Short studies of wierk — its etymology, its relatives, and the long tradition of thinking about what a work is.
The Proto-Indo-European root *werǵ- was spoken before the invention of the wheel, before writing, before the cities whose ruins we now study. A reflection on what it is to devote a website to a word that old, and what it means to keep — rather than produce — something.
Read →The English word energy was coined in 1802 by Thomas Young. The Luxembourgish word wierk is prehistoric. Yet they are the same word, twice over — one traveling through Greek philosophy and modern physics, the other through Germanic oral tradition. A detective story of Indo-European linguistics.
Read →In 1962 Umberto Eco argued that artworks which structurally require their audience to complete them are not inferior but formally superior — the open work is the work's highest achievement. An essay on what opera aperta means for the Luxembourgish wierk and for any artwork that evolves with its reader.
Read →Hannah Arendt's 1958 distinction between labor, work, and action recovered a difference that every Germanic language still carries in its vocabulary. Arbeit, Werk, Wierk: three words for three kinds of human activity, and the political consequence of collapsing them.
Read →Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction proposed that aura — the authority of the singular artwork — withers in an age of copies. What his argument looks like now, when reproduction has become generation, and when a website can outlast its maker.
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