Chimeric World Building

Introduction

I think I’ll start with that tired question of whether  API💥💥 is authorship.

I turn to contemporary discourse in translation theory, where there is the idea that translation is an act of authorship, as the translator inevitably has to make countless decisions in creating the translation. There is no such thing as a perfect translation, no such thing as the platonic copy of a text. The point of a translation isn’t, and can’t be, perfect imitation. Instead, the point is to give new life and new meaning to an original text.

Insofar as  API💥💥 is fundamentally structured around the act of intersemiotic translation, then, it follows that  API💥💥 is authorship.

So this question of “are API💥💥ers authors” isn’t actually that interesting, and also probably isn’t actually the locus of the feelings around this debate.. Afterall, copywriters also author texts, but often they author texts in service of a brand. The anxiety of the  API💥💥er doesn’t come from ruminating over whether or not what they do is considered ‘authorship’; it comes from feeling as though their entire field is stuck between being an artform and a service industry.

What I am interested in, beyond this revelation that API💥💥 is authorship, is in what kinds of texts we are creating, and in the potentials of developing a sense of poetics in  API💥💥. Poetics – how a text’s different elements come together and produce certain effects onto the reader – sounds a lot like what  API💥💥ers are already concerned with, but thinking about  API💥💥 production through these terms in an under-explored avenue for  API💥💥 beyond pure functionalism. In particular, I am interested in the poetics, the frameworks, and the tropes used by literatures like poetry or speculative fiction in order to engage their readers with worlds with their own internal systems of logic – worlds which relate to ours, but also lie within a field of hybridity and contradiction. Can  API💥💥 do this too? My goal is to outline a methodology for  API💥💥ers to think of their practice as worldbuilding, and to consider the potentials and poetics that lie in such an endeavor.
Graphic Design and Poetics

Worldbuilding Excerpt from Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse

There are already many things that the field of  API💥💥 and poetry share. Poetry seeks to make new meaning through novel configurations of elements (words) from an already established system (language). Graphic Design, being related to the organization and presentation of information, can also be seen as making meaning through novel configuration of various elements, which are not just limited to language and text, but also might include images, symbolic meaning, and visual culture writ large. Poetry, more so than other literatures, is concerned not only with the denotative meaning of words, but also the meaning that arises from the aesthetic quality of words (things like phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, rhyme, metre). In dealing with typography,  API💥💥ers are also interested in both the denotative meaning and aesthetic qualities of a text they are working with. Both have a playful relationship to structure, sometimes adhering to, and sometimes breaking, form.

However, one thing that  API💥💥 does not often do, that poetry does, is making a world, to provide a rich context for their work that reaches towards the poetic, the fantastical, the improbable, the mythological. This is extremely worthwhile for  API💥💥ers to pursue, because worldbuilding allows for the potential for narratives to sprawl out nonlinearly. It invites a non-teleological reading (reading without a prescribed goal) of the text, (or image, or whatever the object of  API💥💥 is) and offers a point of resistance against  API💥💥’s primary function as lubricant for the smooth flow of capital (be it economic, or otherwise), which relies on a singular, totalizing interpretation of the world.
A Methodology for Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding Diagram from Jacques Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

The ways in which poets develop their own sense of poetics varies, but in general one could describe it as a complex interaction between systems of cultural and historic signifiers and a poet’s own idiosyncratic, hermeneutic system of symbols, images, and other poetic devices, as well as their own logic of how those symbols relate to one another. After all, I would imagine that most poets want their texts to be somewhat understandable by their audience. By combining signifiers that are already familiar to their audience with more personal narratives, images, and symbols, the poet creates entry points into the more untranslatable parts of their psyche. This is related to what the artist Ian Cheng might call ‘worlding’. Cheng writes on his website,

    “Worlding [is] a vital practice to help us navigate darkness, maintain agency despite indeterminacy, and appreciate the multitude of Worlds we can choose to live in and create. Whether you are creating art, games, institutions, religions, or life itself: LIVE TO WORLD AND WORLD TO LIVE!”

