Semiographics is a project about the history of human language. Through an animated series of looped visualizations the project aims to reawaken a self-critial approch to our innermost secret space and make us undertstand that what we say to one another is not the limits of what can be said.
Think about it like this. It is not the last word, with its heavy ending, that breaks down the pride of man and produces the unifying wisdom: it is the innermost volume of voices, the vast accumulation of languages, the symphony of sounds: time, perhaps, or the earth, filled with voices, the ever-sounding movement, which silence never can reach, the meaningful inner measure of the all-encompassing whole. Yet we still maintained the idea that our isolated human language is something other than a loss. Maybe it is too great to bear. Our roots were once torn out of the living earth and placed in the heavens. It is not impossible that this intervention consolidated our loneliness. Our voices were turned inwards. The forests and the seas fell quiet. We started to believe that our language was independent, self-sufficient, even divine, and we turned our loss inside out. According to Plato, this lie makes our existence tragic. We imagine that our language gives us privileged access to reality. This is of course not the case. In fact, the opposite is true. We believe that we are speaking with the voices of the gods, when it in fact it is precisely this lie that sustains our foolishness. Aristotle hesitated somewhat, but still decided to cement our isolated existence at the cost of a definition. Instead of taking advantage of the experiences he obviously knew about, he decided to fortify the borders. In so doing, he also tore our language away from the fellowship of all other living beings. This caused a deep intellectual crisis. Language became a boundary, our thoughts barriers, and our conversations an insurmountable abyss. The details are of course still negotiable, but the crime has to a large extent already been described. Still, there are reasons to continue to examine what really happened. Even though we today have once again begun to understand that our language is part of a larger whole, we still need to anchor this nascent insight in the sources that, despite much toil, have survived more than two thousand years of loneliness.
Since its launch, the project has been a part of the Geopoetics, a larger umbrella project with many branches and incarnations, but with a core aim to reempower the earth. Parts of the project’s underlying research has been published in more acedemic venues (e.g. in Aiolos’, special issue on Plato, forhtcomming 2021 and in the Journal of Ancient Philosophy (2011)).
To help maintain momentum, some of the output of this project will be sold as NFTs at opensea.io/olofpetterssOn
