During their residency information as material release a series of poster poems available to pick up for free in the Gallery’s book shop.
Edition 2: Howl #16: Algorithmic Translations
By Eric Zboya
We tend to overlook that mathematics is, in fact, a language; and it is a dynamic system of communication that has been largely ignored as a vehicle for textual translation. Algorithmic Translations attempt to acknowledge this vehicular disregard by utlising the mathematical functionality found in graphic imaging software. This utilisation adds an element of dimensionality to a textual work by mutating a text into a kind of graphic, nonlinear entity. Through a series of algorithmic calculations, the computer program expels an abstract image based upon the original topographical placement of the type on the space of the page. This algorithm transforms each letter, each mark of punctuation, into dendrites that extrude into the continuum of the page. Each page is inimitable; the image can never be recreated in the same way twice due to the program’s seemingly aleatory function during the algorithmic transformation. This act of visual creation through mathematical calculation serves to challenge the reader’s notion of comprehension, perceptibility, and language, through visual poetics.
Edition 1: Instruction Manual
By Lucia della Paolera
Brooklyn-based writer Lucia della Paolera constructed the poem Instruction Manual in 2009. It has been editioned as an A1 lithographic print by information as material to inaugurate a series of poster poems that will be presented in conjunction with their residency at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, from April 2011.
Della Paolera’s text derives from a simple procedure: it is a chronological list of all of the directives given to the author in one day. On that day, these charges happened to amount to three hundred and sixty-nine.
Instruction Manual mounts a grammatical satire on the pressure of the imperative. Here, normally diffuse social demands are condensed by the form of the numbered list into a contained manuscript that is mass-reproduced for aesthetic consumption. The text has an unsettling effect on accountability; we do not know wherefrom the commands issue, nor what could or should be done in answer. Both the origin of authority and the site of responsibility are lost as power relations shift and slide in sequences that are at once slapstick and solemn. Instruction Manual is a primer in persuasion.
