It is a snake (...) by Colin Doerffler

It is a Snake (...) was published in 2019 as part of the Can Can Friends 2.0 project which includes contributions from Zebu, a Berlin based art duo, and Molly Dyson, an illustrator and designer based in Australia and Germany.

16 pages, 32x24cm
Published in 2019
Edition of 200
Printed by CanCan Press (cancanpress.com)

Description:
”It is a snake eating its own tail inside a Rubik’s cube on top of a Baudrillard book resting on a M.C. Escher staircase” – a visually associative conglomerate about the relationship between word and image. What are letters today?
„Medium is the message“, McLuhan manifested. The form urges itself in the foreground and the content falls back. Letters are cubistically deconstructed and separated from the claim to consider a construction of the phonetic alphabet. A recursive typography that regresses to its original: the pictorial form – iconoclasm by referencelessness. In the process, language evaporates in favor of the image, leaving only artefacts of semantic references.
Following the theories of post-structuralism as coined by Jean Baudrillard, we find ourselves in a stagnant time: a racing standstill, a lot happens and nothing takes place. A culture of simulation in which civilization seems to have already reached its boiling point.
How far can letters continue to evolve? Have they reached their peak 2,500 years ago in their representation through the abstraction of the iconoclastic alphabet?
The framework of letters is almost unchangeable, but the way of communicating changes constantly and rapidly. Images displace the letters and merge boundaries by adapting character attributes.
An era of simulation has begun, form emerges from properties and structures of tools and materials, and new tools of our time are simulative and three-dimensional spaces in which anything is possible. The sensory part of this new world is overwhelming, content has no chance in this place, thereby creating a future of new narratives in which signs pretend to be decipherable messages, by only following their own purpose.
An agony of semantic. A paradox in which the content can not change, only the form, but form is the content. This leads to a change in structure and evolution of signs. Semantic content is caught up in its visuality: A snake eating its own tail. A visual tautology that leads iteratively to the question: Do letters have future? – Does future have letters?