I have an actuall idea now. which is nice. I was thinking about the repurcussions of copying, duplicating; as well as the subjetc becoming less significant as an actuall item, the quality diminishes and it looses clarity. The first line I went down was thinking about different ways of reproducing images/ text. I remembered in secondary school when we were being taught about cubism, the main point was that cubists were trying to represent what they knew not what they saw. I started thinking then, in order to reproduce an image perfectly, - for instance, a chair - without letting an individuals own interpretaions or existing memory of what a chair is getting in the way, the image could be broken up into sections so that each section doesn't represent any forms, just shapes. Then I thought what would be the point of this?! In terms of creating a typeface, all I'm trying to do is recreate an existing letterform as perfectly as possible. The concept can only produce something interesting when the letterform can evolve and change into something new.

I started to look at how memory can play a part in all of this. My sister told me about a guy called Bartlett. He conducted very influential psychological experiments surrounding the formation of memory.

"One of his most famous studies cast considerable light on the formation of memory. He composed a short fable called The War of the Ghosts, which comprised a sequence of events which were ostensibly logical but subtly illogical, and there were several discreet non-sequiturs. He would recite this story to subjects, then later (sometimes much later) ask them to recall as much of it as possible. He discovered that most people found it extremely difficult to recall the story exactly, even after repeated readings, and hypothesised that, where the elements of the story failed to fit into the schemata of the listener, these elements were omitted from the recollection, or transformed into more familiar forms." - wikipedia

From an influential experiment, this time involving images, not stories, Bartlett showed that we have a tendancy to remember drawings not in terms of thier iconic or formal organization but in terms of thier meaning or symbolic representational value. Bartlett famously ran an experiment in which he showed subjects a drawing which they were asked to remember and then later reproduce from memory. Bartlett would ten show this new drawing to another subject and repeat the procedure and so on.

I want to do a similar sort of experiment but with type. Of course this highlights the fundamental difference in the way we understand images and letters/ language. In order for the letter to evolve each time its pasted to a new person, it has to be an abstract form. At first i thought about breaking up the letterforms into about 6 peices so that each person would be presented with a shape and not a letter. I didnt like this idea becuase I don't feel as if the results would be as interesting as something that went through the process as a whole. So I started to thing how I could present a letterform to somebody without the realising what it is. I've looked at several embelished fonts such as

I ran a quick test and it worked surprisingly well. It seems turning the letterfro up-side-down is enough to make it an abstract form!