Dialecord / ??jéäk (universal-Dada poetry)

Abstract

In response to the fact that there are still many people suffering from language-based discrimination, this senior project has sought ways of allowing people to experience language differences as language diversities. The research on the causes of language-based discrimination reveals that exchanging thoughts through conversation, at a content level, reflects the speakers' attitudes toward certain topics. Also, the differences in the social status of speakers influence phonetic, semantic, and syntactic aspects of language, and as a result, the language itself becomes a mark indicating their social identity. These differences in attitudes and identity can cause discrimination. In contrast, all human languages share two common features: duality of structure and creativity. Based on these observations of language, I formed an hypothesis that by deconstructing languages from multiple languages into letters and characters, people can observe them without experiencing the sense of discrimination. Also, I hypothesized that it was possible to generate a new kind of language out of the letters and characters. Because this attitude toward language had a lot in common with the Dadaist one, I decided to make Dadaist sound poetry with letters and characters from different languages. As preparation for the sound poetry project, I created a project called Dialecord (2019). I collected the data of letters/characters and their pronunciations from people around the world through a web application, and these data were used to generate an interactive map. In the second project??jéäk (universal-Dada poetry) (2019), I established procedures based on Tristan Tzara's How to Make a Dadaist Poem in order to create a Dadaist sound poem. By following the procedures, I created different sound poems by recycling the letters/characters collected in Dialecord. These poems were printed on flyers and distributed all around the campus of Purchase College. The feedback from the participants in and the audience of these projects supports my hypothesis. Moreover, it becomes clear that these projects have potential to encourage people to be more interested in different languages and they also imply the existence of duality of structure in human languages.