Video

Ambient Alphabet (C of Meaning)

Peter Callas

1992, 05:15 minutes, colour

TAPECODE 301.10

Produced by Ring World as an art work for "multisoft" (software for multiscreen videos) installations at a variety of locations throughout Tokyo and Japan, this tape takes the alphabet as its theme. By addressing the location or positioning of letters within the alphabet as "enforced" (or predetermined) edits, it questions this given structure and at the same time attempts to exhume or project some of the possible sharmanic origins of the shape of the letters in the English version of the Latin alphabet.
The environment within which this tape was made and will be primarily exhibited (Tokyo in the last decade of the Twentieth century) by no means warrants English as a "given" structure. New words and new uses for the English language and letters are being introduced all the time in advertising and in common parlance in Japanese. This alphabet then as an ambient structure seen in streets, shopping centres, and computer terminals, is intended to lay open the skeleton of English before its symbolic internment, as if to say "do with this what you will".

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