Two years after the fact, this morning I happily discovered my project listed in the catalogue of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) as purchased for their Archive. The general project, entitled «Lost Grids: or How to Explain Digital Media to a Dead Socialist», embodies a generative mechanism built from a calculated misuse of digital code that tinkers with the conventional correspondences between pictures and words. The artist book presents a clothbound hardcover enclosure containing prints and pamphlets with image-text materials and poetic reflections for each of the five sections or «chapters»: Marx’s Beard, Arrival of the Train, Novella del Grasso, The House Is Black, and Portolan Orifice. I developed the ideas for this artist book portion of the project as the focus of my 2018-19 sabbatical residency with the MACBA Centre for Research and Documentation. A few years later, the book was completed and, in addition, other manifestations (video installations, prints, five loose-leaf books of 500+ pages each of hexadecimal code, etc). Some of these other manifestations form a key part of a current exhibition at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art in Madeira, Portugal: «Round 1.1: A Hairy Decalogue». The exhibition runs May through October 2025.
MACBA ARCHIVE Listing