Lin[e]guistic Diagrams: Scripting the Workshop from beyond the Visual was presented at the conference Drawing Across X Along X Between University Borders organised by i2ADS and the DRAWinU group and hosted by the University of Porto, Portugal, on the 16th, 17th, and 18th of October 2024.
“Benjamin Jenner’s research proposes that drawing-as-process can serve as a “second language” to critique and restructure conventional textual analysis. His work focuses on the concept of “lin[e]guistic diagrams,” which are created through the physical enactment of a workshop script. Drawing on Pamela M. Lee’s temporal triad — the entropic, transitive, and contingent — Jenner treats drawing not as a static visual record, but as a fluid, temporal process that actively destabilises the referential primacy of language. The word-drawings function as a graphemic second language that facilitates interdisciplinary exchange by engaging the recursive relationship between text and material reality.”
Introduction to the DRAWING ACROSS X ALONG X BETWEEN UNIVERSITY BORDERS – Approaches to Drawing Research Across Disciplines
LIN[E]GUISTIC DIAGRAMS: SCRIPTING THE WORKSHOP FROM BEYOND THE VISUAL was a workshop delivered at Drawing Across X Along X Between University Borders organised by i2ADS and the DRAWinU group and hosted by the University of Porto, Portugal, on the 16th, 17th, and 18th of October 2024.
Building on previous work, such as Walking Between Wor[l]ds with Lines, and Blindfolded Feedback, the workshop sought to employ the conference proposal as a prompt to diagram the workshop (the space, the people in the space, the objects in the space) as it/they unfolded in real time through the creation of a script (details below). In doing so, it (the workshop) aimed to show how three key principles of drawing-as-process – the entropic, the transitive, and the contingent (Pamela M Lee) — can be employed to restructure the way language signs for experience.
In undertaking this task, I have approached the workshop proposal as a “proposition”, a proposition that is gradually undermined in the workshop by subjecting its language to Lee’s triad of terms, weakening the imperative of its address.
In the accompanying catalogue essay (https://doi.org/10.34626/i2ADS/2025-0001), I employ the drawings made in the workshop to question the primacy of text. In doing so, I demonstrate how drawing-as-process can operate as a remedial prosthesis, a second language to the words of the proposal, transforming it into an “open work”, a notational arrangement of information, opening channels across x along x between university borders.
Lin[e]guistic Diagrams: Scripting the Workshop from beyond the Visual was presented at the conference Drawing Across X Along X Between University Borders – catalogue essay.
images from the workshop in Porto.