Redaction looms large in the War of Words.
Words are ingested, negated, excised, crossed out, sliced and melted.
It’s not as though we set out to do this, it just happened to work out that way. Interesting. Over the next few posts I’d like to explore this idea a bit by sharing with you some of the artists, works, artifacts and books in the exhibition.
Redaction 01
Detail of Cody Trepte’s “On Computable Numbers.” Shown are 6 of the 17 parts of the work.
Cody Trepte‘s piece “On Computable Numbers” takes its title from Alan Turing‘s seminal essay of the same name. Turing is a well-known historical (and tragic) figure who is often credited as the founder of computer science and artificial intelligence. Trepte’s piece is comprised of 33 pages of this essay in which he has very carefully cut out all of the words, leaving only 0’s and 1’s.
Cody writes, “By preserving only the binary code present in the text, I attempted to create a recursive artifact of Turing’s work: applying the very concepts Turing invented to the mathematician’s own writing.”
What none of this reveals is the beautiful emptiness that has emerged out of the grid of conceptual rigor.
