We decided to focus on student’s air travelling data and started to bridge our positionalities as international students and designers. 

After the feedback session, we clarified our core shift: the shift from “individual guilt” to “institutional responsibility.”

Starting from the airplane ticket, the project expanded to show that students do not freely choose to move, but the education system requires movement. The ticket reveals the condition of travel but not the process through which responsibility is produced.

From this, we planned to develop an Authorised Movement Pack. Students are categorised into three movement bands — Domestic, Short-haul, and Long-haul — and each document represents a stage of processing. A block of barcodes tracks the progression, embedding a geological-sediment pattern so that every administrative step accumulates into a visible record of institutional movement and its emissions.

The airport is not only a place of transport but a system that verifies, filters, and records people, and university entry follows the same logic. We therefore reframed air travel as authorised movement: flying is not a single event but a sequence of procedures — permission, verification, passage, recording, and approval. This shifts the project from “ticket design” to an institutional protocol, where offer letter, CAS, visa, immigration, and registration function as stages of access. We started to plan a Processing System Pack that the viewer moves through step by step.

1. CAS Letter

The journey begins with the CAS Letter.

In our project, it is reframed as an authorisation record rather than an immigration document. It presents movement as a requirement for enrolment, not a personal choice. Personal identity fields are removed and replaced with system-based data, emphasising that the student is processed as part of an administrative structure. From the moment the institution issues this call, movement and emissions become structurally inevitable. The colour of the document follows a thermal intensity scale based on carbon output: long-haul students are marked in purple, while domestic students appear in yellow. Also, the 131 nation-states form a subtle boundary around the CAS letter. This visualises the geopolitical framework that authorises cross-border movement.

2. Plane Ticket

Then, we developed a ticket that no longer documents a trip but the condition under which travel becomes necessary. Students are assigned to Domestic, Short-haul, or Long-haul mobility bands, with emission and distance values calculated from the average CO₂ output of each category. Seats are automatically allocated, positioning the viewer within a ranked emission system while revealing that this position is structurally determined. The ticket therefore operates as a requirement for access to education rather than a personal travel choice, reflecting the repeated movement embedded in international study.

3. Baggage Tag

Inspired by the tax-free shop in the airport, we designed tax free recipets. Students can have it after finishing the process of movement. On the receipt, we can see each step and the total emissions. But at the bottom of recipet t reads “TAX FREE” and “SYSTEM PAID.” This argues that these emissions, caused by the global education framework, are not the individual’s debt to settle. 

4. Passport Stamps

The Authorised Movement Passport tracks both personal and planetary movement. Instead of just “destination” stamps, we include the calculated CO2​e emissions. It shows that movement is “Authorised,” not “Free.”

5. Check-in Barcodes

The hinge of the project is the barcode. A barcode does not recognise a person but it recognises a record. Before arriving physically, the student already exists administratively as data. Each scan logs an event. In geology, repeated events create sediment layers. Here, repeated administrative actions accumulate into emissions. The barcode is a machine-read record, and the sediment is an Earth-read record. When the airport scans the passenger, the Earth records the movement.

6. The Accumulated Sediment

Finally, All stage’s blocks or barcodes are accumulated into a geological drawing representing 131 countries and their carbon footprint. The university invites movement, the system records it, and the environment archives it. We are not proposing a behavioural solution. Instead, the project asks how graphic communication shapes where responsibility appears to sit. The footprint is not simply left by individuals. It is structurally required.

Final Outcome

Reflection

One of the main pieces of feedback we received during the final crit was that our positionality was not clearly defined. In response to this, we clarified the intention of the project.

This project does not aim to simply inform students about carbon emissions. Instead, it reframes how mobility is understood within the context of higher education. By embedding environmental data within institutional paperwork, the work demonstrates that emissions are not produced only through individual behaviour, but through organised systems that require movement.

Our primary audience is international students who may perceive their travel as a personal choice or responsibility. The project intervenes in that perception by repositioning the student from a responsible individual to a participant within a structured institutional process.

In this sense, visual communication functions not as a tool for delivering information, but as a method of contextualisation — shifting how a situation is understood and where responsibility is located.

In the beginning of the project Methods of Contextualising: Publishing and Literacy, our group (Marilyn, Yini, Moye and myself) individually explored how graphic communication design can function as a flexible tool to make complex student travel statistics more accessible.

