From Collecting Responses to Creating Conditions for Expression

I chose to speak with Jayoon Choi because her practice intersects closely with a question that has been present throughout my own work: how can an internal experience be translated into a tangible form? Choi describes her practice as exploring the gap between “inner human experience” and its translation into physical or visual form, particularly experiences that resist language or are difficult to articulate. She uses drawing, moving image, installation and text to investigate how something internal can become externally perceptible. This immediately connected with the starting point of my own enquiry, in which typography became a means of visualising experiences that I found difficult to express directly.

My project began through reading Flowers for Algernon alongside my personal experience of witnessing my grandmother gradually lose aspects of language and communication through Parkinson’s disease. I used the final diary entries of the novel and distorted their typography according to my own emotional response while reading them. The typography was therefore not intended as a neutral presentation of the text, but as a record of my encounter with it. This led me towards the question: should type only be read, or can it also be felt?

As the project developed, I became increasingly interested in the role of the reader. My research moved towards the idea that reading is never neutral: meaning is shaped not only by what is written, but by the person encountering it. In my contextual research, this became the proposition that “the reader is never absent”; subjectivity is not necessarily a distortion of reading, but one of its conditions. I therefore shifted from visualising only my own response to creating an interactive website in which other people could manipulate typographic parameters in response to a series of life-related words. Their responses would then accumulate within a collective archive.

Before my conversation with Choi, I understood this shift from the individual towards the collective as a natural development of the research. I wanted to investigate whether people with different experiences might nevertheless produce certain visual similarities when translating emotion into typography. In this model, the archive became an outcome in itself: by collecting enough responses, I hoped to compare the differences and recurring tendencies between participants.

Choi challenged this assumption almost immediately. Rather than focusing on whether the interface worked, she questioned what the collection was actually for. She compared the project to a data study and repeatedly asked what I intended to do once the responses had been collected. When I referred to the Bouba/Kiki experiment as a precedent suggesting that people may share certain associations between form and perception, she responded: “Who says that? That’s your assumption, no?”

Her question exposed something I had not previously examined: I had assumed that discovering similarities between participants would somehow validate the project. Yet even if a recurring visual pattern appeared, I had not decided what that pattern would enable me to say or do. Choi described the material I had created as “exciting ingredients”, but argued that I still needed to decide what I wanted to make with them. Most importantly, she asked me: “What do you think is unsaid?”

This question unexpectedly returned me to the personal origin of the work.

Until that moment, I had understood the transition from an autobiographical project towards a collective system primarily as a methodological decision. During the conversation, however, I realised that it had also been a form of distancing. I had become uncomfortable with continuing to use my grandmother’s illness and her experience of losing language as material within my own practice. Although the original project came from my response to witnessing her condition, the experience itself belonged to her, not to me. I did not want to aestheticise it or turn another person’s vulnerability into material that I could use to strengthen my own work.

During the tutorial I began to articulate this distinction for the first time. I explained that my movement towards a more generic and collective project was partly motivated by my discomfort with “consuming” my grandmother’s experience. The universal words, anonymous participants and collective archive had allowed me to move away from speaking through her experience. However, I also began to recognise that in removing the personal context, I may have removed some of the tension that made the original enquiry meaningful.

This became particularly significant in relation to Choi’s own practice. Although she is also concerned with making internal and difficult-to-articulate experiences tangible, she describes using herself as both “subject and testing ground”. Our dialogue therefore shifted my enquiry from simply asking how an experience can be translated towards asking whose experience I am translating, and who should have the authority to determine its form.

This has also changed how I understand participation within my project. My previous website appeared to give authorship to the reader, but the experience was still heavily predetermined by me. I selected the words—born, breathe, remember, laugh, love, lose, and forget—and designed the parameters through which participants could respond. Even when their visual choices were subjective, the emotional framework remained mine.

For the next stage, I want to work with a more clearly defined group of participants and remove this predetermined vocabulary. Instead of asking participants to respond to words chosen by me, I want them to bring a word, sentence or fragment of text that already carries personal significance for them. They would then use the typographic system to determine how that text should be visually expressed. My role would shift away from authoring the emotional content and towards designing the conditions for expression, collecting the resulting material, organising it and deciding how it can be presented.

This does not make me a neutral observer. I would still choose the participants, construct the interface, establish its possibilities and limitations, and curate the final archive. However, the distinction matters: rather than attempting to translate another person’s experience on their behalf, I would create a framework through which they can participate in translating it themselves.

The archive would therefore no longer need to function primarily as evidence for a universal emotional language of typography. Instead, it could become a space in which different subjective readings coexist without being reduced to an average or a single conclusion.

The dialogue with Choi did not resolve my enquiry. Instead, it made the problem more precise. I began by asking whether typography could be felt as well as read. I am now more interested in asking:

How can a typographic system create space for people to give form to experiences that literal language alone cannot fully express, without prescribing what those experiences should mean or speaking on their behalf?

The unresolved distance between personal experience, visual translation and collective presentation is no longer something I want to eliminate from the project. It has become the space in which the next stage of my enquiry can take place.

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References

Choi, J. (2026) 1:1 tutorial with the author, 10 June.

Choi, J. (n.d.) Jayoon Choi. Available at: jayoonchoi.com.