 started with a desire to better understand the relationship between literacy and power. When I was younger and visiting my father-in-soul, he took me to the center of his hole and there is a large statue of his Hejong there. And he told me that Hejong is the great king, that freed Korea from China, that Hejong was the one that developed and designed the Korean alphabet. My research involved the historical context and linguistic analysis surrounding the alphabet to better understand the relationship between literacy, culture, and power. Before the Korean alphabet, many were illiterate in Korea because the difficult Chinese pictographic writing system was used to summarize quickly in the Chinese writing system. The characters are pictographic in that the characters illustrate what they represent. They are also logographic in that different sounds are attached to different characters. The Chinese writing system is made up of over 30,000 characters which requires a lot of memorization. Yin and yang, or um and yang, as the Koreans pronounce it, are the primal opposite forces and their activity produced natural phenomena in groups of five. For example, five elements, directions, and seasons. Similarly, studying the spoken language, Hejong grouped the consonants of the Korean alphabet into five basic sounds associated with the speech organ from which their sound originates. So for example, the M sound symbol, and you can try this yourself, you try to make an M sound, muh. You'll notice that you're using your lips and so the symbol, the graph, is depicts the outline of the mouth. The N sound, nuh, depicts the outline of the tongue touching the upper palate. The S sound depicts the outline of the incisor or the tooth. And the K or the G, the ku or the guh sound depicts the root of the tongue blocking the throat. And lastly, the zero terminal, which you can try by making an H sound, depicts the outline of the throat because air passes through an unconstrained throat in order to make that sound. So looking at the different speech organs and the shapes they visually make in the articulation of the different consonant sounds, King Hejong connected the speech organ to a corresponding enunciate, natural element, direction, and season. Furthermore, the vowel sounds were constructed from the three symbols of heaven, earth, and man. Heaven was seen as round, earth was seen level, flat, and man connecting heaven and earth was shown standing. The Korean alphabet was designed to reflect the basic dynamic structure of reality itself and in so doing, bring humanity into harmony with the cosmic order. So these eight symbols, the five basic consonants and the three basic vowel sounds were the basis from which the remaining 20 letters were devised by adding one or more strokes of the basic graphs or by using shapes associated with them. The stronger the sound, the more visually complex the character becomes. So for example, this M sound symbol that we saw earlier is the basis on which it's related consonant, the B sound, b, which also utilizes the lips as well, is created and it's done so by taking the top horizontal line and moving it closer to the center. The D sound is a slightly stronger sound than the N sound, which is what it's based on and it has an additional horizontal stroke added to it. So this table shows the five consonant groups and columns and related consonants in rows below the basic letter. The vowels are divided into two groups related to Neo-Confucian ideology of um and yang. Um represents dark, yang represents bright. When the dot, which is now a short stroke, is placed above the earth, it is bright. So these two vowels represent oh and yo. When it is placed below earth, it is dark. This is ooh and you. When the heaven symbol is to the right of man, it is bright, here it's ah and yah. And when it's placed to the left, it is dark and this is ah and yah. The direct relationships developed between the sounds of the language and their visual representation is an example of a system in its graphic components abstractly representing aspects of an ideology and therefore its culture. A clear phonetic symbol that followed the principles of Neo-Confucian ideology prevalent in the Korean culture at the time made it easier for the people to learn and embrace it. The Korean alphabet acted as a unifying communication tool and helped define the Korean culture as distinct and legitimate, helping free the Koreans from the cultural dominance of China eventually. So my research document written, I designed a book for the research and as the Neo-Confucian ideology informed the structure and design of the Korean alphabet, I asked how can it inform the design of my thesis book. The idea of dark and bright complementing opposites creating the whole universe is fascinating to me. And growing up in Chicago in the 80s and 90s I have a deep love of techno and house music and as I was trying to give these philosophical principles form I was making a connection between the idea of dark and bright sounds to the dark and deep sounds I was into in music. As music tracks are layered into one another in a mix creating something new from the combination I wanted to design a structure for my book that would allow for new surprising combinations of content. The natural phenomena of grouping into five was a place for me to start. So therefore I structured my thesis book into five. The four content sections together making one whole creating five. Each section was assigned a color and corresponding direction