V.

This entry is an annex and continuation of the last. It talks about the motif of Shipping Forecast.

VI.

This entry documents the process of establishing Poetic.cargo.site’s presence in the Physical World.
This consists of the CONCRETE︎︎︎ corner of the triangulation.

let array =

[‘gale’, ‘breeze’, ‘calm’]

Ripples and ripples
upon the

Sea of Entropy.

In the last entry of CONTEXT I talked about the practicality of the poetry and poetic practice and acknowledged the inherent inconsistence and incoherence of living life, where poetic practice resides. Entering and departing poetic practice require code-switching between different mindsets, which somehow defeats the point of an organic, authentic, sincere, almost utopian environment optimal for poetry to occur.

My practice seems to lie in the triple cross section of GCD, Poetry and Tech. Each of these fields manifests in a vision of cohesive structure and system –

a structure to make-simple, to make sense. Intertwining with such narrative is an ideal of clean-cut order, which finds itself awkward and difficult towards the disjointed, pluralistic, chronologically- and geographically-relevant context of such subject matters.


As a professionally and commercially trained Graphic Communication Designer, I have noticed my tendency to gravitate towards a clean, tidied structure of contents, of texts, of visuals and of contexts
– almost a parallel to the now popular
minimalist lifestyle, shared by many young city dwellers disenchanted by the tiresome abundance of material and information.
As the process towards which
sparks joy
, structure and system is almost a manifesto that proclaims autonomy over entropy.

This somewhat triumphant narrative illustrates something rather familiar towards our vision of Design and Tech.


The pluralistic, disjointed, chaotic, entropic nature of human events is the Great Silence, consisting of dark matters that rests behind what gets brought to the surface.


A birdsong through the window to my ear, sketched in the P5.JS Editor hovers in vacuum, above the reality of the mucky smothering traffic,
the growling power tools from newly gated, gentrified communities under construction, the tidal crowd stretching south towards Camberwell Green and further.

My work seems almost like a phone camera snapshot of the moment deemed as Poetic – the capture is in fact a mesh of pixels set to different parameters.


When zoomed in, the capture falls apart to an alien-looking meaningless blur. The works are the projected imagery – simplified, rendered, naturalistically representational to a finite extent.

To protest against a mono-dimensional ideology in the history of Graphic Communication Design, practitioners are already taking it to the digital realm by constructing anti-designs︎︎︎. The overwhelming clusters of elements, types set to high-saturation gradient colours, pixelated puppet-like gif files populated the browser window without unified professional design refinement.

They challenge and break through the confine of a visual digital world pruned by capitalist, colonial, White, patriarchal entities (Yang, 2021︎︎︎).


My design approach for this particular site, is also subconsciously veering off the canon, sliding upon the frontier – on one side is the professional/pedanticism/principle of Graphic Communication Design Discipline; on the other is the populous outsider approach – for example, using pretty sky images as page backgrounds.


While contemplating the lack of apparent political agenda in my poetic practice, I am becoming aware of its object nature: the coherent, structural, sense-making, predictable thing, given birth and condition by the chaotic, pluralistic, disjointed, unpredictable backdrop of the ultimate subject. 


I shall not be the Sea of Entropy, but capable of a wind-battered signage on its cliff shore. ︎