bora rex
digital spit
...
Lately, I've been filming telephone wires. Someone told me that soon they'll all be laid to rest underground, where no-one will be able to film them, where there'll be no more wooden posts and no more fliers to give them tanlines.
In processing the footage, I feed my videos to a code that begins complete and ends unchanged.
We lap up what computers spit out. This particular program spits out a whole platter of offerings, including its most private thoughts.
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/57a0610b-0455-4c3a-aeb1-7b9fe87950cc/11e1b84b-5390-46c6-8946-f2ea4032d67a_rw_1200.png?h=698d22deac215107f53ee309c4d4661a)
Its workings are its own raw material, a putty of calculations. At this stage, any beauty in the thing is invisible to me.
Like telephone wires running to an exchange, the program must pick up and translate what I put down before it can meet me halfway.
I demand it send me another postcard from its process.
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/57a0610b-0455-4c3a-aeb1-7b9fe87950cc/35300e47-baf7-40a4-ac46-11758c1dd6d3_rw_1920.jpg?h=bf89f3b0c3507e578e7f3cf7d4956a95)
Its analyses of my videos, what it sees, should be incomprehensible to me; coincidentally, though, they start to look like telephone wires.
At this stage, the program knows enough to show off. For fun, it can say everything my videos said but in a single frame. For fun, and in the illusion of supervision, I had it do it again and again.
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/57a0610b-0455-4c3a-aeb1-7b9fe87950cc/c5ad5b14-29ad-4fd0-9eba-277d98d6fd55_rw_1920.jpg?h=518e039a8362408c56a6866ac96528e4)
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/57a0610b-0455-4c3a-aeb1-7b9fe87950cc/674f785f-259d-445c-8482-b85d024e4270_rw_1920.jpg?h=8a8b46b39d2828f6c3cffa66baeb7992)
![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/57a0610b-0455-4c3a-aeb1-7b9fe87950cc/8111b1cb-3140-4e23-b4c0-f123784aeab6_rw_1920.jpg?h=f63912243dc9f6d5840c6e3f7ca70fff)
These unreal scenes never existed, yet I was there where they weren't and unintentionally worked towards them.
I wonder what else the program can't or doesn't show me. I wonder how much of its workings I can claim as my work.
Finally, it coughs up what I wanted in the first place...
... but everything it's shown me along the way has been so beautifully unexpected that I don't really want it anymore.
...
Bora Rex makes things with paint, wood, celluloid, and words. He is the founder and editor of These Accents.