80 x 40 in., acrylic on canvas, silkscreen print (acrylic) on rag paper, safety pins, red string, wooden beads, parchment, iron gall ink, silkscreen print (acrylic) on tracing paper
I look more like my father than my mother. My temperament, as well, follows after my father’s—I am impatient, in perpetual motion, cognitively ruled, and a little bit haunted. I’d always considered our subjects of study to be one of our greatest differences: What could be further from computer science than the study of art?
But lately I haven’t felt so sure of this. My father’s first degree was in Library Science, a kind of pre-computational information science. The question of the library—how to preserve and transmit texts (read: how to organize information)—is maybe the most humanist of all concerns.
Lately, I have been thinking that maybe all of life is a question of the library—how to process, retrieve, and store information. In this ocean of endless encounter and perceptual stimulus, the only way we make sense of anything at all is to find patterns—to organize this ether of information into something meaningful. We do this with rituals—we move, speak, eat in particular ways which organize the space, time, and matter around us in a very specific manner.
What ritual systems have we developed to make sense of the absolute senselessness of the cosmos? What ordering principles have we made? My father’s daughter to the very end, I consider ritual as a kind of information science in “abacus.” I am interested in brackets, in the file, in counting and digits, in transferences between different kinds of information processing (by the body—fingers and human digits—by the bead—by paint—by ledgers—by language).