Arise by Any Other Name

Arise by any other name began with the Tower of Babel and moved outward from it —into twelve stories about the cost of accepting the rules that language imposes, and what becomes possible when those rules break down. The twelve booklets nest together in a screen-printed clamshell box whose assembled spines reconstruct the silhouette of a tower —the structure the stories left behind.

The work was made over several years of weekly meetings between writer/programmer Samuel Mignot, designer/printer Patrick Fenton, and book artist Servane Briand. What made this collaboration unusual (and what shaped the work profoundly) was that it never settled into a division of roles. Every element of every booklet was discussed, questioned, and decided together. We were, in a real sense, learning to translate between three idiolects —Mignot's literary and scientific intuitions, Fenton's design and print sensibility, and Briand’s approach as a book artist. The conversation never stopped.

A recurring feature of that conversation was a back and forth journey between analog and digital that none of us could have navigated alone. For the fifth booklet, a story about sleepwalkers converging on a central point, Mignot drew on vector fields as a generative starting place, producing candidate functions that we reviewed together before selecting one, translating it into a visual, deconstructing it for risograph printing, and then deciding that the story itself should move the sleepwalkers’ way —pages 4, 5, and 6 draw the reader toward the center of the booklet, then pages 9, 8, and 7 converge on it from the other direction. The reading order enacts the story's geometry.

Each booklet is a distinct experience; each has its own constraints, its own surprises, its own outside voices brought in through literary quotes and song lyrics, yet all twelve connect. A shared set of constraints (one letterpress cover, two risograph folios, a riso-printed inner cover, twelve icons linking front to back) held loosely enough to make room for a hallucinogenic molecule, a Khlebnikov word grid, a story printed in reverse, one that reads from bottom to top. There is always another floor.

The twelfth booklet opens to the building program: a complete specification, line by line, of the type size and leading used for every story across all twelve booklets (each line increments in size by half a point, set manually throughout). The project was always doing exactly what the Babel stories describe: constructing something out of language, one deliberate line at a time, until it reaches the ceiling.