Verbal Expression Part 2: the verbal continuum

So I’ve decided on the lips and zips motif for verbal expression but pairs of lips in isolation won’t tell this story. I need the lips to be saying something.

In my mouth research on Pinterest, I came across an image of ‘Visemes’ which are images of the shape of our lips when we’re saying a particular letter or word so effectively a lip-reading alphabet. Further turgid reading will point to their inaccuracies e.g. the mouth movements of the phrases ‘I love you’ and ‘elephant juice’ are very similar. A huge amount of research has gone into AI innovations around lip-reading and synching for its use in gaming development and animation etc. but that is neither here nor there. The gist of what I’ve read is that surprise surprise the bots are better than us at it.

So what do I want my lips to say?

Well, the phrase ‘non-verbal’ hit home over 17 years ago when my toddler struggled with verbal expression. In reality, verbal expression has been part of my entire life. Starting with a brief dalliance with selective mutism in my teenage years and not to mention the umpteen social gaffes which usually ended in people telling me ‘you’d say anything‘. And I did. I rambled around for about twenty years with no filter and still have to watch myself although I’m getting better with my great age. Then, on the other end of the scale, we have the hot topics or obsessions, and I’ve been on the giving and receiving end of long monologues that scarcely pause for breath. So I thought my crude little drawing down below captures that continuum of None to No to No More.

The Verbal Continuum

Joy’s verbal continuum

Translating the continuum into plates:

  1. Non-Verbal: a mouth closed with a zip
  2. No Filter: Visemes of letters OH for shock factor, tee hee hee
  3. Too Verbal: an open mouth with crisscrossed zips forbidding speech

Here’s a link to a short reel of me making those plates if you haven’t already seen it on my Instagram feed. In terms of errors when making the plates, there were many.

  1. I originally traced the images and cut out the shapes on the cereal box. To work out the exact shape to cut out of the material of the O and H plates, I cut it out of the cardboard plate which rendered my plates unusable.
  2. I then made a dog’s dinner during the gluing phase. You can see in the reel how I tried to do it backward. Sticking the zip onto the back of the mouth and then flipping it onto the card was very cumbersome. I was much smarter when making the night round of plates. I traced the shape onto the plate including the inset for the shape of the mouth and then glued the zip in place first then the lips over it and it was both quicker and more accurate.

Throughout the plate-making process in my new studio, I constantly asked myself ‘what the hell am I doing?’ and told myself this is absurd. I’ve been a contract marketer and webbie most of my life so who am I to go and rent a studio and add to more bad art in the world? Ah well, I’ll see where it goes and silence that inner voice in the meantime. My next blog post will be a write-up of the testing I did in the Print Room of Gorey School of Art which will form my plan for the final outputs. Watch this space.

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