| ‹ | Recent Work: Coding the Computerface series Tech_no_logica | A multimedia meditation on computing language and metaphors
By juxtaposing devices of technology with issues of human rights, economics, and culture, my work explores the collision of simple and complex meanings. Language, symbol, and code become content, context, and create experience. Control is visually abbreviated. This metalanguage is continuing to move out of virtual computing environments and into the everyday vernacular as it alters the way people communicate, work, and play. Tech_no_logica is a multimedia meditation on computer language and the undercurrent of meaning, inquiry, and control that is subtly and subliminally buried in boxes of technology. The room-size experiential system is organized to reflect the questions indirectly asked of the user by graphical user interface metaphors otherwise known in acronym form as “GUI”. The complete installation offers both digital and analog elements in RGB (red, green and blue) that represent and map metaphorical systems of control. The digital systems are made up of sound composed of binary fragments and a single-channel projection organized as a grid of 16 squares that alternate 64 words with 192 questions. Sitting perpendicular on a low pedestal and mirroring the projection is a set of cloth-bound boxes filled with tangible, codified binary sets A list or map of the words, questions, and color system reads down the wall and onto the floor. Most of the words in the list are benign (copy, file, save); others are a bit hostile (slave, burn, cut). As questions crawl over the words in the projection — do you need a copy to work? do you need a slave for work? — the squares metamorphose as new words appear: finger, capture, clone. Occasionally a square disappears from the grid, exposing the list of questions behind it in layered bands spinning like the display of a slot machine. The dissonant, mesmerizing quality of the sound heightens and deepens the work’s context by providing an audio counterpart to the visual and tactical experience. The red, green, and blue boxes are a deconstruction of the code and pixels that provide virtual, digital experiences. Their forms, colors, textures, and patterns are intended to simulate complexity and simplicity. They are meant to be opened to reveal the binary sets inside and to offer a visual and tactical experience for the viewer.
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