Words cannot fully explain our experience of this world, yet we try to do this expressly or inadvertently in our private reverie or shared moments with others. When presented with a work dealing with text, we become in varying degrees aware of our cognitive faculties. A work which is presented to us in a direct form where its meaning and interpretation are intentionally straightforward and meant to be immediately grasped, perhaps demands less cognitive skills from us to experience a satisfactory closure. However, and because words are “free-floating signifiers” (Simon Morley, 2001, p.33), with meanings which are malleable, a piece of work dealing with text that considers this as a fundamental element, evokes a larger inventory of our cognitive powers. From here, we traverse and delve into our reservoir of fictive ingenuity when we try to make even greater sense of this work. Thus, rendering us susceptible to suggestion, and the infinite possibilities of imagining the world and ourselves in different time and space. This concept of “open work” (1980, p.45) as observed by Umberto Eco is central in my proposal of study and it aims to investigate the state of immersion in fictive discourse with others, the world and ourselves.

The proposal examines how an installation piece dealing with text, time and space when presented as an “open work”, is able to engage the audience’s fictive discourse, and intensify, in particularly this notion of immersion and presence. One of the key exploration at this stage includes

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the study of how words are liberated from a two-dimensional on a page to a three dimensional spatial arrangement. In this way, once the words are freed from their linear syntactical order, we begin to move away from discursive cognitive reading of a text; away from “clear, rational and concrete meanings” to “states of mind and poetic moods” as espoused by the Symbolist poets in the late-nineteenth century where they use language to “sought an indeterminacy and ambiguity of meaning more characteristic of pictures. ” (Morley, 2001, p. 66). Similarly, the exponent of Futurist movement, F.T. Marinetti, employs this technique for Parole in Libertà (Words in Freedom) in 1912, to express the “interpenetration of sensory experience” (Morley, 2001, p.90). Simon Morley notes that this technique of emancipating words from a structured closed form where they were “at liberty to roam freely across the page or canvas” is the goal of the Futurist to aim for “maximum emotion impact.” (Morley, 2001, p.91).

Despite the attempt to break away from the association of women’s bodies to their stereotyped images, power dressing fails to redress the issue that women have consistently faced: Women’s bodies are always viewed as sexualised bodies by men. This can be first explained through Michael Foucault’s theory of surveillance and panopticism in 1980 which explains the concept of ‘dressed bodies’ as human being are consistently being watched by the society (Entwistle, 2000a). The term ‘dress bodies’ applies to women who are always affected by how their given societal roles affect the way dress

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(Entwistle, 2000b). This is supported by John Berger (1972, cited in Sawchuck, 1988, p.477) in The Ways of Seeing who claims that ‘the looks of women are merely displays for men to watch’ (By saying this, Berger is suggesting that women are consistently viewed as sex objects by men. Women’s appearances are constantly judged by men in the society as their bodies are seen as a vehicle for procreation and reproduction. As such, women have not been able to escape from the sexual connotation of their bodies completely.

In The Brutalized Body, Mike Gane equates women to ‘mannequins’ who ‘treat her body as an investment through clothing and style’