Lorem Ipsum,
a book of Nonsense
where’s your daddy?
Lorem Ipsum, where’s your daddy? (2021)
Lorem Ipsum: meaningless filler text; a bastardisation of a dead language; pure shapes and letter forms. DNR: do not read.
Interested in this line between graphic and language, I used lorem ipsum as a basis for a book of Nonsense. Imagining it as a lost language of sorts not too untrue there, I ‘translate’, ‘write’, and shape lorem ipsum into a collection of texts.
Giving these texts serious graphic treatment, Lorem Ipsum, where’s your daddy? (2021) is a parodic and humorous insight into the role of graphic paratexts to shape, authorise, and give meaning to text.
Featuring: Lorem Ipsum poetry, Lorem Ipsum ‘translations’, lectures on Middle Ipsumarian Architecture, and Lorem is Waiting: a nonsense-absurdist play featuring the characters Moose, Meese, Goose, and Geese.
130 pages | 110mm x 178mm x 15mm | Softcover, Swiss binding (with colour-coded thread)
[cont] ︎
I. The book
Flip through the pictures to see the fruits of my months spent reading lorem ipsum. Captions tell all about (what in the world) was going through my mind at the time of creation.
Main categories include, ‘translating’ lorem ipsum into nonsense poems and stories, designing lorem ipsum into different graphic contexts and presenting them as ‘found texts’, and other writings and distortions of English that explore the line between sense and nonsense.
As a collection, these writings explore the extent to which graphic design works as a form of rhetoric.
Ignitus comes over with such veritable seediness
vulgarity and insatiability,
responsibly hand us your trembling feet.
Sequence eachother and validate which,
can nonetheless be considered true.
What colours which trousers,
too vulgur and delicate can decide?
the first ipsum:
Potatoes! Treacherous eels!
Flip through the pictures to see the fruits of my months spent reading lorem ipsum. Captions tell all about (what in the world) was going through my mind at the time of creation.
Main categories include, ‘translating’ lorem ipsum into nonsense poems and stories, designing lorem ipsum into different graphic contexts and presenting them as ‘found texts’, and other writings and distortions of English that explore the line between sense and nonsense.
As a collection, these writings explore the extent to which graphic design works as a form of rhetoric.
father ipsum:
Enough. Olivia Vitica, can you hear us?Ignitus comes over with such veritable seediness
vulgarity and insatiability,
responsibly hand us your trembling feet.
Sequence eachother and validate which,
can nonetheless be considered true.
What colours which trousers,
too vulgur and delicate can decide?
the first ipsum:
Potatoes! Treacherous eels!(from ‘The Lorem’, a translation of a play, vaguely in the style of a Renaissance drama, page 452)
[cont] ︎
II. A rationale
[excerpts from the introduction to the book]
This book isn't about Lorem, or her daddy, or finding her daddy. Of course, Lorem probably isn't even someone's name, and I don't even know if it has a meaning, and I don't know any Latin to even understand the way that it's been bastardised or nonsensised into Lorem Ipsum. Lorem Ipsum where's your daddy just sounded so ridiculous that I felt it had to be the title.
I assume we're mostly familiar with the concept of lorem ipsum in any case — nonsense Latin-looking passages used as filler or placeholder text, either as a stand in to let you know that this is a text-container, or as a filler so you can see what this page looks like with text on it (supposedly so that you can 'see' the design without being distracted by the text1).
[excerpts from the introduction to the book]
I
This book isn't about Lorem, or her daddy, or finding her daddy. Of course, Lorem probably isn't even someone's name, and I don't even know if it has a meaning, and I don't know any Latin to even understand the way that it's been bastardised or nonsensised into Lorem Ipsum. Lorem Ipsum where's your daddy just sounded so ridiculous that I felt it had to be the title.
[...]
I assume we're mostly familiar with the concept of lorem ipsum in any case — nonsense Latin-looking passages used as filler or placeholder text, either as a stand in to let you know that this is a text-container, or as a filler so you can see what this page looks like with text on it (supposedly so that you can 'see' the design without being distracted by the text1).