I began my exploration by examining how people understand climate change and how graphic communication design shapes that understanding. 

While reviewing the dataset, I encountered transport emission records from 2015–2020. Looking at these records, I started to think about carbon emissions not as isolated events but as accumulations over time. The travel spreadsheet began to resemble the gradual build-up of CO₂ within geological sediments.

According to Parsons D.’s public lecture “The Plastocene – Plastic in the Sedimentary Record,” human-made materials can become preserved within sedimentary layers and even function as markers for dating historical periods, ranging from glass bottles to debris from World War II. This perspective encouraged me to rethink data visualisation. Emissions no longer appeared as abstract statistics but as material traces with temporal duration.

To visualise this accumulation, I decided to gather transport emission data representing how students move within the UK. My aim was to help the audience understand not only the emissions themselves, but also how they gradually accumulate over time.

Using this data, I began to translate the information into geological sediments. Inspired by metamorphic charts, I visualised the 2015–2016 transport emissions using different rock particle structures. Transport modes with higher emissions were represented with larger rock particles and darker tonal values, while lower-emission transport was illustrated with smaller particles.

I deliberately worked in black and white using pencil and charcoal. This material choice allows the drawings to be read as references to fossil fuel histories.

For example, flights, the heaviest and most emission-intensive layer, are represented as anthracite with large rock particles. Ferries appear as medium-sized particles inspired by gneiss, whose pattern also subtly resembles water waves. Meanwhile, coach and rail transport are visualised using much finer particle textures to reflect their comparatively lower emissions.

I continued this process for each year of data. Initially, I arranged the layers in a landscape format, but the sense of accumulation was not very visible. To emphasise the build-up over time, I began stacking the layers vertically in a long portrait format.

I then applied this method to analyse the flight data of UAL students from 2024–2025. I recalculated the dataset to focus only on air travel records based on students’ countries of departure.

This time, I decided to introduce colour. While the earlier drawings used charcoal to evoke fossil fuel histories, the addition of colour allows the sediments to be read as a cross-section of an ongoing energy system, something still active in the present.

The colour scale follows a simple rule:

• Lowest emission layers are represented in pale yellow, suggesting low-energy deposition.
• Medium emission layers shift into orange and red, indicating increasing energy intensity.
• The highest emission layers appear in purple, marking high-energy depositional events.

In this work, I treat carbon emissions as energetic depositional events. The colour scale is derived from geophysical seismic amplitude mapping and thermal heatmaps, where colour represents energy intensity rather than material type.

Traditionally, geological strata record the accumulation of physical materials. However, within the context of the Anthropocene, these layers can also be understood as records of human actions. In this sense, the work does not simply depict soil or rock; it visualises how the repeated act of choosing to fly may accumulate into a future geological record.

However, while developing these visualisations, I began to question the implications of representing student mobility through carbon emission data.

Studying abroad is not inherently wrong, and students should not be blamed for travelling to pursue education. This led me to ask: if I visualise this data, who is the audience, and who is being held responsible?

International student mobility is not simply an individual ethical choice, but rather a structural condition produced by the global education system. In this sense, the dataset does not represent individual behavioural data, but something closer to institutional dependency data. The internationalisation of universities relies on physical mobility. This raises an important question: does the responsibility for carbon emissions lie with the individual, or with the system that requires this movement?

I began to worry that visualising travel emissions could unintentionally frame the issue as a matter of personal guilt. Instead, I wanted to shift the focus towards the institutional structures that make this mobility necessary.

To explore this idea, I started working with the visual language of an airplane ticket. Traditionally, a flight ticket functions as a record of movement. In this project, however, the ticket is reframed as an access permit. The student has not simply chosen to travel; mobility becomes a requirement for accessing education.

Using UAL student travel data, I organised countries based on their flight distance to London and calculated the associated carbon emissions. Countries were ranked from 1 to 131 according to their emission levels. The ticket structure assigns mobility bands: Row A for long-haul flights, Row B for short-haul flights, and Row C for domestic flights.

The ticket is issued by UAL, and the distance and travel time are translated into calculated CO₂ emissions. Even the seat number becomes a ranking of carbon emission, transforming the familiar format of a boarding pass into a record of authorised movement within the global education system.

