[N. Katherine Hayles contribution, a little more reformatting to come:]

 

In Jorge Luis Borges’ fabulous little fiction “Borges and I,”[1] the narrator, the “I” (eye) of the story, tells of his relation to “Borges,” the writer with whom he shares a name but not an identity.  A principle of conservation seems to be in operation between “I” and “Borges”; every attribute, accomplishment, and accolade that “Borges” garners now belongs to him and no longer to “I.”  The more famous “Borges” grows, the more “I” sinks into oblivion.  The ambiguity haunting the fable’s end is “I”’s realization that in writing this story, he has given over to Borges even his confession of impotence, so that he finally cannot even be sure which of them is writing at the end.  The final sentence trembles at the brink of this void, an emptiness devouring everything “I” can write, even the pronoun, bereft of antecedent, that was all that previously served as his name.  

 

In this fiction Borges evocatively captures the ambiguities haunting that staple of art history, the artist’s “Self Portrait.”  Suppose we think of the canvas not as a painterly surface or a representation but rather as the interface connecting two realms, the artist’s subjective sense of the self and the exterior construction of him as “artist” by a nexus of forces—his artistic work, his culture, his self-construction in interviews and other pronouncements, the judgments of art critics and historians.  Across this interface distributive functions operate, parceling some attributes to the artist as subject, some to the “artist” as object of his own and others’ scrutiny.  Unlike the dynamic of Borges’ story, the distributive functions are not necessarily bound by a principle of conservation; attributes that had in their origin in the artist can flow into the “artist,” and vice versa.  Now further suppose that the interface, already operating more as a dynamic flow rather than a static surface, is algorithmically generated and can draw from a number of different subjects—let us say twelve, a number imbued with magical power by everything from Leonardo’s Last Supper to dirty dozens.  

 

Something like this is at work in Talan Memmott’s “Self-Portrait(S) [as Other(s)].”  As the title’s orthographic complexity suggests, the “artist” is less a person than a cultural dynamic flowing in and out of containers the culture uses to construct the artist as subject and object.  In an interview with M. D. Coverley,[2] Memmott comments on the formulaic quality of the “artist’s” biography (an observation I confirmed for myself by looking up the twelve artists he references—David, Goya, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Degas, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Mattisse—in Wikipedia, where the same structure is indeed used with metronymic regularity).  Parsing the biographies into self-similar units, Memmott constructed an algorithm that combines them in different configurations, “smoothing” the syntax so that the recombinatory biographies read as (more or less) coherent narratives, though with incongruous juxtapositions both hilarious and revelatory.  

 

Reverse engineering this process, I conclude that the units can be parsed more or less as follows:  

 

young life, family background, decision to become a painter

(conflicts and obstacles)

adult life, artistic works, influences

(conflicts and obstacles)

old age, death, reputation

 

Mixed in with these combinations are references to the Andy Warhol and other contemporary painters as well as iconoclastic off-hand remarks that no reputable art historian would be likely to allow himself, further insuring that, despite its canonically reassuring form, the biographies remain off-center and off-color as they swerve dementedly from one context to another.  The parodic nature of the narratives is signaled by the names announcing the biographies, composites of the first and last names of different artists (“Edgar Van Gogh,” “Paul Delacroix”), accompanied by birth and death dates similarly composited (for “Pierre-Auguste Renoir,” for example, “1746-1867”).

 

Accompanying the recombinatory narratives are images composited from the twelve artists’ “Self Portraits,” parsed into six units (two eyes, two ears, mouth and nose).  The image thus functions like the narrative, in that it mixes wildly different compositions into a pastiche.  The visual composite transforms the individual identities of separate artists, each with his putatively unique visual characteristics and representative style, into the “artist,” the construction that cultural, historical, and artistic categories determine will be legible as his “Self Portrait.”  

 

As the user mouses over the “artist’s” mouth, a quotation appears with a new background (e.g., Goya’s pronouncement that “fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels”).  The quotation is linked with the mouth belonging to the artist that said it, but since the mouth itself is mixed in with foreign elements in the pastiche, the text loses its anchor in the artist’s specificity and floats on a surreal background that, in the case of the quotation cited above, includes an extra ear protruding above the one attached to the mouth.  

 

That Memmott would choose this quotation (among others) seems to me significant, for his practice is an uncanny combination of rigorous discipline, expressed in the intricate DHTML coding of his works, and a dark energy that crashes through the categories human and machine languages construct, violently clashing together diverse parts to create hopeful monsters.  On the level of the word, this energy expresses itself through evocative neologisms (particularly evident in his brilliant Lexia to Perplexia, which sports such hybrid terms as “communification,” “remotional,” and “I-terminal”).  On the level of the sentence and paragraph, the energy generates the wrenched narratives of “Self Portrait,” including such gems as this:  “Vincent Matisse was introduced to the art world through a shady uncle who was affiliated with the Flemish Picture Cartel.  In 1869 [with a putative birth date of 1798!] Vincent went to work for the family.”  

