Work

Title

How It Is in Common Tongues

Author

John Caley, Daniel C. Howe

Date

2012

Description

How It Is in Common Tongues was composed by searching for the text of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is using a universally accessible search engine, attempting to find, in sequence, the longest common phrases from How It Is that were composed by writers or writing machines other than Beckett. These phrases are quoted from a portion of the commons of language that happens to have been indexed by a universally accessible engine. How It Is in Common Tongues is an art work, and an aesthetic outcome of The Readers Project. For more information, please visit: http://thereadersproject.org. The notes at the bottom of each page in the book give the shortest url (often one of many) that we were able to retrieve for the phrases cited. The first in a sequence of citations provides, in parentheses, the date when we found the phrase on the web page given, and immediately subsequent citations will have ‘id.’ instead of a date, where this is the same as that last provided. The number following the date (or ‘id.’) is the total number of occurrences found for the phrase, as searched on that date and for the search engine we used. Note numbers are hexadecimal.

Copies of How It Is in Common Tongues. Courtesy of the artists.

Page 7 of How It Is in Common Tongues. Courtesy of the artists.

URL

thereadersproject.org/hiiict2012.html#hiiict

Medium

Book, Script, Webapp

Technology

RiTa

Platform

Google

Size

8.5 x 5.5 inches

Pages

300

Publisher

NLLF Press

Edition

Limited to 256 copies numbered, in hexadecimal, 0 to ff.

Download

How It Is In Common Tongues (1.8 mb).

Price

Offered freely in exchange for a donation of 32 units of the donor's currency.

Source Materials

How It Is” by Samuel Beckett,(translated by the author from the French *Comment C'est*, 1961, and published in English, 1964.)

Event

'Remediating the Social,' Inspace Gallery, University of Edinburgh, Nov 1-17, 2012

Launched and featured at the juried exhibition associated with the ELMCIP conference and festival, Remediating the Social in Inspace Gallery, University of Edinburgh. 1 November - 17 November 2014.

Related

Keywords

authorship, conceptual writing, copyleft, copyright, literature, network literature

Added

ID

1374