"j" Experiments #1
Some happy little accidents from LanGLiTCH*! This used to be the letter j, but I broke it using the phrase from Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks:
"Every colonized people–in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality–finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.
The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.
He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle."
On the theory and process:
This project explores the languages of Colonised Others, especially languages such as Creole and Anglo-Indian. It references mismatched language patterns and the fractures that happen when displaced or colonised peoples begin assuming the language and culture of the Coloniser. I chose to make it based on my experiences as an Anglo-Indian woman in Australia, having watched the quintessential Anglo-Indian-isms fade with each ageing generation. I am very fascinated in language as a cultural artefact, and so chose to make a typeface as an artefact that responds to different breaks or pressures as a kind of visual metaphor for Creole languages and the fact that language is always in flux, always being subjected to appropriations.
On the outcomes:
Even though I have some degree of control over the outcomes – especially with regards to what is predictable based on file formats and colours etc – oftentimes weird stuff happens and I just can't explain it. These are great examples of things I just can't explain, especially because they are not entirely consistent with the other letter forms. Quite a few of them did this weird gradient cube thing, but many others showed other similar outcomes with seemingly little correlation to each other. Every image is exported with the same settings too, so it's all very curious and beautiful.