Lorem ipsum is a placeholder, to not be read, nor understood by the spectator. Its role is one of a stand-in, taking up space, to be replaced with meaning in a later moment in time. It is meant for designing without content, layouts with no meaning. Though it remains to be unknown when or how this text became a placeholder, versions of it have been used at least since the 1960ies. In 1982, Richard McClintock, a latin scholar at Hampden-Sydney College was able to trace back Lorem Ipsum to the original writings of roman philosopher Cicero, proving that it was in fact, a text with meaning.

Trying to get closer to the core of Lorem Ipsum, I started a series of artistic experiments, exploring various notions of translation and interpretation through varios media formats. I soon realized, that there could not be such thing as a word in itself, a word with no meaning. While walking through text, we as readers constitute such meaning, connecting the words according to their order of appearance, creating relations from one sentence to the following.

If we look at the world as text, through the eyes of a reader and writer, the same applies to everything else within this world: no object exists in itself, everything has meaning, but this meaning can never be fixed or static, it is constructed through context of things next to each other, and through the gaze of the reader, constantly changing with every moment.

I ended up creating a wearable version of Lorem Ipsum, that could account for various perfomative bodily interpretations of the text. The text became a texture for my body, the movements of the fabric in relation to my body displayed the motion of meaning. Words would appear and hide depending on my movements, gestures or viewpoints.

By reading from my own body, each reading created a new version of Lorem Ipsum, which was then translated back to latin and added to a database. From this database, the different versions of Lorem Ipsum were to be made publicly available through a website, which displayed randomly selected versions, or readings of Lorem Ipsum.