"Ryan Thurmer’s Automatist Excercise"

WR:7&8

There’s something very confining about having the total freedom to respond to words or images in a 2in x 2in square piece of paper. All but one of the squares on my sheet appear to be in a list form starting from the top left corning and meandering their way down. I did this because of the unknown amount of words or symbols I would have to respond to, to save space in my 2’’x2’’ box. Perhaps though we were all just taught uniformly in our ways of communicating with pen and paper. This uniformity, though, offers a balanced symmetry for us to work with, as can be see in the left two squares. Though they many not have a direct connection to meaning their composition fits together almost like a two puzzle pieces.The right two squares are connected conceptually and compositionally. And exclamation of “OUCH!” which graphically points down to a container labeled “Rx” and a hand reaching out which takes the eye back up to “OUCH!”. This could be conceived as a message about out pain tolerance and what we do when we get the slightest injury. Instead of drinking water to get rid of a head ache, we take a few Tylenol, the cycle continues.
Now what are the influences of consumerism on our choices of what to write or draw? Again I believe the right and left side are separated here. The top left square has mostly geometric symbols, and a few organic forms. I can’t see a link to consumerism in her choice to draw these symbols but consumerism could be a factor in whomever looks at these and associates a circle with an iPod’s click wheel, or the zig-zag shape with a zipper, and so on. Below are the words written after presented with shapes: “ magnet/macaroni, sea creature, cannon/rooster, x, mouse.” The associations between these words and their image counterparts is part of a survival skill (know your environment and be able to identify it, size it up, and choose to stay or run away). My environment is full of images from past, present, and future environments many things I’ve never even used, or know much about came to mind (like the cannon). The right side I believe is directly related to media, comic books, graphics on the television and internet, give us images of what pain looks like on paper (“OUCH!”), and what healing looks like. We see thousands of symbols everyday (much like the trigger mechanism we’ve been discussing: you see, you do...) and I’m not so sure if ouch is the natural exclamation of pain, perhaps that has been programed into us from day one. Again the symbol for medication: here is the literal symbol for medication, a pill bottle with “Rx” on the label. How many of us know the where the symbol “Rx” comes from or what it even means, yet we use that as a reference, and people understand what we’re referencing.
Though our intentions, and responses may have been involuntarily the “first things to come to mind” they may not be all that natural, and perhaps we have a lot more subconscious media influenced relationships with images and words that we thought.