FLORA: Language Arts in the Age of Information

Monograph

Authors

Thomas Ballhausen , Elena Peytchinska

Publishers, Location, Date

Edition Angewandte, De Gruyter, Wien, Österreich, 14 April 2020

Text

Setting out from the findings of FAUNA (2018), the visual artist Elena Peytchinska and the poet Thomas Ballhausen elaborated a continuative examination of information and its theorisation in their new project FLORA. Peytchinska’s digital drawings (plant diagrams) and Ballhausen’s literary texts devise a texture of landscapes of information and their orders – as well as the dialogic practice of language artistry made legible. In the book, which is object and locale in equal measure, geometrical and topological strategies are connected to make a renewed spatial thinking: established and assumed communication circumstances are traced with reference to enrooted, immobile plant systems. Between the positions of immobile nodes, a multitude of wandering messengers and messages unfold. On their paths, a communication between adjacent networks ensues beyond classical hierarchies – new spaces are opened up by these connections, and by means of the structures used, realized as no less new modes of being. FLORA charts those spaces and makes the relational territories accessible with the aesthetic and scientific means of the art of language. With contributions by Ferdinand Schmatz, Katharina Swoboda, Boyan Manchev

Published By: Elena Peytchinska | Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien | Publication Date: 03 November 2023, 17:03 | Edit Date: 05 February 2025, 11:08