Tickle Like Electric Shock / The Yerkish Poems, 2022
Audition No.1, Composite, Melbourne Australia, 2022
Graw Böckler Garage, Berlin, 2022
Jumbo Receiver, Berlin, 2022
Arising from research conducted with Danni Zuvela into the linguistic capacities of animals, this body of work manifests itself accross multiple media including performance, video and prints.
Tickle Like Electric Shock
Told through a set of graphic poems in the visual language Yerkish, the lecture performance details the true story of a 35 year long linguistic experiment to communicate with chimpanzees and bonobos. Funny and tragic by turns, it considers the deep similarities but also the unsurmountable differences between ourselves and our primate relatives. This performance was later turned into a video.
The Yerkish Poems
The Yerkish Poems (Tickle lIke Electric Shock, Keyboard Talk and Listen), banners printed on synthetic silk, 2022
These banners printed on sythetic silk dissect and redraw the Yerkish symbols invented to communicate with primates, performing a kind of design forensics that reveals the development of the images from the initial set designed by Ernst Von Glasserfeld in 1977 through the later images constructed by the researchers themslef using MS paint and word. The recombination of these images opens the design process itself to poetry.