“Text” and “textile” come from the same Latin root “text-“, which means “woven”. The network is the perfect metaphor to understand the inner making of text. To visualize the meaning, to see what the text is made of, how it operates, and — ultimately — to understand how we think.

Rhizotext is an audio-visual interactive installation where the visitors are invited to create sculptures using the language. The participants can either write or speak into a microphone and everything they say will be visualized as a network graph of relations. A special peer-reviewed methodology developed by Dmitry Paranyushkin is used to translate the text into the network in real-time, based on the co-occurrence of words and meanings. The participants are collectively creating the sculpture using their words, shaping the pattern of the narrative together with others, creating a complex web of relations and meanings, revealing the gaps, opening up the new spaces for imagination to fill in.

…

There is a particular moment

    within a dream,

When one realizes

    that it is a dream.

The first thought:

    “What a superb rendering of reality!”

Every shape, every color, every constellation –
    all this is a product of imagination.

After the initial appreciation

    has subsided,

(and somehow it always does)

the question arises:

    what is to be done?

What can one do

    with reality

    so perfectly rendered?

The dream is no longer a dream

when grasped by reason.

It gradually fades away,

    slipping

through one’s eyelashes.

Until one wakes up.