NEWSPEAK (2019)
by Pip Thornton & Ray Interactive
Newspeak (2019) visualises the words of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Fouras if they were commodities on a stock exchange. Using live data scraped from Google Ads, the text of the book scrolls across the screen as ticker-tape. The fluctuating prices of the words are determined by what they are worth to Google in the context of an advert.
The project is a political critique of the power held by technology companies as mediators of information in an age of linguistic capitalism. Evoking Orwell’s vision of Newspeak as a language that “could only be used for one purpose”, the project suggests that in a digital age, language is controlled and restricted by economic incentives, with similarly dystopian political consequences.
What do you (double)think of the value of language in this dystopian linguistic market?
#whatarewordsworth
Nineteen Eighty-Four copyright © the estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell, by permission of A M Heath & Co Ltd.