On Halloween I went to go see this cooperative Paris-based duo talk about their work. They came together in 1994 to produce experiments that they refer to as "machines". Their work consists of writing, art and design; they think that the final result isn't as important as the process of a kind of research/experiment. They have constant dialogues or as they say interrogations about their reoccurring obsessions. They call themselves maniacs, I suppose in their tenacious and unflagging efforts to dissect their obsessions and create new forms from their symbols.
By staging their work they are able to distance themselves from their questions and explore how the political tones of their work play with the nature of public advertisements. By taking different glyphs, strata, maps and symbols, they are able to classify and connect them. One of their projects that does just this is the one where they use color as an alphabet, from international flags and by distilling the unique blues, greens, reds, etc. they create a new language with color that they separate into blocks of what looks like paint samples, but are really unified stratum. They do this similar form of analysis and restructuring with the symbols of money and with national boundaries on maps.
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