Three Constitutions

de Russell Maret

"Three Constitutions is my response to [political events of November 2020-February 2021] and the culture that bred them. The large volume contains the full text of the Constitution and its twenty-seven amendments. It is set in a typeface that, though difficult to read, is legible once one becomes accustomed to its forms. The texts of the two smaller volumes were arrived at via the most prevalent modes of constitutional interpretation: algorithmic skewing and selective redaction. The text of the volume titled Constitution. United States. was arrived at by feeding the Constitution and amendments through Google Translate. The text was first translated from English into Esperanto, then from Esperanto into Russian, Russian into Chinese, and Chinese back into English. Esperanto was chosen to represent the Utopian ideals of America's founders; Russian and Chinese to reference two of the primary disseminators of the internet-borne disinformation that has taken such firm root among Trump loyalists. The volume titled Constitution [redacted] was set in metal type, and subsequently redacted by physically turning key words and phrases over and printing the underside of the type. The resulting text is not the hopeful re-write I would conceive; it is intended to reflect the cynical, ineffectual state of political discourse in the United States"--From colophon.