Scribbled into Existence by Christopher Justice

This photograph was taken of a collage of pages from academic

books I’ve been reading while writing my dissertation. Specifically,

each page was empty and found at the book’s beginning or end.

Most importantly for this exhibit about asemic writing, each page

had some type of scribbling on it. Sometimes, the scribble was a

doodle. Other times, the scribble was used to determine if a pen

had ink. The pages were then compiled into various designs until

one resonated with me on different levels.

The purpose of this artwork is to demonstrate that not all writing is

purposefully done to communicate meaning and that writing’s

meaning can emerge from radically alternative readings of a text.

Furthermore, one interpretation of the artwork is that it serves as

a metaphor for the dissertation process: out of many “scribblings”

a coherent, important argument emerges. In this case, even the

most seemingly inconsequential scribblings have meaning, thus

suggesting the dissertation, like so many other texts, is a “text of

traces”.