Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language

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Two-Alphabet Monograms

Ei Arakawa, Nikolas Gambaroff. Two-Alphabet Monograms. 2009

Ei Arakawa (Japanese, b. 1977) and Nikolas Gambaroff (German, b. 1979). Two-Alphabet Monograms. 2009. Installation view, Pro Choice, Vienna, 2009. Courtesy Pro Choice, Vienna. Photo: Will Benedict. © Ei Arakawa/Nikolas Gambaroff

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This collaborative project consists of 325 canvas flags, each spray-painted with a two-character monogram featuring one possible combination of uppercase letters in the Latin alphabet. The mono­grams compose a kind of alternative language made up of discrete linguistic building blocks that can be combined and permutated in various ways: read aloud as speech, displayed as paintings, performed semaphorically, and physicalized as structures in space. The flags are accompanied by audio record­ings of the artists pronouncing different texts that have been cut up into these two-letter pairs.