A dot. A small, black, microbeam isolated over a white page from which language is born. Dot is also the surname of an artist whose work is materialised from words. Maybe all of this is a little too OuLiPo , a literary group cofounded by Raymond Queneau, the man who jumped the abyss between rigid written French and rough spoken French. It was Georges Perec, another member of OuLiPo, who said that to be totally free, you first have to establish some rules. In his autobiography, W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975), Perec wrote, “My family name is Peretz. It is found in the Bible. In Hebrew it means ‘hole’.” A hole through which words escape and where, in the end, only one point remains. Perec in Hungarian means pretzel , by the way.
For the March installment of Spike’s monthly collaboration with Liste Expedition, critic and curator Juan José Santos explores the abyss of language in Anna Dot’s work, which spans from performance-lectures to images, asking: will the iPhone 17 have the ability to supplant human speech?
