Like knotted glands in an offish goby… … stands for ‘like potted plants in an office lobby’ at the level of speech and writing, in a somewhat similar form of utterance and appearance that even disregarding meaning nonetheless produces it. The experience of words echoing other words is reminiscent of Benjamin Cheverton’s invention - a reducing size machine - which was based on the mechanism of the pantograph: a structure that resembled an accordion, formed by a linkage of parallelograms with pointers placed in both arms, of which one would follow the model whilst the other would draw or sculpt a copy at a different scale.
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By proportionally reproducing the location and distance between each point that informs a figure, what is repeated is not only the figure but its contour, the line that speaks of every position at once and reveals the transit from one form to the next. Thus, beyond the all too famous discussions on the original and the copy lies the question of this movement that makes replication possible. The phrase embedded in multiple shifts. The path traced by repetition.
A replica does not refer to a model at first but re-enacts the motion by which it is produced. The experience of objects echoing other objects expects and at the same time recalls this movement, which unites them in a sort of fraternity while keeping them apart.
‘Like potted plants in an office lobby’ …precedes ‘Like knotted glands in an offish goby’, where ‘like’ remains identical in both as to indicate or exactly reproduce the movement that connects distant figures, be it under the logic of resemblance or that of meaning. The ‘like’ entails remembrance and the retrieval of memories. Every time we reproduce this journey by saying ‘like’, we actualize this movement and anticipate the next.
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Even if the word replica seems to emphasize the apparition of an exact copy the term itself contains a specific movement by which we are reminded of the Latin word ‘replicare’ meaning ‘to repeat’, ‘to fold again’ and later ‘to reply’.
So by uttering ‘like knotted glands in an offish goby’, I come back to ‘like potted plants in an office lobby’ to which I had replied ‘like knotted glands in an offish goby’ while overhearing ‘like dotted pants in a selfish hobby’.
‘Like knotted glands in an offish goby’… …sets in motion a play on words, ‘like potted plants in an office lobby’. Each case containing thirty one letters and seven words that look (a)like and sound (a)like but cannot merge. It is this reverberation, this distance: the evidence that one cannot speak in vacuum.
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Echoing suggests once again the movement created by enunciation, the reflection of sound waves, from one surface to another until they reach the listener.
For whenever one replicates, someone else repeats and responds.