An Infinity of Lists presents all 2,832 terms from John Wilkins' 1668 Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, rendered as hand-drawn Real Characters — the invented script Wilkins designed so that every thing in existence could be written without the ambiguity of natural language. The piece runs throughout the night hours of a 24-hour installation cycle, the time of day that best fits its subject: the ambition to name everything. The work begins as a grid. All 2,832 characters are arranged in ordered rows, each paired with its English word beneath — stable, legible, teachable. Wilkins' system is visible in its construction: forty root genus marks, each modified by strokes that generate differences, each difference further modified to generate species, the forty becoming two thousand. The grid holds. Then it dissolves. The pairings between character and word begin to destabilise; the characters start to drift from Wilkins' ordered positions toward the positions they would occupy in a contemporary word-embedding model, where proximity is determined not by rational taxonomy but by statistical co-occurrence in text. Each term moves at its own rate: the theological terms resist the longest, the plant and animal terms migrate fastest. At full dissolution, every character flickers independently between its two states — Wilkins' invented symbol and its English word, its 1668 position and its contemporary semantic location — on its own rhythm, out of sync with everything else. The system is still present but can no longer be read as a system. Then it reforms. The flickering slows, the pairings restore, the drift reverses, the grid reassembles. And begins again. The title is taken from Umberto Eco's 2009 study of enumeration, in which he argues that the list is the origin of culture — the primary tool through which humans have attempted to make infinity comprehensible. Wilkins believed he could close the list: that a sufficiently rigorous taxonomy would eventually contain everything, leaving nothing unnamed. An Infinity of Lists enacts the failure of that belief as a perpetual breathing cycle, assembling and collapsing throughout the night.
The Real Characters Wilkins invented are not variations on a single form — each of the forty genus marks is a completely distinct symbol, engraved for the original 1668 publication by the typographer Joseph Moxon. Drawing all 2,832 possible combinations by hand was central to the work's argument: Wilkins' system was designed to be universal and impersonal, but the marks themselves are the product of a specific hand at a specific moment, carrying all the particular quality that universalism tries to exclude. The drift between Wilkins' positions and word2vec semantic positions is not smooth. The theological terms at the apex of Wilkins' hierarchy — God, World — move slowest and latest, as if resistant to the reorganisation. The plants, which Wilkins classified by rational morphology and which word2vec clusters by cultural association and usage, travel furthest and fastest. The moments of deepest instability — when every term is simultaneously flickering and drifting, and the grid is entirely illegible — were the most interesting to make: they are not chaos but a different kind of order, one that does not recognise itself as such.
Commissioned by the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, University of Oxford, as part of A Perfect Language of Images (2026)