Dough Writing

Dough Writing

Writing, to many, is not seen as a technology. This everyday, innate, task is easily over looked especially in today’s modern world of high tech computers, cameras, phones, and palm pilots. It’s hard to imagine at one time people actually invented this thing called the alphabet, somehow made each letter represent a certain sound, then by combining this with other letters and sounds made words. But someone did and we, as a society, forget that and take writing for granted. We do not think about writing or its intricacies when we are in the act of writing. This is partially due to the availability of writing utensils and other materials needed to perform the task. What happens though when those things are taken away from us?

Set about with this task, to write something without using any form of writing technology including pencils, pens, paintbrushes, and paper, I have found a new respect for writing, and the tools used to write with. I saw this as the intended outcome, but what surprised me was the amount of thought and planning the writing took. Not thinking of what to write, but instead how to write it, not with which materials, but how to actually shape the letters to make them legible.

Once given this assignment I began thinking about nature and came up with my first course of action: a piece of bark with carbon writing on it from a burnt stick. This sounded great, how easy, then I realized I live in an apartment with no trees around. I thought about going to my friends and taking materials from their trees but when I tried the snow and rain from the past week had made everything very wet and hard to work with. The bark was too moldy or malleable and the sticks were too damp to light on fire. I had to find another way.

My next idea was to make paper and write with charcoal or carbon on that. I had done this before in elementary school and remembered it to be quite easy. We had made a lot of paper for nature journals so I felt it appropriate for this assignment. I had everything ready to go, the blender, berries to make the paper pretty, water, flour, and a stick.