 

More is at stake in these monstrous narratives and images than the usual ambition driving recombinatory processes—that is, the paradoxical desire to expose the cultural categories through which we create the world and escape them by breaking through their boundaries.  In Memmott’s work, these well-known strategies combine with more esoteric explorations of how human subjectivity is mutating as it travels through the net, in-mixing both with remote correspondents and machine processes.  In Memmott’s works, the interface becomes a multi-leveled signifier, operating at once as a metaphor, as the complex layered surface through which the user interacts with the work, and as a profound dynamic transforming the very idea of the human.  The interface is what connects two faces, understood in the complex senses with which Levinas invests the term—as the site compelling ethical recognition of the other as other, that is, as an authentic being who cannot be ignored, demolished, or assimilated into the self.  For Memmott, the otherness of the other is at once posited and subverted, for both self and other are meeting “remotionally,” their encounters mediated and therefore in-mixed with the machine processes that intervene and contaminate their putatively human subjectivities (à propos of Charles Baldwin’s provocative comments in the blog on face-recognition software, we may notice the oxymoron involved in this common circumlocution: what does it mean for a machine to “recognize” a face).[3]  

 

 

As a result of these strategies, Self Portrait(S) [as other(s)] constructs and reveals the interface as a highly structured but nevertheless dynamic borderland in which chance operations create chaotic juxtapositions that, in their incongruities and occasional serendipity, signify that the encounter cannot be limited in its effects to the screen but seeps through the user’s and creator’s fingers, eyes, ears, mouths and bodies to change in unknown ways human neural functioning and therefore the very seat of human identity.  As Borges’s little fiction suggests and as Memmott’s work demonstrates, the Self Portrait is never just a picture of the self but rather the site for complex negotiations that subvert, even as they construct, the face of the artist that is always already also the face of the “artist.”

 

In Maria Mencia’s work, the emphasis shifts from the in-mixing of human and machine cognition to reconfigurations possible with digital technologies of the traditional association of the sound with the mark.  It was, of course, this association that inaugurated literacy and, in the modern period, became deeply identified with print technology.   In “Methodology,” Mencia comments that she is particularly interested in the “exploration of visuality, orality and the semantic/’non semantic’ meaning of language.”[4]  With graduate work in English philology, she is superbly positioned to explore what happens when the phone and phoneme are detached from their customary locations within morphemes and begin to circulate through digital media into other configurations, other ways of mobilizing conjunctions of marks and sounds as they go in search of meaning.  Digitality assists in the process by providing the functionalities that enable new conjunctions and, equally importantly, that unsettle the established conventions of print.  With traditional print literature, long habituation causes visuality (perception of the mark) to flow automatically into subvocalization (inaudible sound production), producing the recognition of words (cognitive decoding) that in turn is converted by the “mind’s eye” into the reader’s impression that the words on the page rapidly have given way to characters that she watches as they speak, act, and interact.  

 

“Worthy Mouths” demonstrates how Mencia’s reconfigurations trouble this process.[5]  The video shows a mouth articulating words, but no sound emerges; rather, text phrases flash at a pace too rapid to allow them to be read completely, although not so fast that portions cannot be deciphered (one such phrase, for example, is “lips pushed outwards closed”).  By the time the phrase is decoded, however, the mouth is already forming other words, which are no sooner pursued than they too are dislocated from the mouth’s movements.  The effect is both to mobilize the viewer’s desire to connect mark with sound and to discombobulate it, forcing a disconnect that unsettles our usual assumptions about the connection between sound and mark.  In “Audible Writing Experiments,”[6] video projections covered the four walls, so that the spectator was surrounded by writing and immersed in a soundscape in which a voice articulated English phonemes.  The writing quickly became illegible as it proceeded down the page space, however, transforming into wavy lines that forsook their phonetic vocation and instead began to resemble the threads of a woven fabric.  Mencia notes that the illegible writing was “quite textural,” a phrase that recalls the etymology of “text” as “knitting” or “weaving.”

 

In Mencia’s “Things come and go. . . ,“[7] digital projection showed an animated calligramme composed of pieces of paper with words and letters on them moving through the sky, initially legible as a poem about the ongoingness of things as they come into being, change, and go, a process humans resist as they attempt to hold onto them.  As the calligramme shifted and reformed into new shapes, the initially coherent phrases of the poem were broken and reconfigured while a computerized voice articulated the changing configurations.  In her documentation of the work, Mencia comments that “the spectator can either love or hate” this voice, or accept it as it moves “from one state to another.”[8]  We may wonder if her comment about hating the voice reflects feedback from those spectators who found the work frustrating because they yearned for the durably inscribed marks of print that have the decency not to mutate while one is reading them.  

 

 

The serendipitous convergences that emerge between Mencia’s and Memmott’s works suggest the following playful experiment.  Hovering at the periphery are two virtual artists whose work we should also discuss:  Talan Mencia and Maria Memmott.  Whereas Talan Mencia’s work is primarily textual, concerned with semantic meaning and the complex operations that enable it, Maria Memmott’s projects focus primarily on the visual, exploring the ways in which images operate and in which text itself becomes an image.  Talan Mencia’s textual emphasis can be seen in his focus on the mouth, animated to articulate the words that upstage the visual representation.  Maria Memmott’s emphasis on the image can be seen in the portraits she composites, in which the supposedly textual inscriptions are converted into illegible shapes that resemble knitting.   If only these two artists could meet, they might have a lot to talk about.

 

 

Endnotes

 

[3] Face recognition software operates somewhat similarly to Memmott’s parsing of faces except with far more variables, in that it divides the face into sectors and then uses the configurations of the sectors to compare the target image to the source image, operating within prescribed error tolerances.