Installation: Art & Media Lab, Queen’s University
Collaboration with Matt Rogalsky
A 30-minute looping video/audio installation, whose primary features are the visualization of all the words with exclamation marks in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and a player piano with an audio counterpart synchronized with the visual flow of words.
There are wall mounted paper works portraying data, including graphs, concerning the words and their distribution in the book, as well as a modest booklet or binder presenting all 4320 words in order, and organized according to book, chapter and page. This information is repeated on a separate monitor.
Each word with an exclamation mark appears visually in the video projection. There are 4320 words, shown in order, and organized according to the books (4), chapters (17) and pages (628) found in the Penguin softcover edition,1999.
Installation Stills
Exclamation Marks in Finnegans Wake, and Their Distribution
Total: 4390
Average per page: 7.09
Pages with: 577, or 93.21%
Pages without: 42, or 6.78%
Chapter 1: 220 8.14 per page
Chapter 2: 59 3.2 per page
Chapter 3: 159 5.88 per page
Chapter 4: 184 6.3 per page
Chapter 5: 50 2.7 per page
Chapter 6: 230 5.34 per page
Chapter 7: 127 4.70 per page
Chapter 8: 185 8.80 per page
Chapter 9: 265 6.46 per page
Chapter 10: 236 4.8 per page
Chapter 11: 583 7.87 per page
Chapter 12: 76 4.47 per page
Chapter 13: 252 9.69 per page
Chapter 14: 375 8.33 per page
Chapter 15: 821 10.13 per page
Chapter 16: 301 8.36 per page
Chapter 17: 267 7.41 per page
The Full List
Get the full list of all 4390 words and their distribution per page and chapter.