I also tried stacking the 131 tickets to show how these carbon emission accumulates on to the geological sediments.

As a research-based illustrator, I use drawing to translate difficult sociopolitical and environmental knowledge. I previously viewed my role as a solitary “gleaner”, an independent observer searching for alternative perspectives. However, this project transformed my practice into a collaborative production of knowledge. Much like Agnès Varda’s films, our work was shaped through continuous dialogue, moving beyond solitary observation toward a collective narrative.

Working together on the UAL Net Zero dataset shifted how I understood climate communication. Previously, my illustrations visualised individual human actions using simplified information to make the topic approachable. Through collective discussion and engagement with raw data, I recognised that climate change cannot always be understood as a single event or a sum of personal behaviours. Quantified data can unintentionally assign blame to individuals, even when emissions are structurally produced.

This experience reframed my practice. I now see illustration not only as a tool for accessibility, but as a form of critical translation that can expose systems behind environmental impact. In the context of climate justice and the UAL Net Zero plan, my role as a practitioner is to design visual narratives that reveal institutional responsibility alongside personal action.

Bibliography

• From Reading list:

Conditional Design (Lust & De Decker, 2008–ongoing) Conditional Design Manifesto.

The Conditional Design manifesto proposes that designers create conditions rather than predetermined images: process produces formations rather than forms. I understood this through the analogy of a football formation, the overall pattern does not exist in a single player but emerges from many individual actions occurring simultaneously. This idea shifted my focus from representing carbon emission totals to visualising the process of student mobility that produces them. When emissions are presented only as numerical outcomes, they tend to generate individual guilt. However, mapping how emissions are distributed across routes, distances, and institutional structures revealed shared responsibility. The question therefore changed from “how much carbon do students produce?” to “what systems allow these movements to occur?” In our ticket and movement pack system, the visual outcome is not a fixed composition but an accumulation produced by multiple journeys. Conditional Design helped me frame climate communication not as a moral statement but as a relational pattern. Within the context of the UAL Net Zero plan, the work attempts to show that sustainability is less about correcting individual behaviour and more about understanding the infrastructures and educational conditions that organise mobility in the first place.

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Varda, A. (2000) The Gleaners and I [Film]. France: Ciné Tamaris.

My working process often follows a sequence of questions → investigation → structural analysis → translation → image, which I came to recognise through Varda’s approach in The Gleaners and I. Rather than treating her subjects as objects to be represented, Varda continuously speaks with people, traces contexts, and examines the conditions that allow certain practices to exist. This perspective influenced how I reconsidered my own visualisation of student air-travel data. Initial stage of the project, our group found ourselves only representing emissions as outcomes. Returning to the data, we began asking how the data itself was produced: why students move, what institutional structures require mobility, and how these journeys accumulate. Through this process, we recognised a parallel between the movement of students and the formation of geological sediments, both are gradual deposits created by repeated actions rather than singular events. Varda’s method shifted our practice from illustrating information to investigating conditions. The sediment drawings therefore do not simply depict carbon emission; they attempt to make visible the processes and contexts that generate it, aligning the work with a climate justice perspective focused on systems rather than individual behaviour.

• Outside the Reading list:

Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Haraway’s writing shifted my perception of climate change from a singular global crisis to a network of entangled relations. Her insistence on “staying with the trouble” suggests that environmental issues cannot be resolved through clean narratives of responsibility or technological optimism. This directly informed how I interpreted the UAL Net Zero plan. When carbon emissions are presented as individual behavioural choices, institutional structures become invisible. Through collaborative discussion, I began to understand student air movement not simply as personal travel but as a condition produced by international education systems, visa policies, and academic networks. Rather than illustrating catastrophe, the work attempts to situate viewers within a shared yet uneven system. Haraway encouraged me to avoid moralising imagery and instead design for situated awareness. The project therefore operates less as environmental persuasion and more as an invitation to recognise how environmental responsibility is distributed across institutions, infrastructures, and individuals.

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Parsons, D. (2022) ‘The Plastocene – Plastic in the Sedimentary Record’. (Public lecture and research publications).

