A More Subtle Perplex

A More Subtle Perplex is an experiment in quasi-linguistic formalism, in gibberish. Borrowing and inverting techniques from computer science and analytic linguistics, it blindly strives to produce the outer appearance of language – to be all form and no content. The Perplex produces synthetic languages, or at least their syntactic forms, by writing letters to you. The production of the text and the production of a given language are interdependent.

Like most of Dean’s work, this is a serious joke. A lonely robot, desperately seeking to communicate in an endless series of idiolects, or a play on the abstract aesthetics of non-representational painting for a conceptual artist. And, like most of his work, it is a point on a line, or a member of a set — these examples are not the first, nor will they be the last iterations of the project to make excellent gibberish.