The Engagements of Difference Machines

Insufficent Memory with two viewers/readers behind the hanging photos

It’s been a while since I stopped over in Buffalo, but I’m finally unfrozen, and I’m unfreezing my blog, too, to comment a bit on the exhibit I saw — this was the purpose of my brief wintry sojourn — Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art at the Albright-Knox Northland. I visited the show with my spouse, Flourish; Tina Rivers Ryan (who curated the exhibit with Paul Vanouse) was kind enough to give us a big chunk of her day and provide a detailed tour.

When we speak of “identity,” we speak of difference. This is true whether we are philosophers like John Perry, who has interrogated what it is that makes objects identical to one another, or are focused on the social world. The works in Difference Machines explore how, in the context of computer and network technologies, people’s identities persist, rather than being erased as some imagined would have happened. This means that some can be grouped together and identified in stereotypical, harmful, even lethal ways — but there are also glimpses of how, more positively, people can identify with one another.

I got to see Difference Machines just before it closed on January 16, so I have to settle for telling you about what you missed. One of the more remarkable aspects of the exhibit is that it was light-flooded and in a space where sound could call out invitingly from some of the pieces without derailing one’s experience of artworks nearby. While I would exhaust myself (and you, dear reader) were I to try to thoroughly review the show and relate much of what was so compelling about it, I’ll at least write some about three of the works in it, to give an idea of what machines were running and how they engaged with shared themes.

Many of the artworks spoke against the concept of a flattened, egalitarian cyberspace (metaverse?), but the photos and texts by Sean Fader in his 2020 Insufficient Memory go beyond this. They document hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people, including many murders and instances where people have been provoked to kill themselves. As a viewer approaches, the low-res photos, taken on a very early consumer digital camera, have a beauty that inheres in the often natural scenes, is intensified by how they are framed, and becomes even more compelling because of the lossy, “cool” (McLuhan’s term) nature of these highly compressed images. Walking around to the back, the viewer, become reader, discovers how each photo is the scene of a brutal crime. The victims did not find positive community through common identity; they were marked as different and in most cases directly killed because of their difference.

‘Ye or Nay at Difference Machines, two computers set up with the game
‘Ye or Nay, A.M. Darky, 2020 (Photo by Tina Rivers Ryan)

To given an idea of the range of this show, turn to ‘Ye or Nay by A.M. Darky (2020). This artwork is a game for two that invites a chat as each player tries to pick out the card that is showing on the other’s screen. It’s not some antigame or disorientation machine, but an actual fun game with a compelling soundtrack, graphics, and interface. (Go play it online!) The cards all display portraits of Black male celebrities. Part of the concept is that some will be better equipped to play this game for various reasons — they will have a more extensive vocabulary to describe the hairstyles shown, for instance, or they will know more about who was born where. The game/artwork playfully tickles players to consider what they’re able to articulate (or not). My only critique is that the piece is already showing its age in one minor way: The apostrophe at the beginning should now be removed!

Level of Confidence’s face-recognition software finds a match for Flourish
Level of Confidence, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 2015 (Photo by Tina Rivers Ryan)

The last piece I’ll turn to is by a well-known digital media artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. His Level of Confidence (2015) is a free and open source software project in which biometric software matches the face of the viewer (also the viewed, in this case) to one of 43 students who were kidnapped from the Ayotzinapa normalista school in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The project memorializes this event and exposes the working of a face-recognition system which, it seems, is doomed to never make a match. As I read the piece, though, this artwork also uses computer technology to present the viewer with someone who looks like them, making the connection to this kidnapping more personal and acute. This does not result in some sort of naïve empathy machine. A museum visitor in Buffalo is not likely to suddenly feel, “ah! It could have been me being kidnapped!” But the piece is also not purely a slam on surveillance technology, as I see it. The face-recognition system that is central to this interactive artwork is used to invite a novel viewing and works to help keep an event alive in memory.

Well, I could go on! There were many other great works in the show. But I can’t write a catalogic discussion of them all, so I’ll have to let those three stand as examples of the different approaches artists in Difference Machines took.

