Initiated in November 1993, the “Elephant´s Memory” is a linguistic research project based on the premise that visual thinking was entering a new phase with the advent of hypermedia, and looked at the “World Wide Web” as an experimental playground where new forms of expression were going to be explored and negotiated around the world. It can be regarded as an early nineties internet utopia, a naive enterprise celebrating an undefined, unregulated “global space” in which new rules of interaction had to be invented, tested and implemented to explore new levels of resonance between cultures. In short, EM is the child of the nineties, - before the explosion of social media and the platform economy changed the agenda.

As an arts and design student, this project was for me the opportunity to experience my own “picto-linguistic turn” and create an exploratory tool which would let anyone question everything, everywhere, always and with everyone if they wanted to; - some kind of Wittgensteinian playground, where every simple word could rediscover its own implicit riddles. Starting 1993, I spent three years experimenting with grammatical rules enabling the meaningful assemblage of “semantic objects” organised spatially in a regulated and recurrent manner. It wasn´t meant to repeat the linear attempts of Bliss and Ota, but followed instead a “non-linear” hypothesis, exploring the possibility to associate signs in “all directions”. They would snap and constellate in ways that would respond to their individual meaning and graphic appearance, creating sentences that could be red in every direction.

Elephants Memory was first exhibited in “Visual Language” (Boulder, 1996) and the media Art Exhibition Artifices 3 (Saint-Denis, 1996). An extensive article published in “Apple learning technology review” ( 1999) presented the basic principles of the languages grammar to a wider audience. The project has been further developing since then, traveling lately with the group show “The society of signs” (Düren & Freiburg 2020/2022).

“Elephant´s Memory” remains to this day my dearest and most productive failure, and a usable blueprint for anyone interested in visual language creation. Designed to become an open source toy-in-progress inviting the contribution of everyone, the project stopped short at getting the funding needed to scale up several times. It keeps developing to this day. A presentation of the language´s grammar and vocabulary will be released in 2026. Here attached a short introduction to the project with a few screens.