![artwork by Stacy Jo Scott](/sites/default/files/styles/landscape_xl/public/stacy-jo-scott1_0620_f-1200x800.jpg?itok=Y-QETGTx)
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.
![artwork by Stacy Jo Scott](/sites/default/files/styles/landscape_xl/public/stacy-jo-scott2_0620_f-1200x800.jpg?itok=0NWhSItP)
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.
![artwork by Stacy Jo Scott](/sites/default/files/styles/landscape_xl/public/stacy-jo-scott3_0620_f-1200x800.jpg?itok=20QNiv4K)
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.
![artwork by Stacy Jo Scott](/sites/default/files/styles/feature/public/stacy-jo-scott4_0620_f-1200x395.jpg?itok=cEDLv9-K)
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.
![artwork by Stacy Jo Scott](/sites/default/files/styles/landscape_xl/public/stacy-jo-scott5_0620_f-1200x713.jpg?itok=AavvSmZE)
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.