Dictionary Stories

by Magdalen Wong

13 authors : John Batten, Jonathan Burt, Justin Cooper, Karishma D’Souza, Bruno Dias, Adèle Eisenstein, Pedro Lagoa, Irini Miga, Chiara Picotto, Maria Tsagkari, João Vasco Paiva, Anna Rebecca Unterholzner, Elaine Young

Dictionary Stories is a book of 13 stories composed by 13 authors using only example sentences and illustrations found in dictionaries.

The 13 participants were given the following instructions :

1.     The story must be created solely with real and existing example sentences / illustrations found in dictionaries.

2.     The dictionaries used must be real and existing dictionaries in physical or virtual forms.

3.     There is no limit to the number of dictionaries used.

4.     There are no limits to the language, format, style and length of the story.

Thinking about a dictionary as dynamic form that documents the evolution of a language, this exercise is a way to look at or to shift where the authority lies in determining the rise and fall of words, their changing significance, and the manner in which they function through time. When taken out of their original context in the dictionary, the example sentences and illustrations may open up to different forms of usage and manipulation, repurposed to define alternate narratives and modes of understanding.  These 13 stories reveals the various possibilities of how a structure, such as a dictionary or a sentence, may be deconstructed and reconstructed to generate varying interpretations and values.

 Edition of 100

Published by things on a table 2021