This graduation project started with the knowledge that you only need 200 words for basic communication in a language. I was curious how much words a novel needs to tell a story. It became a visual research of the use of language by only letting every word appear once. Double words are replaced with white space. Slowly the text eats itself away. The book ends with a frequency index.
All the work was done by endlessly 'find' and 'replace' words. After the book was finished, Dion Nicolaas heard about the project and did some programming.
Even after years, I sometimes get an e-mail from an Arnon Grunberg collector, who would like to buy the book. It's sold out. I did find it at an online bookseller for 180 euros. That's 1200% of the original price!
- self initiated
- graduation project Gerrit Rietveld Academie
- also see http://www.hapax.nicolaas.net/
