The question is that what letterpress can bring to the table as a tool that others cannot? What is unique about letterpress? I made a meta joke about researching graphic using letterpress, it can easily be substituted by other means of practice (i.e. coding, screen printing). For this week I need to frame myself in a better position with what I am doing.

After the first week of critic on my joke, there were a lot to digest. Meta joking and labour intensity seems to be the main quality the project can bring.

To be honest, I was being a little cheeky to make memes with letterpress as a joke, and hence make the whole research as a joke; all because I was exPloRIng `GrAphiC coMmUNicAtiON as HUmoUr. That being said, I was proud of my meta-joke. And there are ways to explore the self-awareness of the joke. Self-referenciality art is not a new thing. Roy Lichtenstein made the Masterpiece in 1962. In the pop art painting, the lady had a speech bubble saying that the piece itself was a masterpiece. She also told the painter himself “soon you’ll have all of New York clamoring for your work”.

Whether the painting technique was exquisite or not, it seemed to be not as relevant to the audience’s attention as it should be for identifying a masterpiece. The joke is said to be prophetic as Liechtenstein’s career proceeded to blossom following that; and the painting in question was sold for $165M in 2017. Though I am not familiar with the artist, nor could I conduct a control experiment, it seemed the form and style seemed substitutable. It would be hard to tell, if the painting could wield as much power if it was done in for example impressionist styled painting. I think my work is relating to this painting a lot. Tongue-in-cheek and self-referencing was fun, but I wanted to go deeper than that. Matthew mentioned the iteration where the room recording voice tape was repeated a lot of the time until the English monologue became completely some inaudible croaking sound.

Maybe I should repeat the self-referencing process to a point it become ridiculous. There are a lot of materials to add to this. For example, Helen from the letterpress workshop bursted laughter when she read my joke, she then told me I missed some keywords: `iteration, vernacular, juxtaposition, and position. Or I can just add some hats and trousers as types are supposed to be the latter, not the former. I can just memeify the comments and critic of the original one and then make it become a meme-ception…until it gets to a point of total absurdity.

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Another quality highlited from this meme making process is the labour intensivity. Letterpress is no joke that every glyph has to be handpicked, and then well calculated to be set on the machine. After that, I have to choose my own paint and set the right amount of paper to roll on it. I did some experiment with thermo neon powder but it did not seeme to add anything to the context.

To highlight the labour of doing letterpress; also to make my life harder, I wanted to try making the image with letterpress instead of the convineint printer. The format that I adviced to do on is to make the image into ASCII.

There are a lot of limitations when doing this. After generating the first ASCII, I did the word count. And as expected, there were hardly any non-roman glyphs of the same size in the quantity of 800 that is also has to be monospaced. After adjusting my ASCII and looking at whats available, I could finnaly start assembling the ASCII image with the dimension of 80 x 23 characters.

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However, even after 2 days of assembling, I have only done 15 lines of 40 characters out of it, which is approximately 32% of the whole thing. There are already some glyphs in danger of running out and I have to figure out which one to use when it happens.

Hopefully, when it is well aseembled, it actually looks like the original meme. After that, I am going to print the same joke on it, so that the whole thing is completely made with letterpress.

Is what I am doing “Letterpress is meme making?” ; Should I carry on with joke-ception/self-referencing?