Generative Unfoldings, Opening April 1, 2021

Generative Unfoldings, 14 images from 14 generative artworks

Generative Unfoldings is an online exhibit of generative art that I’ve curated. The artworks run live in the browser and are entirely free/libre/open-source software. Sarah Rosalena Brady, D. Fox Harrell, Lauren Lee McCarthy, and Parag K. Mital worked with me to select fourteen artworks. The show features:

  • Can the Subaltern Speak? by Behnaz Farahi
  • Concrete by Matt DesLauriers
  • Curse of Dimensionality by Philipp Schmitt
  • Gender Generator by Encoder Rat Decoder Rat
  • Greed by Maja Kalogera
  • Hexells by Alexander Mordvintsev
  • Letter from C by Cho Hye Min
  • Pac Tracer by Andy Wallace
  • P.S.A.A. by Juan Manuel Escalante
  • Seedlings_: From Humus by Qianxun Chen & Mariana Roa Oliva
  • Self Doubting System by Lee Tusman
  • Someone Tell the Boyz by Arwa Mboya
  • Songlines by Ágoston Nagy
  • This Indignant Page: The Politics of the Paratextual by Karen ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato

There is a (Screen) manifestation of Generative Unfoldings, which lets people run the artworks in their browsers. In addition, a (Code) manifestation provides a repository of all of the free/libre/open-source source code for these client-side artworks. This exhibit is a project of MIT’s CAST (Center for Art, Science & Technology) and part of the Unfolding Intelligence symposium. The opening, remember, is April 1, 2021! See the symposium page, where you can register (at no cost) and find information about joining us.

Post Hoc, An Online Art Show

Please enjoy Post Hoc, a show I’ve put together with generous contributions from a baker’s dozen artists and eight writers. There was no pre-established theme for Post Hoc, which was prompted by our inability to get to IRL galleries and museums. Artists were simply asked for digital images, any digital image they considered an artwork. (Several works in the show do have other manifestations.) The work in the show is all from 2020. I solicited 1000–1200 character responses to each piece.

Agnieszka Kurant   response by Mary Flanagan

Christian Bök   response by Paul Stephens

Daniel Temkin   response by Craig Dworkin

Derek Beaulieu   response by Amaranth Borsuk

Forsyth Harmon   response by Simon Morris & Valérie Steunou

Lauren Lee McCarthy   response by Daniel Temkin

Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault   response by Fox Harrell

Olia Lialina   response by Mary Flanagan

Manfred Mohr   response by Craig Dworkin

Mark Klink   response by Daniel Temkin

Renée Green   response by Paul Stephens

Sly Watts   response by Fox Harrell

Susan Bee   response by Amaranth Borsuk

You can scroll through the entire Post Hoc show as a single page. However, you’ll only see the images at their original size, and be able to read the responses, if you go to each post individually.

Gomringer’s Untitled Poem [“silencio”], an Unlikely Sonnet

The untitled poem by Eugen Gomringer that we can only call “silencio” is a classic, perhaps the classic, concrete poem. According to Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius, the “silencio” version of the poem dates from 1953. In my 1968 edition of The Book of Hours and Constellations I find the German manifestation of this poem (with the word “schweigen”) and the English poem (with the word “silence”), on the same page at the very beginning of the book — but no “silencio.” The place where I do find “silencio” is An Anthology of Concrete Poetry from 1967, edited by Emmett Williams. My copy is the re-issue by Primary Information.

Williams mentions tendencies and tries not to too strongly characterize any particular poets in the anthologies when he writes, in the introduction:

The visual element of their poetry [the concrete poets’ poetry] tended to be structural, a consequence of the poem, a “picture” of the lines of force of the work itself, and not merely textural. It was poetry beyond paraphrase … the word, not words, words, words or expressionistic squiggles …

There are several essential points here about the project of concrete poetry and how it differs from, for instance, the shapes of “Easter Wings” and the other poems in George Herbert’s The Altar, as well as the way Lewis Carroll presented the image of a mouse’s tail in words that tell the mouse’s tale in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. However brilliant these two writers were, in these cases they were using language to make pictures; the concrete poets, beginning with Gomringer, worked to create structures. Their poems are not just verse (lineated language), but made from lines of force. In many cases, as with the unnamed poem I must call “silencio,” an entire concrete poem can be understood to cohere as a word.

There are other interpretations of Gomringer’s poem that situate it in history, but I will give a simple one that situates it within the project of concrete poetry — followed by another that places it in a different and much longer-lived poetic tradition.

The lines of force of this poem are, most obviously, those that allow for the gap in the middle where the ground (the absence of text, the absence of “silencio”) becomes figure. As ink declares silence, or, if we read the text aloud, as our voice declares silence, attentive readers can’t help but notice a truer silence in the middle of the page.

