Book from the Ground is a multi-media artwork with various visual and interactive components. It is a work-in-progress that first truly began to take shape in 2003. The overarching goal of the project is to assemble a universal language of icons from preexisting sources, to edit and reduce these icons to their most fundamental and easily recognizable visual elements and then to create a database; a multi-lingual, web-based chat-program; and a full-length novel written exclusively in this new language.