Tom Jenks
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On Liberty, Repressed

10/5/2013

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This text is a numerical repression of On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. The entire text of On Liberty was imported into a database table, from which only words beginning with the letters in the title (o, n, l etc) were selected. These words were then sequentially placed in ten by ten grids. From these grids, words in the columns corresponding to the year of first publication were selected: 1, 8, 6 and 9. This produced 268 canvases, each containing 40 words. These canvases were shaped by erasure. No more than one word per line was kept. Addition was forbidden, as was any form of editing. This process reduced On Liberty from 52000 words to just over 1000. The finished text presented here can be thought of as an oblique summary.

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