David Reimondo's 'Non-existent Words' at Open Box Milano

David Reimondo (born 1973) uses software to calculate all possible word combinations from the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, yielding 6402364363415443600995503674052849007 words. Subtracting existing words, he isolates impossible lemmas—words that do not exist, as per the exhibition's title. From this linguistic framework, Reimondo selects words that best meet his graphic and acoustic criteria, creating a ceiling and floor installation assembled from twenty-six volumes (one per letter) containing all found combinations. A video projected on the ceiling shows the formation of words with no more than two consecutive identical letters, read by a text-to-speech that resonates in the space, over a non-linear temporal loop. On the front wall, a robot writes a non-existent word with a marker on a large white sheet, periodically replaced throughout the exhibition, editing the failure of communicative and relational transmission. The show runs at Open Box in Milan.