Parsons’ discussion of anthropogenic sediments provided the conceptual foundation for translating carbon emissions into geological strata. Learning that human-made materials are preserved in sedimentary layers, and can be used for dating, from glass bottles to World War II debris, reframed data visualisation for me. Emissions no longer appeared as abstract statistics but as material traces with temporal duration. This allowed me to position flights not as isolated journeys but as deposits within a planetary archive. I therefore chose black-and-white sediment drawings, using pencil (coal) as both medium and reference, so the images function simultaneously as data representation and landscape. The work shifts attention from immediacy to accumulation: climate impact is read as consequence over time rather than a single moment of action. This also complicates accountability. No single layer belongs to one individual, yet layers are unevenly produced. Parsons’ research helped me understand how Net Zero frameworks risk framing emissions as individual behaviour, while the sedimentary model instead reveals climate change as a systemic condition distributed across infrastructures, institutions, and mobility patterns.

• Design Practices/Project

Templo (2021) United Nations Climate Communication Collaborations.

Templo’s collaboration with the United Nations influenced how I approached entry points into complex climate data. In their project, the designers intentionally “flipped the data on its head” to create an immediate visual access point for a broad audience. Rather than presenting separate disasters as isolated incidents, they produced monochromatic 3D renderings that were collided and layered to reveal shared topologies, underlying structural causes such as infrastructure neglect or profit prioritisation. The images did not simply illustrate findings; they reorganised how relationships between events could be read. This approach directly informed our movement pack and ticket system. Instead of explaining emissions through a single infographic, we as a team designed multiple documents that must be compared and handled. Meaning only emerges through relational reading. Like Templo’s visual collisions, the tickets do not identify one responsible figure but expose connections between institutional movement, education structures, and carbon production. This shifted my understanding of accessibility as a visual facilitator: clarity does not necessarily come from simplification but from providing a legible entry point that enables audiences to recognise systemic patterns rather than individual blame.

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Tapper, T. (2022) ‘Creativity isn’t carbon neutral: How complicit are agencies in the climate crisis?’, It’s Nice That, 8 November.

Tapper’s concept of the creative industry’s “brainprint” challenged my initial approach to visualising carbon emissions. He argues that design should not be evaluated only through its material carbon footprint, but through its capacity to influence behaviour. Advertising and visual communication shape desire, and therefore indirectly produce environmental impact by encouraging high-carbon activities such as travel and consumption. This shifted my understanding of responsibility within the UAL Net Zero context. Our project initially risked presenting student flights as individual behavioural choices. However, Tapper’s argument suggests that mobility is not purely infrastructural but culturally constructed through institutional messaging, aspiration, and educational systems. As a result, our work avoids assigning blame to individual students and instead reveals the system that organises movement. The ticket and movement pack function as administrative documents that expose student air travel as a designed condition rather than a personal decision. This reframed our practice: discussing carbon emissions is not neutral, and depending on how data is interpreted and communicated, design itself can participate in either reinforcing or questioning environmentally damaging behaviours.

While considering different ways to visualise p5.js as an emergent system (for example, a football match or a kitchen), I started to think about recipes.

Coding environments are built on accumulated patterns—reusable solutions that make certain actions easier, faster, and more “proper.” p5.js sits on top of these inherited conventions.

My practice moves between:

• following these patterns,
• breaking them,
• and sometimes using them backwards.

This is an adhocist approach: I don’t invent new systems from scratch, but reconfigure existing ones through situated use.

A recipe felt like the perfect metaphor, because a recipe is not an image of the outcome, but a set of conditions under which an outcome may appear.

I had already explored the two extremes of the spectrum: the most human-centric method, through manual ASCII typing, and the most automated method, through machine-led processing. But I hadn’t yet tried what could be considered the “proper” or canonical way of coding.

So I deliberately shifted my approach. I began working through p5.js in a more conventional way: using functions, parameters, structure, and modular logic.

To do this, I went through many tutorials, documentation, and other people’s code, adapting and modifying them rather than copying them directly, in order to build my own set of instructions.

Through repeated modification and refinement, this process resulted in my first canonical coded cake. I decided to develop cake as it had quite clear stacking and decorating procedure.

Once this middle position became clear, I realised I was no longer working with isolated experiments, but with a spectrum of instruction.

And it was at this moment that I decided to make that spectrum visible— So I decided to present the same cake as three different recipes, each corresponding to a different distribution of instruction and authorship.

