emotional or aesthetic journeys. The artist Alex Selenitsch has stated that: “On its own, a word points to both the sentence that it might end up in, and also to the thought that precedes it. This zone between thought and convention allows artists to foreground qualities that are normally ignored in linguistic acts.”
I feel that an isolated word can also point to a thought that follows and so a conversation may have a starting point.