At the next stage, there is silence between each “silencio,” horizontally and vertically. We overlook this gap, which is seen even when text is not presented on a grid. It too will be represented if we read the poem aloud, however, between each spoken word.

We can go further, although ear and eye would not agree about the silences. There are spaces, and thus silences of a visual sort, between each of the letters in “silencio,” too.

Fascinating, isn’t it, that John Cage’s 4’33” was composed and presented in 1952, preceding this poem? This poem, too, seems to structurally show, through its lines of force, that silence can take center stage.

In any case, without offering more than a brief appreciation, I mean to make it clear that this is a quintessential concrete poem. One can read it out loud, but that does not provide the listener with the effect of apprehending the structure of the poem on the page. The poem is not a picture of anything. It is a structure. And it is not squiggles or simply a bunch of words, even if the single lexeme “silencio” is repeated fourteen times. It is fitting to apprehend and read the whole poem as a word, not a bunch of words.

Accepting this, I would like to offer an interpretation of this poem that may seem perverse, but which I believe shows this poem’s radical versatility: It can be seen in the light of a poetic tradition that long predates concrete poetry. This poem is not only a concrete poem, but also a sonnet. Specifically, I’ll argue that although the repeated word is a Spanish word, it fits into the English-language tradition of the sonnet. Because concrete poetry is a transnational phenomenon and Gomringer writes in English as well as German and Spanish, this disjunction may be less unusual that it otherwise would be.

Consider that the poem consists of fourteen occurrences of “silencio,” which despite their unusual arrangement on the page can be read aloud as fourteen lines. It would be hard not to read them this way.

Because each word is the same, the poem follows the rhyme scheme of a sonnet — any rhyme scheme, including the Petrarchan or Shakespearean in English, including those typical in Spanish.

If some reader finds it impossible for the same line to be repeated fourteen times in a sonnet, I refer this reader to the 2002 “Sonnet” by Terrance Hayes, which consists of fourteen repetitions of the line “We sliced the watermelon into smiles.”

But is it metrical? The word “silencio” pronounced by itself has two metrical feet ( x / | x / ) and is in perfectly regular iambic dimeter. This is also the meter of Elizabeth Bishop’s last poem, “Sonnet,” which begins:

Caught — the bubble
in the spirit level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle

There’s much more variation in Bishop’s poem, but the metrical regularity of Gomringer’s poem shouldn’t preclude it from being in this particular form. While I don’t have an example of a sonnet with repeated lines (like the one by Hayes) from before 1953, there are earlier sonnets in dimeter, or one, at least: a piece of light verse by Arthur Guiterman, published in The New Yorker on July 7, 1939.

Sonnets can be about anything, although the form does have a heritage. Reading the poem as a sonnet allows us to make a connection to the sonnet tradition if we wish. We can, for instance, ask whether this sonnet has anything to do with love, whether in the most traditional sense of love for a woman or, in John Donne and Herbert’s senses, religious love. Could the silence of this sonnet be that of being understood, and of not needing to say anything aloud?

Seeing this Gomringer poem as a sonnet also allows us to put it into conversation with other one-word texts (those that have several tokens but repeat a single type) that can also be viewed as sonnets, because they have fourteen tokens.

The one I know of, and which fascinates me, is Dance, a typing by Christoper Knowles that I saw contextualized as visual art in his 2015 solo show at the Philadelphia ICA. The page of this work is blank except for a line at the top that repeats the word “DANCE” (in capital letters) fourteen times, with a space between each occurrence. This makes for 83 characters: 5 × 14 = 70 for the word DANCE, plus the 13 spaces that go between each pair of words. While a sheet of paper is typically thought to accommodate 80 typewritten characters across its width, Knowles found that by beginning at the extreme left edge of the page and typing to the extreme right edge, he could fit exactly 83 onto it.

The typing Dance can be read as a sonnet in hemimeter — a term used by George Starbuck for “half-feet,” and associated with light verse. Where “silencio” offers a more static and contemplative structure, I can’t help but imagine Knowles typing DANCE repeatedly, his hands dancing on the typewriter, as he also produced a text that is a score, instructing us to dance. Not so much a structure, it seems to me, but an exhortation and a trace of its making. And, of course, a text that can be read in the sonnet tradition, asking us to consider how dance, repeated, insistent, filling the width of the page completely, relates to love.