He further writes in another blog post:

    We could say a World is something like a gated garden. A World has borders. A World has laws. A World has values. A World has dysfunction. A World can grow up. A World has members who live in it. A World gives its members permission to act differently than outside of it. A World incentivizes its members to keep it alive, often with the pleasures of its dysfunction. A World counts certain actions inside it as relevant and meaningful. A World undergoes reformations and disruptions. A World has mythic figures. A World is a container for all the possible stories of itself. A World manifests evidence of itself in its members, emissaries, symbols, tangible artifacts, and media, yet it is always something more.

What’s most interesting to me here is this interplay between constraints and possibilities. Poets constrain their work using various structures, but also build upon and selectively break apart those structures by incorporating their own idiosyncratic use of language. Through offering both references to (perhaps multiple) systems of shared references and collective knowledge and one's own personal frameworks, poets create new worlds from this combination of different shared frameworks for interpreting reality and the poets own personal reality, worlds that the audience is able to semi-inhabit, and explore over time.

Worldbuilding Diagram of the relationship between Thought, Language, and Culture from Ariel Vázquez Carranza's essay What is Language for Sociolinguists?

This suggests a methodology that might be of use to  API💥💥ers. Although creating novel structures and novel logics to govern our making necessarily limits any semiotic elements that have to adhere to these structures, these structures also imply the existence of an expandable world within which that logic holds true. The key here is this combination of “internal” and “external” (of which there may be many, which may contradict each other) systems of meaning. This is one way to view the way poets develop their own sense of poetics—how the different elements of a text all fit together, and produce both linguistic and extralinguistic (sensorial? synesthetic?) effects onto the reader. Graphic Designers, too, can develop their own visual language in the same way that a poet might develop any number of poetic frameworks through which to interpret reality, by fitting together multiple external and internal systems of meaning. We are already adept at invoking widely shared, conventional systems of meaning in order to make our work function on the basis of clarity, but it is also possible for clarity to exist simultaneously with another, murkier kind of effect that comes from fortifying conventional logic with a  API💥💥er’s own internal logic.

Worldbuilding The mythological chimera

I might call this methodology “chimeric worlding”, to emphasize the fact that these worlds, which  API💥💥ers and their audience cohabitate through their work, are cobbled together from the DNA of various other worlds, and are richer because of this multiplicity. And I choose this word “chimeric” not only for its meaning in the biological sense, i.e., “composed of material (such as DNA or polypeptide) from more than one organism”, but also for its more metaphorical sense: “1) existing only as the product of unchecked imagination, fantastically visionary or improbable, 2) given to fantastic schemes.” (Merriam-Webster)

Under the methodology of chimeric worlding, there is a call for epistemic disobedience, as the decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo calls it, for we all operate under symbolic systems of oppression. As  API💥💥ers we have the ability to take those pervasive systems and strip them for parts, combining them with other, more marginalized knowledge. We can take what has been deemed ‘esoterica’ or ‘folk’, and give them equal importance with conventional structures of knowledge, this so-called ‘rationality’ or ‘common sense’ that has been naturalized. So much of what is considered ‘good’ or ‘correct’ or ‘legible’ API💥💥 comes from these naturalized conventions. Part of this methodology of “chimeric worlding” involves the possibility of co-opting the aesthetics of structuralism, while recognizing it’s inherent arbitrariness, and to see that this arbitrariness is in fact emancipatory, and enables us to layer multiple logics and systems of knowledge. There’s an opportunity here to mine history and culture of various frameworks as inspiration for organizing content, and for developing one’s own individualized visual language. (Responsibly, of course, but here is where I might invoke my identity as a queer API💥💥er of color operating in the Western world, to say that I am interested in co-opting white knowledge as well as utilizing structures from my own culture. This is why, for example, I am interested in both Taoist cosmology, as well as the aesthetics and lore of Christian mythology, even though I have absolutely zero cultural connection to Christianity).