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Vibrational Semantics
Bergen
Vibrational Semantics focuses on the elaboration, documentation and investigation of the voice.
The publications and sound works in the series explore the voice’s ability to shift seamlessly between signification and sonority, from speech sound to noise. Questions of linguistic ambiguity, embodied voicing and points where feeling and meaning overlap are investigated in relation to the place and presence of the performed voice.
So far, this has included visual scores, creative essays, interdisciplinary writing and sound works commissioned from artists, writers, performers and vocalists.
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Publications
All you have to do is die — Mette Edvardsen (2025)
14 pages
140 x 200mm
risograph printed
edition of 150
2025
All you have to do is die is an artist text centring around the ghost lamp, written by Norwegian writer and choreographer Mette Edvardsen
...like a sentinel an eerie outpost watching over the theatre...
Infernal Appendix — Samuel Brzeski (2025)
92 pages
265 x 340mm
risograph with screenprinted cover
handsewn saddle stitch
limited edition of 50
Channelling the distorted vocal sonics of black metal music, Infernal Appendix is a chaotic, distorted liquified mess of various hellscapes. This artist book depicts digitially distorted source imagery from Gustave Doré’s illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, and from images of August Rodin’s seminal bronze sculpture The Gates of Hell, following sonic inspiration. The images have been printed in large format risograph, bringing a tactile quality to the swirling visual voids.
A Paralingual Score — Clara Mosconi (2025 (2024))
11 pages
90 x 410mm
risograph printed
edition of 150
A loose leaf visual score based on Clara’s Paralingual Index, a notation device that denotes extra-lingual utterances such as breaths, sighs, pauses and mutters. Mosconi uses this transcription method to record conversations around bilinguality and translation. Here, she has transcribed a conversation with Sara, which can be recited, read, or displayed by the reader. With an accompanying essay from Mosconi.
Pleasure — Samuel Brzeski (2025)
82 pages
138 x 190mm
Comcolor / screenprint
edition of 100
2025
A distorted bootleg version of Roland Barthes’ classic meditation on different modes of writing and reading, The Pleasure of the Text. In the original text, Barthes sets out an erotics of reading in textual experience. He contends pleasurable texts, those familiar and coherent texts that comfort the reader, with blissful texts, those that disrupt the reader by breaking down literary conventions, pushing the boundaries between ambiguity and experiment.
In Brzeski’s reworking, this proposition is taken a step further to the formal properties of the text. The typography itself is morphed into a visual erotic body of voluptuous form, spilling across the frame of the page, disrupting the reading experience and creating new visual and textual compositions. Somewhere between text and image, reading and drawing, the eye is drawn to certain propositions, whereas others disappear into obscurity
