Whitman > Nobody Loves Pain Itself For Itself

Part of an ongoing engagement with the sexual and textual propositions of Walt Whitman, Nobody Loves Pain Itself For Itself is a series of forty-five unique prints produced alongside the series Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet and a cycle of forty-five poems. Prints in the Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet series present word clouds of digitally generated lorem ipsum (a meaningless filler text resembling Latin) based on the word counts of the forty-five poems in Whitman's “Calamus” cluster. This series was created alongside forty-five parallel word cloud prints in English intuitively “translated” from the lorem ipsum, titled Nobody Loves Pain Itself For Itself (itself a rough translation of Cicero’s phrase from which lorem ipsum originally derived: [do]lorem ipsum [quia] dolor sit amet.) The prints from the Nobody Loves Pain Itself For Itself series, as well as the poems that derived from the same "translated" English texts, were gathered into a book alongside a reproduction of a page from Whitman's journal in which he compares his output by word count to that of the literary canon.

These works were created with the use of the websites Tagxedo and Lipsum.

Images of Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet and Nobody Loves Pain Itself For Itself, installed at the Northwestern University, fall, 2012 here.