Alicia Escott, Heidi Quante: The Bureau of Linguistical Reality Performance Lecture
May 1, 2024
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Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante discuss their participatory artwork The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, creating new words for unexplored feelings amidst the climate crisis. They delve into crafting neologisms, exploring emotions like longing and fear, and empowering individuals to reshape language to address global issues.
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality creates new words for undefined emotions in response to the climate crisis.
Language evolution through collaborative neologisms helps reshape perceptions of environmental challenges.
Deep dives
Creating Language for the Long Term
The Long Now Foundation was initially set up to build a 10,000-year clock, but it then extended its vision to creating a 10,000-year library to preserve knowledge. Language, being the fundamental way information is encoded and stored, became a focal point for long-term preservation. This led to the Rosetta Project, an archive dedicated to conserving linguistic diversity globally. Examples like the Rosetta Archive being sent to space highlight the Foundation's commitment to safeguarding knowledge for future generations.
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality's Vision
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, founded in 2014, aims to create new words to describe shifting emotional experiences due to climate change. By forming new vocabulary like psychic corpus dissonance, the Bureau explores ways to articulate feelings associated with environmental challenges. Their work highlights the power of language in reshaping perceptions and responses to our changing world.
Exploring New Terms for Changing Realities
Neologisms like 'pluvifake' for the social pressure to appear grateful on a rainy day emerge from collaborative word-building sessions. These new terms capture nuanced emotional states such as 'rejuv-esusted,' depicting a blend of mental rejuvenation and physical fatigue. The Bureau's efforts underscore the ongoing evolution and impact of language in reflecting and shaping human experiences.
Fostering Dialogue and Growth Through Language
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality encourages individuals to engage in creating and utilizing new words to articulate their experiences. By facilitating word-building sessions and embracing diverse perspectives, the Bureau seeks to expand linguistic horizons and foster meaningful conversations. Through this communal approach to language, the Bureau aims to cultivate a deeper awareness of personal and collective dynamics in a rapidly changing world.
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a participatory artwork facilitated by artist Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante which collaborates with the public to create new words for feelings and experiences for which no words yet exist. Recognizing the climate crisis is causing new feelings and experiences that have yet to be named, the project was created with a deep focus on these and other Anthropocenic phenomena. The Bureau views the words created in this process as also serving as points of connectivity: advancing understanding, dialogue, and conversations about the greater concepts these words seek to codify.
This talk was an intimate sharing of The Bureau's findings from their decade long social art practice as well as a Word Making Field Session where Escott and Quante collaborated with participants to collectively coin a term together.
Participants were encouraged to consider in advance their personal unnamed experience(s) of our changing world as well as their unique feelings for which they wish there was a word and to bring the diversity of their linguistic backgrounds to this conversation as the Bureau creates neologisms in all languages.
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