The Sign of the Enterer, 2019, Ceramic
The Sign of the Enterer is a series of objects and performance based on a text I wrote using a predictive keyboard program. This text acts as a script for both the objects produced and the performance of recitation and sound. I trained the rudimentary artificial intelligence of the predictive keyboard with source material from cyborg myth, queer utopias, writings from a late 1800s magical order, and descriptions of pottery found in ancient Roman England and Corinth.
The Sign of the Enterer, Ceramic, 2019
The text of The Sign of the Enterer has two voices. One voice describes a speculative queer futurism in the style of a manifesto. The second voice offers specific descriptions of objects used in a ritual of enacting this utopic space. These voices are in turns imperfect and ecstatic. The utopia they describe is rhapsodic and galvanizing, contradictory and imprecise, advocating for a shift of individual consciousness and claimed agency.
The Sign of the Enterer (Text Snippet), Published Text, 2019
I built the objects of The Sign of the Enterer following the object descriptions offered in this algorithmic text. These specific instructions, born first of human-machine collaboration, became filtered and re-translated through the stubborn materiality of clay and my own haptic toolset and idiosyncrasies.
The Sign of the Enterer, Ceramic, 2019
The objects stand as markers of this process, the ways in which a poetics of computation can emerge through the imprecision and subjectivity of such human-machine collaboration and clay. Such thinking troubles the commonly evoked body-machine dichotomy, honoring instead the multiplicity of human experiences and our entanglements with machinic technologies.
The Sign of the Enterer, (Installation View), Ceramic, 2019
Such multiplicity reflects a queerness that rests, sometimes hidden, within much of contemporary experience. Queerness, ever shifting and evasive of definition, offers a name to experiences that waver on the liminal bounds of what were assumed to be hard and fast delineations, between categories and identities.