signification

Alternumerics explores the relationship between language and interactivity by transforming the simple computer font into an art form that explores the fissure between what we write and we what mean. By replacing individual letters and numbers (known as alphanumerics) with textual and graphic fragments that signify what is typed in radically different ways, Alternumerics transforms any computer connected to a standard printer into an interactive artmaking installation.

Interested in the breaking and production of meanings, the non-semantic the visual, the oral, the blank page, the engagement of the reader/user in theshifting from the linguistic to the visual and back. To represent the broken and the formations of new meanings, I create an aesthetic environment consisting of a blank page/screen, inviting the reader/user to click/touch the screen in order to generate words. The installation includes a microphone to invite the users to read aloud and share with other users the experience of performing the work through their oral participation. As the user explores and experiences the work by connecting the random words appearing in the screen and assembling definitions, the accidental position of words produce new relationships, and in doing so, an on going process of meanings, connections and narratives; of shifting from the semantic linguistic meaning to the visual, from the literal, the transparent to the abstract; and simultaneously creating a poetic space of juxtaposed words, layers, and visual textualities.

The database of this work is a list of the 100 words all American high school graduates and their parents should know upon graduation.

(source: author's website.)