Post 9: Street signs as interruptions

I’ve been thinking of things like street signs as interruptions. The “things like” includes things that advertise, display, convey a specific meaning--things that speak in the name of explicating or describing. I find that these all seem to exist as interruptions to the self-evidence that the surrounding world sits in. These interferences feel like a change in tone. I could definitely say that this has to do with the words on signs (often these are present) being a change in feel from the un-worded world that contrastingly resists clarification, but aside from full on words (maybe words are the most extreme version of this phenomenon), anything that acts as an indication of something else--a red stoplight, black and yellow striped tape--behaves like a declarative statement, whereas everything these things are not seems to be present as a question (perhaps just a subtle question, or only barely a question--faintly articulated). The intervening attitude of street signs and other indicators feels like an exclamation of clarity amid a sea of ambiguity (i.e. the meaning of the sign in the above photo is much more certain, definite, bounded, controlled than the meanings of the sidewalk, the street, and the car that can be seen around it). Which is not to say that the sign is more understandable than these other things--I think it’s instead to say that the sign conveys a more articulate understanding of itself. (This is why I've used both ambiguous and self-evident to describe the "sea.")

Recently, I’ve been inclined to mimic this type of interruption in the things I make. To mimic street signs and other sign-like objects--orange construction cones, circular, red driveway markers--not in their role of conveying a message or serving a certain purpose, but in the way their presence acts as an interference to the world around them. The interference of something more definite in an expanse of things that are less definite.

Though…to create something that is or contains an interruption within it sounds a bit like trying to create something with a reverse relationship to meaning; “create” doesn’t seem like the appropriate word for inventing interruptions. The idea of creating an interruption feels comparable to attempting to build a road that functions like a pothole. But maybe I’m confusing interruption with “broken” or “flawed” here. When is an interruption a flaw and when is it a pause? Are these two different forms that it can exist as?