ghosts in the machine: a discussion

luther blisset and xero discuss xero's recent work: ghosts in the machine www.deviantart.com/view/213807…


lb: i guess the first question is 'why a number of paintings?'


x: well i like canvases because they're natural fibres, canvas and wood. in a physical environment that increasingly consists of more highly processed materials, contact with natural things brings us back to earth. i like the idea of oil painting, and the fact that while what i'm technically doing is painting, i am also in a sense writing. what i am producing is not what most people would think of as a typical painting. have i painted pictures? i'm interested in the nexus of words and pictures, and how they relate to each other. the numerous canvases, as well as their divergent syntax and punctuation, expresses a plurality of voices.  


lb: these voices seem to be complaining. why is that?


x: they're confessing. the phrases are excerpts from confessions that people have posted online.


lb: why have you chosen to focus on that, what's interesting about that?


x: well firstly, the fact that they're writing. it once seemed as if the increasing textuality of our communications, such as email and text messages, was a short step backwards prior to our technological release from the constraints of the written word. the changing shape of communications technology and the internet suggests instead that we do not collectively seek the transcendence of text, but rather we seek to be yet more textual, more immersed in the written word. the resonances of this are historical, pointing to the history of language and writing, and especially the history of printing and books.


but also that they're confessions. there is of course a long western history of confession. the catholic church and freudian pyschoanalysis are the most obvious examples. in both those cases the person hearing the confession was hidden from view. the same obviously applies to the internet. that people are now writing them down anonymously and leaving them somewhere suggests a detachment from an overarching idea of moral or ethical consequences. in the case of both the church and analysis, the confessions generate a response, and the person confessing has to deal with that response. in the online case, there is no response. is this a sign of a shift in our morality, or is it just a paring-down of the process to the bare essentials?


lb: what about the numbers? what are they about?


x: well the confessions are taken from a particular website, group hug. grouphug.us on that site when someone posts a confession, they do so anonymously. the only way in which the confessions are labelled or indexed is by means of a randomly-generated nine digit number assigned when they're posted. i included them for a lot of reasons.


lb: like what?


x: well firstly they're necessary to express the plurality of voices. they in fact suggest a much greater plurality than is the case, the site hosts tens of thousands of confessions, while the numbers imply hundreds of millions. but yeah, numbers are something of a divine mystery to me. the flipside of this is the history of the state or bureaucracies numbering its citizens or users. phone numbers, registration, pin numbers, social security, auschwitz tattoos. all these cases represent a shift or loss of identity. sometimes we have our identity taken from us, and sometimes we give it up voluntarily.
more broadly, it is about the urge to quantify things. it is clear that numbering people is an expediency, no-one suggests that a licence plate is a comprehensive summation of a person. but the programme of science is to quantify the universe in the same way, to map it by the dictates of reason, and yet people have come to understand that as a comprehensive depiction of the world. i don't think it is.


that's the broad political and philosophical context of this work if you like. that the world does not consist merely of the quantifiable, that the declarations of reason do not tell the whole story. prior to these people typing these confessions, they were invisible. and after, they revert to invisibility. heartbreak and regret cannot be measured, and are therefore not good reasons to stay home from work. the kind of things expressed in these paintings are the side of the world that is rendered invisible by the dominant philosophy - media, politicians, the economy.


lb: is the font times?


x: yeah, times new roman. the website uses a sans serif font. i purposefully chose that font to evoke book printing, bureaucracy, and the past. i like that they evoke children's readers, index cards and newspapers. i chose to paint it by hand rather than print it to represent the human frailty inherent in the messages, despite their being mediated by a structure, whether you think of that as a website or a bureacracy, or more broadly as language and reason.


lb: is this plagiarism?


x: i don't think it's plagiarism. the work purposefully raises a number of interesting legal and authorial questions. legally the confessions on the site are the property of gabe jeffrey, the guy who set it up. the phrases i've chosen are generic, and there are allowances made in copyright law for "fair use", which covers critique and parody. i assume they'd be legal, but i'll see what he thinks. if i was really worried about it, i would've used different numbers and rendered the phrases untraceable.


i have duplicated the form of the confessions of the grouphug site. the confessions there are in black writing on a white background with a red nine digit number. have i stolen that? i don't know, it's an interesting question.


really the interesting bit is the question of authorship. catholicism and freud set up the traditions. the american military set up the computer structure. gabe jeffrey set up the software structure. anonymous users constructed the confessions. i chose particular phrases from particular confessions, and turned them into paintings. i suspect the anonymous authors would no longer recognise their own texts.




many thanks to all of you for the encouragment
especially :flipa: :etc-etc-etc: & :03:


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