COLOR-CODE: MARX’S-BEARD
My current series of video works presents 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 would embody a kind of «vernacular archive» of its own. From each small network 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 (image-text juxtaposition), 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.
«Color-Code: Marx’s-Beard», based on the digital materials produced at the outset of «Lost Grids», comprises the first work of glitch cinema series that takes the form of projected video installation (one-hour or 30-minute looped) as well as a single-channel cinema presentation (2.5 minutes or 5 minutes). Each piece in the series aims to open up a mode of expression which brings forward the incommensurability of surface and depth in our algorithmic age in a quite specific way. These pieces work by the absurdist conceit of flipping the structural split of the image by making what is normally the visual surface into the latent depth, and conversely, making what is normally the latent elements of mechanics or depth into the manifest surface.
«Color-Code: Marx’s-Beard”» contributes an argument to the traditional of found footage filmmaking. foregrounds the structural split in the image today as simultaneously an optical display used for evidence and enjoyment and a latent yet generative code-bed that functions in all manner of operational systems. The split suggests a need to rethink and expand what is meant by “found” in the art and politics of found footage filmmaking. In this vein, “Color-Code: Marx’s Beard” performs a double détournement.
The visual track presents in serialized form the color tiles of a magnified glitch (pixelation) that has resulted from inserting semantic text (a critical statement) directly into the encoded data undergirding the famous 1875 photographic portrait of Karl Marx.
The vocal track presents the equally absurdist recitation of the hexadecimal string that encodes this visual distortion and that are provided in subtitles. The matches and variations between voice and subtitle point to a tension between two ideas of “performance” at play: vocal interpretability and algorithmic iteration.