Semantic Development – Semantischer Verlauf

What happens when the words of a language change their meaning? In the short story “Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch” by Peter Bichsel, an old man assigns new meanings to words. I took this again as a source for inspiration (see also the photographic translation. In this work, I take a visual language and change its interpretation. A visual language is a language that has a direct graphical expression. In the world of computers, this is e.g. Logo or Postscript. I use Postscript because it is a very general language that most printers understand.

Imagine you are printing a document, but the document doesn’t look like you designed it. It is like your printer has a virus in it. It doesn’t understand you anymore… your communication will include a parametrized amount of randomness. In the example above, the randomness of the interpretation of the commands in the postscript language increases gradually from left to right.

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