listen hear sound projects - audio diary » 2008

Searching for imperfection

February 19th, 2008 — listenhear

Some thoughts from my train journey today… Are we losing our individualism in a search for perfection? Computers have, in no small way, contributed to this as, as an example, they offer us all the same fonts and spellchecker facilities. Anyone in the world could write these sentences in Arial 12pt. Apart from my choice of words and the order I decided to place them in, what singles out this piece of writing from anyone else’s, where is my individual stamp? How do you even know that I’ve written this? My handwriting is a left handed dyslexic scrawl, often difficult to read, so Arial 12pt at least gives me some hope of being understood. But it’s exactly this, my scrawl, that separates me and identifies me, along with the crossed out, wrongly spelt words and doodles in the margin. Who is to blame? William Caxton? Henry Mill? Gates and Jobs? How can you be an individual when your writing looks like everyone else’s? Handwritten songs and music from Lennon to Bach sell for thousands of pounds at auctions, but what now? If a lyric or piece of music is written using a word processor where is the interest and soul in that? The mistakes and rewrites are deleted the spelling is usually correct and it’ll be cut, copied and pasted to perfection, the anguish, struggles and mistakes, which any great artist goes through when creating, are lost and with it also, possibly our understanding of the work itself.

As I’m writing this my (poor) grammar is being highlighted, how dare this software offer an opinion in such a way. Is your choice of font about as much of a symbol of your individuality as it now gets?

I use computers everyday, I compose and create, I write, I edit my photographs, but how am I really able to keep the processes I go through which, in years to come, will validate the decisions I make/made.

Have we become just too obsessed with this neatness and common form? What can we do to maintain any individualism (red underlined check spelling) when creating on our computers?

I think I’m searching for a way to highlight the many imperfections which single me out and make me, me.

I suppose it’s quite natural for us all to want the finished ‘product’ to be as good as it can be, but I also think we should not shy away from sharing the mistakes which we all make achieving this. This is where I fell asleep, somewhere around Three Bridges…no doubt to be continued…