Jeu de mots

Douglas Edric Stanley

1998.01.15

Wordplay, Claude Faure

Claude Faure is a conceptual artist who often works with puns, or “wordplay”. For Claude’s CD-Rom, produced for the City of Science and Industry in Paris, I was given free reign to design the interface as well as the interactivity, and to program the installation. The animations were designed by Claude and Vincent Faure.

Very quickly into the project, I developed an index based on the tautological nature of the dictionary: amlost all dictionaries contain the 26 letters of the alphabet themselves, along with the words used to describe the various terms. A dictionary defines itself with itself. Here, the design goal was to create, as always in my work, an adequation between the so-called “interface”, its expression, its design, and its function. There is no index “separate” from the contents, they both form a single experience of wordplay.

The interactive figures were voluntarily simple, and were culled from the various research projects I had developed at the Laboratory for Interactive Aesthetics.