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.
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.
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.
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.