as related to the Um Yang principle. And then lastly I wanted to acknowledge the format directly since I was exploring these principles through a print piece. Therefore each section has a corresponding ink from the CMYK breakdown. The fifth being a combination of all four inks. Here is a sample spread from the introduction. The images in this section are monotone in yellow and centered within the spread. The text is printed in 100% cyan. As the vowel system represents heaven, earth and man I explore the vertical and horizontal nature of these symbols within the format of the spread in addition to the directionality of the heaven symbol in relation to the other two. And I did this within the text blocks. So here is the Korean alphabet section. The images are in silver and the direction is west. The text blocks span across the spreads and reach to the edges of the pages to again emphasize print and book format through which this exploration occurs. There is an acknowledgement of the fold. The sentences run across the fold rather than being two parallel columns. The book is assembled as an accordion fold to emphasize the idea of interconnectedness which relates back to the neo-confucian understanding of the cosmic order that everything is connected. The end is connected to the beginning to further emphasize this idea. It also doesn't allow the book to close and encourages you to start at any point. I chose the typeface caliber, a typeface based off of Berlin street signs because it is a utilitarian face just as the Korean alphabet is one of utility. So a question for me was could I design something beautiful using something utilitarian? Is there beauty in something so functional, so useful? For my thesis exhibition project, I wanted to further understand this idea of um and yang, complimenting opposites. What does it mean to be both complimenting and opposing? As Hyejung deconstructed the Korean spoken language into its basic sounds that could be recombined, I wanted to develop a method for which to combine different images to create something new. As Hyejung deconstructed, oh I just read that, sorry. Using a slideshow of projected images I photographed them at slow shutter speed. This framework allowed for surprising combinations of images which was a reflection of a complimenting and opposing relationship between an orderly or structured framework within which chaotic unpredictable merging could take place. And here are some early tests. I decided to collect news images and headlines because of what they reflect of the cultures and audiences that they serve. I combined the two corresponding headlines of the images and spliced them together using a slight color change to indicate which word came from which story. The images contain elements of cultural symbolism and the headlines do as well. Leaving two together creates something new from the merging, making us pause to reflect on what we associate with what we recognize. For the month of March, 2015, I collected the top news story and corresponding headline from 12 different news sources on a daily basis at the same time. And I chose one combined image from each day. I printed it on a card and I did this for the entirety of the month of March of last year. The back is printed with the two headlines woven together utilizing a grid based off of the March 2015 calendar and I laser cut the day and time stamp into each card to formally connect the front and the back and to show the ruthlessness of time since time was an important element in my content collection as well as my combining process. Here's some more examples. I also printed segments of the commencement speech that David Foster Wallace gave to Kenyon College in 2005 and that's in the brownish color that you see here. He speaks of mindfulness and choosing what meaning we assign to our experiences. And this is a photo from the exhibition. So if you have all 31 cards, you have the full transcript of the David Foster Wallace speech which demonstrates this idea of part and whole and interconnectedness. You can see or hold one individual card but it also belongs to a larger system. The cards were displayed on the wall in the March calendar grid with multiples so that visitors could take one home with them. I also created an interactive book in order to allow a view into my combination process and it also explored the relationship between two opposites, print and digital. The book is oversized. Each spread represents a day in March. Each spread has the same day and time stamp laser, a laser cut into it as the cards and here's the video. So a flip of the page triggers the images from that day to shuffle until it stops and two images and corresponding headlines are combined. The images are on the right and headlines are on the left. The surprising combination of images and texts mostly charged with symbolic meaning like Putin's face or name slows down our reading of them. The merging of recognizable parts pushes us to make sense of their new context in which we see or read them and perhaps to gain an awareness of what meaning we assign to the cultural symbol that we recognize. I explored, the themes that I explored include an intentional framework versus surprising merging outcomes, analog versus digital and traditional and newer technologies, so opposites that are working together to complement each other. This project was incredibly challenging and rewarding for me because for me, my focus was more about the process than the outcome and I learned a lot from it. Thank you.