notes from my talk at LESS SPACE Gallery
SPACE: What is chosen to appear (by outside forces)--what has agency, what has a calculable position in space. What it means to constantly map and reference a digitized copy of earth using ourselves, our homes, our time-specific locations, as the point of origin. It's a form of narcissist cartography, as it is a relay between the self and these capitalist institutions, whereby one's conception of one's Self is either produced or reinforced. Spatial representations are important to me, as well, because of how sites of actionable resistance are relentlessly dissolving into one huge Ellis Acted casualty. That being, what is missing from our maps. With these N-grams [IMAGE], this logic is extended to the level of language: what dictates how books are evaluated, what are the politics behind the digitization of this corpus, and how are projects like Google Books displacing indigenous forms of knowing and making.
IMAGING: Imaging is merely a cultural consensus on how to represent one's world. ocular snares like perspectivalism (that also lend themselves to linear chronologies, which in turn promote a proprietary logic governing who exactly can devise and decode that timeline--who 'owns' history, and who gets to be traumatized by it) or '3D' imaging, when really everything is being transmitted via a flat surface. The work is literally dematerialized (we are taking matter 'out' of it every time we reproduce an image; lossiness is inherent) and even its tonal content varies depending on the device upon which it is viewed. There is nothing static or reliable about the transmission of imagery--even the apparati, such as the Sephora/Pantone charts [IMAGE]--that we disseminate in order to totalize our knowledge around a concept, such as color. The only constant is our implicit appeal to objectivity (see: Ngrams, google earth, the diagram). The renderings of EXIF data are, then, a tongue-in-cheek exercise to 'spatialize' that which has no material dimension...to require absurd, excess technologization of something removed from an expectation of visibility.
We can also see this in graphic design trends, wherein artists peel back the layer of mystique that would otherwise furtively blend into a formal 'art object'--an intentional error with the spellcheck markings in full view, or Photoshop's immediately recognizable grid of grayscale inversely represents a _lack_ of image--and the image is perversely constitutive of that lack. These methods reveal not only the technology undergirding the artist's idea or objective, but it is also speaks to a repetition and sameness--a depressing technical hegemony--within the field of computerized design. Such tropes of abjection are seductive to me *not* because they enable an ironic distance between the work and its cultural milieu, but because, in this hyper-materialist/capitalist moment, they reify histories of the creative labor between subjects and objects. This also somewhat relates to the degradation of flags [IMAGE], because their meanings are also bound up in their material signification (which is abstracted from an actor's real labor) and although the actual origins are still locatable in this remixed mess, i am interested in that additional layer of abstraction, by which any salient 'meaning' or historical context is retained via an inscription from the 'artist'.
Writing on the "solution to the problem of how to make art that is both critical yet participatory," Warren Lloyd introduced the term 'sobject' in 2013: Sobject explores subject/object relations conditioned by a culture of surveillance and visibility, sobject's conclusions are really premises in which visibility, artifice and image are often imbued with non-reciprocated interests. These aestheticized forms traffic under objectivity on their way to public fact. Sobject asserts that it is subjective participation and critical collaboration between art and science that can `re-cord' ports and `re-port' visual `re-cords.'
These works fall within sobject's rubric, as they form categories of mutant forms of objectivity: they are snapshots of a recursive game that requires a pre-existing, Othered, externalized technical profile (you exist as a swatch, a message, a coordinate) before you can even begin parsing the different faces and registers of your data selfie.