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CONFIDENTIAL (INFORMATION
OVERLORD) public installation, 7:00 - 8:30 AM July 2, 2004, Seattle, Washington |
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For this project I
put myself in a position of having total control over a piece of information.
I chose a phrase, INFORMATION OVERLORD, that I kept secret for the
duration of the project, and constructed the phrase by sewing together large
letters from leftover plastic packaging. Throughout the construction
of the piece, although I told people I was working on a 'secret project,'
I kept most of the details a secret. The message was displayed in fragments throughout the city from 7 - 8:30 AM on Friday, July 2. A crew of volunteers – none of which knew the full message - displayed it and documented the project. The participants who helped me hang the piece throughout the city were crucial, not only in their participation, but in their ignorance. In addition to not knowing the entire message, the participants were given very limited instructions, and were told not to communicate with each other. This piece is an obscure, sideways comment on transmission and obfuscation of information - how we get it, where it comes from, how it's conveyed, and whether we even notice it when it's right in front of us. Our limited perspectives privilege us to only the tiniest bits of information, forcing us to try to make sense out of a scattering of random data points. Anyone coming into the city that morning who saw the various pieces of the message may not even have noticed or interpreted the bits of text as a message, and if they did, it was almost impossible to see enough pieces of the message to decipher it or understand its fuller context.  |
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