Textual Becoming 🔁 Becoming Textual (Prototype)

The installation departs from a perspective of life as messy, complex, impure, imaginary, spontaneous, incomplete and intensely longing. It speculates about the reciprocity that modeling living beings through signs might entail: If life can be described through signs, perhaps this is not because living beings are "mechanical enough" to be represented, but rather because language itself is living matter.

The wall-drawing shows processes of encoding a word or phrase in DNA-bases, to then search for these DNA-encoded words in different genomes that have been sequenced and published via the NCBI database. [1] The output of those searches for words within beings and vice versa, are hand-drawn onto the wall, exemplified through "Metaphor", "A Sign is not alive, but a Text is" [2] and "Sympoiesis". Via the keyboard, visitors can input words or phrases to perform this process of DNA-encoding themselves. The visual output of this custom hand-coded software is projected onto the wall.