Dictionary of Primal Behaviour

An aesthetic communication experiment that combines verbal and nonverbal codes in an effort to create a message that is understandable to wide audience despite of their cultural background, linguistic knowledge or a world knowledge.

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Urtica’s statement:

Communication is a vital part of every community. Ability of a species, to exchange information through sounds, signals, signs or movements help them to survive. In order to communicate humans have developed language as a major means of sharing information or expressing their thoughts and feelings. There are about 6000 languages spoken in the world today, but as many linguists believe only half of these languages will still be spoken by the end of XXI century.

Dictionary of Primal Behaviour includes entities that express primary emotions and behaviours that might be common to all humans despite to their socio-economic differentiation. The idea is to form a multi-lingual platform for affective communication by using words that sound similar in different languages. Those words, interjections, are used to express strong feelings such as shock, pain, or pleasure. They are primary spoken but in Dictionary of Primal Behaviour they are transferred to visual communication.

The dictionary is made as syncretic mixture of verbal and nonverbal codes: Phonetically Expressive Word, Graphically Expressive Symbol and Facial Expression. It is a database of interjections (a words used to express a feelings) translated into visual codes.