ABC 61250 e altre / E altre
ABC 61250 e altre is the title of a project made by Aurora Pelaggi and Matteo Mariangioli, students of the MA in Communication and Design for Publishing at ISIA Urbino, during the course Graphic Image Design taught by Mauro Bubbico. It was included in Batti il primo cinque, a series of five exhibitions shown at the Magma Museum.
About the project, from the presentation on Behance:
An object as well known as it is discussed, but perhaps not over-analyzed, “la civetta”, the sheet containing the headlines of the most important articles in a newspaper and displayed outside newsstands, becomes the protagonist of the volume, losing its function as a mere attraction and becoming the central element from which the tools are drawn to articulate a discourse entirely constructed from its textual components.
“ABC 61250 and others” is a catalog but also a dictionary; it is an object that aims to bring out critical reflection based on the depth of the news and the generality with which this information is conveyed.
Generic news, repetition of terms, and simple structure have drawn attention to a very fascinating side of language, which is then closely related to mathematics. A language can produce and recognize a potentially infinite number of sentences from a finite number of basic units. Raymond Queneau teaches us, in his experimental work of 1961, that starting from 10 poems per 10 pages, printed on ships of moving paper, it is possible to compose a hundred trillion sonnets at will. So what happens if an absolutely popular piece o news, which Is nothing more than a set of lines, is placed inside a combinatory machine that allows infinite combinations to be generated?
5 words, 5 news items associated with the respective term for each letter of the alphabet generated the 61250 “civette” that are the result of the computer code that exponentially increased the starting archive making these news items hypothetically all true, or almost all true. 61250 is thus the result of a starting selection that made the physical form of this object possible so that this volume, though not as its main intent, can be read.
Description by the contributor of the insert title E Altre (auto-translated from the Italian with DeepL):
The combinatorial machine changes its form: from a digital tool it is transformed into a paper object, making the same computer process possible in an analog way. E Altre (“And others”) represents the most absolute synthesis of the concept expressed within the catalog; the 21 civette offered in the exhibition, through the interaction of visitors, become the matrices for the generation of new news. This insert again seeks to emphasize the ambiguity with which much news is communicated but also the fascinating possibilities behind the language. 62 civette are those generated through passage and participation during the Batti il primo cinque exhibition at the Magma Museum. ABC is: 61250, 18688 but also and others.
