(March 07) Split-screen video (2:30 min loop)

Sorting and resorting string through shifting categories.

The video takes as its start-point the inability of the aphasic mind to perceive or create categories, as Foucault describes in ‘The Order of Things’:

It appears that ceratin aphasiacs, when shown variously coloured skeins of wool on a table top, are consistently unable to arrange them into any coherent pattern; as though that simple rectangle were unable to serve in their case as a homogenous and neutral space in which things could be placed so as to display at the same time the continuous order of their identities or difference as well as the semantic field of their denomination. Within this simple space in which things are normally arranged and given names, the aphasiac will create a multiplicity of tiny, fragmented regions in which nameless resemblances agglutinate things into unconnected islets […].

Foucault goes on to argue that the loss of language is the loss of what Borges calls the ‘operating table’: the contained system within which a given set of elements can exist in relationship to one another. The motif of the tabletop as a contained system has frequently appeared in my work, and with this video I begin to explore the motif more explicitly.