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The first recipe is a manual ASCII version, presented as a handwritten notebook, similar to a grandmother’s recipe journal.

I grabbed an old paper from the recycle exchange downstairs and started to translate my cake image into hand written ascii art.

Here, every character is placed through human judgement, time, and attention.

All the computational thinking happens in my head. p5.js is treated merely as a digital canvas.

The process is:

• linear,
• labour-intensive,
• and deeply personal.

This is authorship through human persistence—designing a form through sheer manual control.

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The second recipe is the most “proper” coding method, presented as a palm-sized accordion book.

I started by coding the recipe and made the prototype.

When the accordion book is expanded, it reveals the full p5.js recipe: code, functions, comments, and logic working together. Here, p5.js operates as a living organism, very much in line with the Conditional Design Manifesto.

When the book is unfolded, we see the long process. When folded, we see the finished cake. This physically demonstrates the idea that “process produces formations rather than forms.”

Even ASCII art becomes drawing material inside the code editor itself, and error behaviour becomes an ingredient: when “#” turns red, it becomes a strawberry.

I also include failed recipes not as mistakes, but as moments where the system reveals its limits and assumptions. Functions and transforms act as kitchen equipment, shaping how the recipe runs.

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The final recipe is a single, minimalist recipe card.

This represents the most automated method.

Here, I upload the cake image back into p5.js and translate its pixel data into a set of rules. The instructions are extremely short, but they trigger a complex automated process.

In this version, authorship is at its most detached.

My role becomes that of a system architect: I provide a seed and step back, allowing the machine to execute the translation. Meaning shifts from argument to instruction, and authorship moves from decision-making to delegation.

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Ultimately, this project demonstrates that p5.js is not just an image generator, but a translation system where time, logic, and the surrender of control converge.

If traditional design is sculpture, directly carving an outcome,
then my role is closer to gardening.

I design soil, light, water, and seeds, and allow forms to emerge beyond my control.

The value of this work lies not in the final cake or image, but in the rigorous exploration of how meaning, authorship, and instruction shift across different systems of making.

Up to this point, I had used two distinct methods:

1. Manual ASCII input:
2. Automated image-to-ASCII processing

Last week’s feedback suggested that 1. Manual ASCII does not count as “coding,” which led me to examine the definition of coding more closely.

Coding can be understood as instructing a computer what to do through a formalised language that it can interpret. From this perspective, coding is not defined by efficiency or automation, but by the act of instruction itself.

I realised that within what we call “coding,” there exists a wide spectrum:

From the most human-centric method, where everything is typed manually, to the most machine-driven method, where uploaded images are automatically translated through code.

From this perspective, coding is not defined by efficiency or automation, but by the act of instruction itself.

Both manual input and automated processes are forms of coding, but they exist at different positions on the same spectrum of instruction: In manual ASCII input, the computational thinking happens primarily in my head, and the code functions as a recording of those decisions. In automated processes, the same thinking is delegated to p5.js, where the system executes those decisions algorithmically.

This led me to reconsider p5.js not simply as an image-making tool, but as a system in which instructions can be distributed in different ways.

I began to ask:

So I made a fixed condition for my Method (Fixed Parameters), generating the same cow ascii images using P5.js and the output will be the code, console and the final preview image.

As I moved between these methods, a question started to emerge:

I noticed that I could arrive at the same visual outcome again and again, but through very different paths and processes.

Each method implied a different way of thinking, a different epistemology, and a different relationship between me and the machine.

This is where I began to treat coding not simply as a way to produce images, but as a way to think about authorship itself.

Through iteration, I started to deliberately subvert the original purpose of p5.js. Instead of using it purely as an image-making tool, I shifted the focus toward how images come into being.

I no longer positioned myself as a “user” of the software, but as someone who designs the conditions under which things appear.

In this sense, my role shifted from illustrator to system architect.

I started to learn the program through various YouTube tutorials and archives that p5.js has uploaded on their website.

Then, I started to try the actual coding.

At the beginning, I did not fully understand how to upload an image and translate it into ASCII using code. Instead, I manually typed each ASCII character line by line:

As a result, the image began to appear not only in the preview window, but also as text within the code editor itself.

