By visual means, the installation describes a sentence from James Joyce´s “Finnegan´s Wake”. By including more than 16 languages, the work is given a multiple meaning. In reality, words have a different meaning hidden under its shells; they represent keys to open the book and read it like a world book: mythological, historical, theoretical and other models for interpretation which are not arranged in a serial chronological order but work simultaneously. The installation Joyce thinks in pictures was made possible by a theoretic cooperation with Ulrich Blumenthal, the translator of Anna Livia Plurabell.

The sentence consists of 50 words and is made visible in the room by means of two-dimensional and three-dimensional presentations, sound and moving elements. The audience may interconnect various overlapping layers of images and thus get access to the linguistically abstracted meanings. Intentionally, there is no linear reading order, the audience may enter the cycle from anywhere. Joyce thinks in pictures was presented at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in the summer of 1990 during the John Cage days.

“And there oftafter, jountyjogging on an Irish visavis, insteadily with shoulder to shoulder Jehu will tell to Christianier, saint to sage the humphriad of that fall and rise while daisy winks at her pinker sister among the tussocks and the copoll between the shafts mocks the couple on that car.”