Tongues: A Parent Language

Johanna Drucker

Tongues was produced procedurally from Simon Frith's The Tongues of Man. I selected every twelfth, eleventh, tenth etc. word in each successive section to produce the text. The images were made using potato printing and other random mark-making devices that could make a repeatable form. They accrue, so that the mark in the first image also appears in all of the succeeding twelve, the second mark appears in all eleven etc. Since the edition size was somewhere around 70 copies (I think), if you multiply 12 x 70 and add 11 x 70 to 10 x 70 etc. you get an idea of the number of printed marks necessary to complete the whole edition.—Johanna Drucker