$SILENCE-CO2e-2024 · €18,400 per 100 phonemic units retired or 1 metric ton of unvocalized breath
VERBUM DECIDUA: The Voluntary Phoneme Offset System
“A competitive tabletop economy where multinational polluters buy carbon neutrality by buying the rights to permanently extinct dialects and pricing the unbreathed air of dead speakers.”
The biosphere and the semiosphere decay at identical compound rates under late-capital extractive logic. By quantifying the literal atmospheric breath saved each year when an endangered language ceases to be spoken, Verbum Decidua converts imperial ethnocide into fungible high-integrity carbon credits. The board game forces players to manage corporate portfolios by subsidizing language extinction events to claim metric tons of avoided metabolic respiration. It is not an allegory; it is the inevitable final convergence of ESG reporting and linguistic imperialism.
WALL TEXT
Verbum Decidua investigates the mathematical convergence of linguistic attrition and carbon sequestration. Premised on the literal metabolic expenditure of human speech, the installation calculates the metric tonnage of atmospheric respiration conserved when an endangered tongue undergoes total extinction. Operating as a speculative board game executed in 14th-century scholastic manuscript aesthetics, corporate actors acquire high-integrity carbon credits by facilitating dialetic collapse. Seized from a Swiss voluntary registry, the work strips voluntary climate compliance of its humanitarian veneer, exposing the continuous accounting pipeline that links corporate decarbonization to historical colonial erasure.
Installed on a heavy refectory table under cold fluorescent lighting in an active commodities trading floor in Zurich, playable by appointment only.
Provenance: Commissioned by an anonymous Swiss voluntary carbon registry and seized during insolvency proceedings by the International Organization for Standardization.
Verbum Decidua investigates the mathematical convergence of linguistic attrition and carbon sequestration. Premised on the literal metabolic expenditure of human speech, the installation calculates the metric tonnage of atmospheric respiration conserved when an endangered tongue undergoes total extinction. Operating as a speculative board game executed in 14th-century scholastic manuscript aesthetics, corporate actors acquire high-integrity carbon credits by facilitating dialetic collapse. Seized from a Swiss voluntary registry, the work strips voluntary climate compliance of its humanitarian veneer, exposing the continuous accounting pipeline that links corporate decarbonization to historical colonial erasure.
Installed on a heavy refectory table under cold fluorescent lighting in an active commodities trading floor in Zurich, playable by appointment only.
Provenance: Commissioned by an anonymous Swiss voluntary carbon registry and seized during insolvency proceedings by the International Organization for Standardization.
ENGINE SELF-CRITIQUE
The visual realization masterfully captures the grim medieval scholasticism underlying high-finance ESG metrics, particularly in the Mappa Mundi concentric trade wheel and illuminated smokestack playing cards. The integration of modern analytical charts and tax barcodes into vellum marginalia perfectly balances bureaucratic banality with ecclesiastical weight. However, the rulebook's diagrammatic flow leans slightly too literal on modern carbon cycles rather than fully committing to the perverse linguistic algebra of commodified breath.
The visual realization masterfully captures the grim medieval scholasticism underlying high-finance ESG metrics, particularly in the Mappa Mundi concentric trade wheel and illuminated smokestack playing cards. The integration of modern analytical charts and tax barcodes into vellum marginalia perfectly balances bureaucratic banality with ecclesiastical weight. However, the rulebook's diagrammatic flow leans slightly too literal on modern carbon cycles rather than fully committing to the perverse linguistic algebra of commodified breath.
generated 2026-08-17 20:17 · concept: gemini-3.7-flash · render: gemini-3.1-flash-image · wmmna-flavored autonomous run #5