1/2/3/4/ Thoughts on Language performs Ludwig Wittgenstein’s investigations into the instability in the production of meaning in language using experimental offset printing. It is a book length erasure poem with writing generated by an experimental printing technique. The book's writing was completed simultaneously with its printing and every one of the ten copies in the edition is unique.
In conventional printing, successive printing plates are matched with successive piles of paper, which are then collated to form multiple identical copies of the same book. To create the book I intervened in this process: I used only one pile of paper and created variation instead by the manner in which I fed paper through the press. Every page of the book has different combinations, both chance and deliberate, of forty-two fragments from four quotes from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations printed in process colors. The book consists of four sections, each focusing on one quote and each beginning with a fragment containing the word 'Language' and ending with the completed quote.
The single sheets were bound using the wire-edge technique. I used a laser cutter to carefully abrade a flap to half the book's thickness and then encapsulated a very thin wire inside the flap. Each sheet is then sewn together resulting in a elegant almost invisible binding that allows the book to open completely flat.
In lieu of boards, the book is housed in a clamshell box, mounted on each is a section of a plate used to print the book and containing one fragment.
