We now live in an age when, as the story goes, the image offers up less a display for the human eye than a data set, latent yet generative, that functions within operational systems. In short, the dominant status of the image has shifted from an optical configuration to a computational one. Within the techno-political context, questions abound regarding this status of the image as well as its relation to the classificatory and descriptive powers of semantic text.
My current series is a further manifestation of the project titled «Lost Grids: or How to Explain Digital Media to a Dead Socialist» (2018-Present). The ongoing «Lost Grids» began with the provocative coupling of images and texts cited from the cultural archive. These couplings were organized into relatively small, thematically associative networks that as an ensemble embody a kind of «vernacular archive» of their own. For each of these small networks of image-text pairings, one coupling was selected for a calculated misuse of digital code: The semantic text was entered directly into the underlying digital code-bed of its corresponding visual image. Rather than pursuing the visible and legible strategy of culture jamming (détournement), this collision of incompatible «languages» resulted in a specific visual glitch in the optical image, which was then magnified and adapted, in the specificity of its failed state, for a particular artistic expression: prints, artist books, and so forth.
I have begun a new contribution to this ongoing work: a series of video installations that maintain but invert this relationship between data and semantic display. The video installations integrate extended recitations of the underlying hexadecimal code for the soundtrack of the visual projection of the magnified glitch’s color palette. The recitation manifests as both vocal presentation (reading aloud) and as subtitle. This doubling reveals a sometimes surprising performative interpretation brought to bear in reciting the hexadecimal code. The divergence between visual subtitle of code and the unexpected elements of its recitation opens up a question of «reading» in a broad sense.
Each of these installations will be available in multiple durations, from 2.5 minutes to 5 minutes to one hour, all designed for different presentational contexts. Here you will find a 2.5 minute version of the recitational color/code installation for the first grid titled «Marx‘s Beard»: Color-Code: Marx’s Beard [click HD].