What if one’s voice were limited to his or her own physical ability? The use of language becomes embodied in typing, from the very keyboard layout to each step of the typing process. With a constrained version of one’s language, what stories emerge with a limited amount of words to choose from?

The text inside each machine involves a specialized vocabulary. The machine operated with the viewer’s left hand contains only “left-handed” words – words that originate from the left-hand (Q-W-E-R-T-Y) side of the keyboard. Likewise, the right-handed machine contains only “right-handed” words, from the right-hand (Y-U-I-O-P) side of the keyboard.

My intention was to explore the full capacity of each “handed” version of English with the aid of a computer program designed by Mario Rosasco. All possible combinations of letters were formed into all possible words within this new, embodied vocabulary. The process of reduction woodcut is similarly constrained – only one wood block is used for all four layers, so each layer involves the permanent deletion of information, with no adding possible. 

Though voices within the machines originate from the same language, there is no possibility of overlap between them. But their relationship continues to grow closer and then further apart. Like two sets of eyes on a single event, they are each other’s ghostly relative, their doppelganger.