Mallarme Analysis, 2011/16

Archival Inkjet Print on Hahnemuhle Pearl

Mallarme Analysis submits the poet’s most famous work, an exploration of chance and contingency and the space of both the poem and the page, through the quantitative literature analysis tools sometimes used by media outlets to highlight key messages in political speeches. Wordle, one of the major applications providing this service, automatically sets out the text into cloud-like forms, in which quantity (or the repetition of specific words) is represented by increased scale. The minimal text of Mallarme’s pages also sees the text set out in a strange parody of this work of radical poetry.