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Viktor: Reading & Deciphering

April 2016

Viktor: Reading + Deciphering
Viktor: Lewis Carroll Rebus
Viktor: Star Chart
Viktor: Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
Viktor: Google Glass
Viktor: Braille
Viktor: Reading Wheel

Jürg Lehni & Jenny Hirons, A Taxonomy of Communication, 2016

Lewis Carroll Rebus

The beginning of Lewis Carroll’s letter to Georgina Watson, full of Rebus puzzles:
https://theamericanreader.com/10-october-1869-lewis-carroll-to-georgina-watson/

For thirty-seven years, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson — better known as Lewis Carroll — kept a meticulous record of letters sent and received, complete with a précis, date, and entry number. This register recorded an astonishing 98,721 letters sent, most of them brimming with his characteristic puzzles, puns, jokes, and ciphers. Some of his most delightful letters were written to children. Here, Dodgson sends Georgina Watson an illustrated letter on her birthday, explaining why he could not be with her to celebrate.

Star Chart
Flown Version of LM G&N Dictionary, Apollo 11, Page S-1, May 29, 1969-BD

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/A11StarCharts.html

Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems or One Hundred Million Million Poems (original French title: Cent mille milliards de poèmes), published in 1961, is a set of ten sonnets. They are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book, a type of children’s book with which Queneau was familiar. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, so that there are 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. It would take some 200,000,000 years to read them all, even reading twenty-four hours a day. When Queneau ran into trouble while writing the poem(s), he solicited the help of mathematician Francois Le Lionnais, and in the process they initiated Oulipo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Thousand_Billion_Poems

Google Glass
Source: Patent US 20130016070, https://www.google.com/patents/US20130016070

Braille
Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are blind or visually impaired, named after its creator, Frenchman Louis Braille, who lost his eyesight due to a childhood accident.

Hands reading braille spelling out a text from Lewis Carroll’s letter:
CRUSTS, BONES,
PILLS, COTTON-
BOBBINS, RHUBARB
AND MAGNESIA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille

Reading Wheel
Juan Esteban Fassio’s machine (created in the 1950s) for reading Raymond Roussel’s Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique.

https://www.amazon.com/Ex-foliations-Reading-Machines-Electronic-Mediations/dp/0816651019



A Taxonomy of Communication by Viktor
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