Symbolism in Circuit Diagrams

Any fridge, TV set, or hair dryer carries implicit text. Right now this text remains unknown to the user. Thus, every day we deal with closed messages that can carry any meaning whatsoever. And then the reverse situation: when creating something electro-mechanic or robotic, you actually don’t know the true meaning and purpose of the object you are creating.

You don’t understand what kind of text you have just created. We have tried to resolve this issue using the long-established system of electronic symbols used in circuit diagrams. These symbols reflect not only the functions performed by the components they designate, but also the related processes. Thus, for instance, an antenna is denoted by a tree with upward-pointing branches; earth, by a vertical post stuck into three horizontal lines, and so on.

We have attempted to decode these symbols and to create appliances that correspond to the texts encoded in them. We translated poems (by Lorca, Kharms, Pushkin, Khlebnikov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Concrete poetry, Magdalesh Dabral, Savita Singh) into the language of circuit diagram symbols and then assembled appliances from the resulting circuit diagrams. As a result, Pushkin’s “Prophet” turned out to be a radio set with headphones; Kharms’s short poem about Khlebnikov, a multivibrator; Lorca’s “Schematic Nocturne”, a crystal radio; and so on. We discovered that the resulting appliances’ functions are connected to the meaning of the underlying poems. We understood that if you manage to exactly describe with words what you intend to create, then all you need to do is translate the text into a circuit diagram and assemble your appliance from that diagram. We are continuing this work.