whatsoever, July 2024
site-specific installation
salvaged plywood, steel screws, steel cup washers, soil, PVA, charcoal, found granite boulder, acquired aluminum loudspeaker horns, found steel squiggle, borrowed chair, commercial grade special effects paint, audio jacks and sockets, scaffolding, analog camera & monitor, black nylon zip ties, micro PC, open source software, QR code linked to broadcast livestream
For this work I was after elemental objects which look like symbols of themselves, so that they function both as the sign signifying the thing and the thing signified. It felt strangely violent to paint the objects blue, as though forcibly gagging them, robbing them of their sensible qualities. I wanted the intensity and flatness of the special effects paint to make the objects look unreal and hyper-real at the same time, undeniably analog and yet vibrating at the threshold of the digital.
The live video feed uses the post-production technique of chromakeying to delete any blue areas of the image, replacing them with a fuzzy noise, itself recorded from analog TVs tuned to no signal. Changing light causes the software to glitch, abstracting shapes unexpectedly and contaminating the representation of the surrounding environment.
The horn gagging itself echoes the muted post horn in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the sign of the Tristero, a shadowy organization of either illuminati and/or a bunch of derelict bums. It also risks miming a constricted throat (Maggie Nelson).
This work could conceivably be dematerialized to a set of instructions or stage directions.
a series of quiet rooms, diffusely lit, no sharp-edged shadows, contain salvaged & scavenged objects, all painted the same deadeningly flat, post-production blue / a range of organic & machined items, which might include rocks, bones, loudspeakers, rope, ballasts, printed circuit boards, a chair / some of the objects have been punctured by old-fashioned audio jacks & sockets, as though they might, if correctly cabled, constitute a system / the final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent") appears on one wall / a manipulated live video stream of the installation faces away from the main space
For the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, everything is either factual or ineffable. This is a poetic but very dangerous misconception of the world. Accordingly, you can read the final proposition of the Tractatus as a prohibition but also as a warning.