1 Which, in a way is odd, because lorem ipsum doesn't even look like 'real' text. It has far too little punctuation, the paragraphs are too long and consistent, the length of the words also stands out etc. etc.
Lorem ipsum is essentially the neutral text, so impenetrable they decided to take distorted fragments of a dead language to ensure that no one can make heads or tails of it. In effect, it is an infinite text, a text that appears in all contexts, to any ends, set alongside anything, in any typeface — words are graphic forms before they are words, and lorem perhaps is the only text that is pure form, and no content. Its form, is its content.
In an interesting? way too, lorem ipsum is a promise for text. A promise for 'real' words; liked a 3D rendering of a luxury apartment2 some kind of proxy. There is some reduction of words into lines and spaces that is both unsettling and captivating. It is both super-text and anti-text; like some meta granddaddy of all text.
In an interesting? way too, lorem ipsum is a promise for text. A promise for 'real' words; liked a 3D rendering of a luxury apartment2 some kind of proxy. There is some reduction of words into lines and spaces that is both unsettling and captivating. It is both super-text and anti-text; like some meta granddaddy of all text.
2 However, the purpose of these renderings is in a way to aid in your suspension of disbelief, like props in a film, but lorem ipsum doesn't do that. It's success in a way, is reliant on the fact that it shouldn't look like real words. Not proxy 3D renderings of a bed, but proxy blobs of amorphous things that is understood to be furniture
This book then, is some reversal of lorem the filler text. Lorem ipsum reveals that something in progress, scaffolding, or painter's tape or something. It feels innately, a little odd to print it out and bind it, to stylise it and re-set it so it looks more like 'real' text, to actually fucking read it, to imagine meanings for it, contexts, histories... Is it a reminder? Of the graphic foundation of text, the graphic foundation of written language. Of the true shaping and contextualising potential of graphics in writing, in providing status, and in taking it away, in positioning a text—
something cannot have meaning if it does not have a form, because then it could not be perceived at all. But then, can something be purely formal, without any meaning whatsoever? Maybe this circles us back to lorem ipsum. A nonsense version of an already dead language, generated at random, at will... designed to be, used as, forcibly presented as non-text — still, if there is form then there is the potential for meaning to be applied/created/derived...
[...]
something cannot have meaning if it does not have a form, because then it could not be perceived at all. But then, can something be purely formal, without any meaning whatsoever? Maybe this circles us back to lorem ipsum. A nonsense version of an already dead language, generated at random, at will... designed to be, used as, forcibly presented as non-text — still, if there is form then there is the potential for meaning to be applied/created/derived...
II
So reader, welcome.
What you decide to read, what you consider to count as text, what you choose to find meaning in, how far you delve into this book, how many fucks you give, is of course, completely your prerogative.
There is a roughness to this text, an incompleteness, some elements not fully thought out; I believe working with lorem ipsum for the better part of six weeks may have killed some brain cells. This may be the most useless book ever for glue to have been applied to. Cum eat reri aut lit, qui a doloris quasint que destis qui aut doluptur, comnistis endandi cillandicid quam labo. This may not make sense. But in any case, it doesn't feel that much different when a paper provides a quote in French and doesn't translate it. Et omni ommodis eum etur?
Ilitate velentore nonsecae eum ut explauditias ulliqui alicia volore eos alit, odit repudan diorecabores. So reader, let me part ways with this. Nunc nec massa luctus, porttitor elit at vehicula ex. No matter the pile of shit, a pretty jar can mask anything.
Amet.
fin
Minuet Workshop
by Stephanie Jin
by Stephanie Jin
Minuet Workshop is a graphic design, research, and bookbinding practice. A book(ish), typ0graphic playground, this practice experiments with, explores, and playfully interrogates the intersections between graphic design, language, and literature.
(mi-new-ette)
work/shop
work/shop
