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I love to play TIME’S UP*, especially the third round when we have to rely only on gestures, mimics and sounds to make our team guess the answers. Your body instinctively performs the images that flash in front of your eyes. It’s random, short, exhilarating, iconic**.
Right now I am busy drawing the vignettes for the next issue of the ERB. Drawing vignettes is a bit like round three of TIME’S UP. It starts with reading a text but it ends with small, condensed, vivid cues that have been triggered by some sort of evocation. When it happens, I create a small gap in the body of the text where I think the vignette could appear. There I start drawing. The strokes of the pencil are busy finding a relationship between the words and my own visual tendencies. Those sketches are made directly in the margins of the lousy A4 prints that my dysfunctional printer deigns to produce. My friends tell me to use an iPad but surprisingly I resist. I like the imprecision of a blunt pencil, working in a limited space next to the text, the accumulation of tryouts around the page, the digression. Here is a selection of my current scribbles. They are the size of a post stamp.
* TIMES UP is a « charades-based party game » where players have thirty seconds to make their team guess as many names, characters or objects written on cards as possible.
**In functional-cognitive linguistics, iconicity refers to the capacity to recognize in a sign — like a word, a sound, a gesture or visuals — actual features of the thing it represents. Think of the words « spin », « click » or « bounce ».