To support this process, I created my own system with two methods:

1. either completing a section before checking accuracy, or repeatedly testing the code in smaller increments.
2. In both cases, I compared the output against the reference image and physically marked my progress.

After entering the code, I scribbled red lines over the reference image displayed in the adjacent window to mark what I had just typed.

Without realising it, I was approaching the web software in a highly human-centred way. Instead of instructing the computer to position each letter, I was trying to control the placement myself.

Knowledge gained at this stage

I inserted the fully hand-typed ASCII code into CSS and HTML environments to observe how the same instructions would behave across different systems. Although the code remained technically identical, the visual outcome changed: characters that appeared yellow in JavaScript were rendered in different colours in CSS/HTML, altering the tonal values of the cow image. Certain symbols, such as @ and #, suddenly became highlighted by the syntax rules of the browser.

This revealed that the image was not only produced by my input, but also by the interpretation rules of each software environment. The “image” therefore did not exist as a fixed visual object, but as a negotiated result between instructions and platform.

I also discovered that when writing // as a comment in JavaScript, the notes were not applied to the preview window. The system recognised the line as instruction about the code rather than instruction for the image. This exposed a hierarchy inside the language: some text participates in image production, while other text exists only as meta-communication between human and machine.

Through this, I began to understand that coding is not simply a neutral tool for drawing. It is a conditional system that filters, prioritises, and interprets information. My earlier attempt to manually control every character conflicted with the nature of the medium — the computer does not execute intention, only rules.

When I manually typed the ASCII characters and pressed the play button, the image appeared not only in the preview window but also inside the console text output. However, whenever the code contained an error, red underlines appeared and warning messages were generated in the console. The system followed a clear chain of behaviour: an error in the coding window → a warning message in the console → the program refused to run.

Multiple instances work together:

The interface is divided into functional zones: the sketch.js editor performs the act of making, the preview window performs the act of seeing, and the console performs the act of communicating. These separate instances interact and together produce an emergent outcome.

the code itself,

comments,

console feedback,

and the visual output.

Together, these form an emergent system. I began to think of p5.js less like a static tool, and more like a living organism.

However, When I manually typed ASCII characters to recreate the same image multiple times, I received feedback that this approach was not considered “proper coding,” as it lacked automation.  I began restudying the fundamental functionality of p5.js, focusing on how the system operates, and then moved on to creative coding studies.

I then uploaded the original image itself and translated its pixel data into ASCII characters. Instead of manually placing each symbol, the computer analysed brightness values and assigned characters accordingly.

While working through these different approaches, I began to question what coding actually means. I decided to explore this concept further for the upcoming weeks.

In Violent Phenomena (Barokka, 2022), Khairani Barokka critiques how certain bodies, experiences, and forms of communication are marginalised through translation’s politics of access and refusal. Her concept of “right of refusal” reveals how silence, hesitation, and the unspoken are not neutral absences, but embodied forms of power that structure who is allowed to speak—and who is not. Using Barokka’s framework as a method of re-presentation, I re-translate the Preface of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947), which recounts translator Barbara Wright’s polite but uneasy conversations about her work.

In this re-presentation, I adopt “Translating Absence” as a technique: the process of taking the unspoken, judgmental silence—the “Ah-,” pauses, hesitations, and polite micro-violences embedded in everyday conversation—and rendering them explicitly visible. These translated absences appear as Intrusive Annotations in the form of footnotes, exposing the prejudices, micro-aggressions, and social hierarchies that silently structure the original dialogue. In doing so, the project aligns with Barokka’s insistence that translation must account for what is withheld as much as for what is spoken.

Footnotes, by their very position at the margins of the page, visually and conceptually embody the mechanics of exclusion. They represent information deemed necessary yet structurally secondary—mirroring the way unspoken judgments and social biases remain present but unacknowledged in everyday interaction. In this piece, the intrusive annotations transform casual dialogue into a layered commentary, revealing the micro-aggressions beneath the surface of polite exchange.

By framing these internal, judgmental thoughts as annotations, the work foregrounds the politics of silence and absence that Barokka identifies. The footnotes do not simply clarify the text; they interrupt it. They refuse the smoothness of politeness and instead foreground the embodied tensions that constitute communication. Through this method, the project demonstrates that translating absence is not a subtractive act but a critical one—making visible the unsaid structures of power that shape how we read, listen, and understand.