WordMord

WordMord is a collective artistic research which started as part of the seminar Feminist Practices in the Public Space at the Era of Globalised Technologies, organized by the Centre of New Media and Feminist Practices in the Public Space at the Department of Architecture, University of Volos (GR) in 2019. The project´s starting point are two instances of public violence, misogyny, and homophobia that occurred in Greece in 2018: the brutal murder of the queer activist Zak/Zackie Oh in Athens and the femicide of Eleni Topaludi in Rhodes.

WordMord means that words can kill.

WordMord poses questions on the relationship between language, technology, trauma and violence.

How is violence represented through (online) narratives? How can we assemble, archive and thus deconstruct heteronormative, derogatory, sexist, homophobic and transphobic narratives? WordMord believes that the violence of language is not eradicated by merely erasing words, but rather by transversing their violent imposition through specific practices, that trouble and disrupt grammatical consistency, semantic norms, 'correct' pronunciation. The rupture of linguistic limits suggests the possibility of experiencing language in its materiality.

WordMord´s initial research group: Vassiliea Stylianidou aka Franck-Lee Alli-Tis, Angeliki Diakrousi, Christina Karagianni, Stylianos Benetos aka Oýto Arognos, Mounologies: Eleni Diamantouli and Anna Delimpasi.

"Dear [neutral] language, (...)"

workshop

In this workshop (10/11/2021) WordMord presented their investigations of how coding can destabilise traumatic language. The group had also invited Allisson Parrish to conduct the workshop 'Creative Writing with Computers, Noise and Mulch'.

No Annotation is Alone / καμία επισημείωση δεν είναι μόνη

tool

The "No Annotation* is Alone" is an attempt to intervene in legal language and discourse within a semi-public dialogue in Greek and English occurring via the WordMord mailing list. This debate questions the law, specifically the Chapter Fifteen of the Penal Code, which deals with Crimes Against Life and discusses the topic of 'femicide' in Greece. We intervene into the PDF with annotations that are not visible from the beginning and we use the web interface to decode the hidden annotation. By using Python, Tesseract, and ImageMagick we replace the searchable text of the PDF with other words, a methodology we call "metalacksi" (word mutation). The first mutation is the replacement of the term "homocide" with "femicide" and we plan further metaluckseis. This replacement happens in the hocr file that can be extracted from the PDF and then inserted back into it. As a result it is a hidden annotation that can be visible when copying the text or by making a new PDF.

Workshop at Parallel Library Services

Presentation at Art Meet Radical Openness

Para-dictionary

scripts

The para-dictionary is an attempt to count violent words in journalistic contexts in cases of femicides and the killing of Zak/Zackie Oh. Through an algorithmic and performative counting we see how the language is changing according to the perspective of the writer, often distorting the facts and erasing, ignoring events behind the murders that target the murderers.
Counting as mourning, counting as praying, keeping track, documenting, remembering, counting the beatings, counting the age, counting as ritual, death counts of femicides.