Privater: A Proposal for Rhizome by Sal Randolph
SUMMARY
Privater is a website/performance where your status is "privated" by being typed out manually in ascii binary and held in a closed archive.
PRIVATER
Let us private.
Privating is a reversal of publishing. It takes what is public and hides it away.
For the Rhizome 2011/2012 commission, I propose to create PRIVATER, a place, a website, where you will be able (at last) to private your status.
You (the visitor) will be invited to make a micro-posting (up to 8 characters) describing your state: "offline," "orange," "busy," "alive," "waiting," "503," "bingeing," "demure," whatever.
Your posting will be conveyed to the artist (myself) who will painstakingly translate it into 8-bit ascii binary and type the resulting ones and zeros on a manual typewriter. If desired, you may request a carbon copy of your status be sent to you by postal mail.
WHY?
Privater begins in the networked space of the internet and ends in a box. The statuses, encoded, detached from the identities of the persons they refer to, rest quietly in a closed archive.
Privating takes what would be effortlessly done by computer code and renders it manual, intimate, slow, error prone, laborious. The artist, acting as medieval scribe and 1950s typist both, creates a bureaucracy where none needed to exist.
Privater reintroduces fatigue and effort, absurdity and inscrutability, error and delay, even sacrifice and loss, into the ever-flowing streams of information. One particle of the internet (infinitesimal in relation to the net's vastness) is removed from circulation: 64 bits at a time taken offline and rendered analog, given a place to be quiet. It is the sleep, the near-death of information.
Just a few ohs and ones, a sigh of relief.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
While some coding is involved, Privater is really a performance piece (even though, of course, most of the performance takes place in private). Because of this, Privater, unlike most websites, cannot be constantly in service. It must have a period of time when it is live, enacted.
For the Rhizome commission, I propose a 3 month period of initial performance. As "the artist," I will keep up with input statuses as best I can, acknowledging that the likelihood of delay and fatigue is inherent in the structure of the piece.
After the initial period, Privater could come to life again in the contexts of gallery exhibition, live performance venues or even just for the sheer love (which, oddly enough, I have) of typing ones and zeros, handling carbon copies, adding to an archive, putting things in the mail.
Work Samples
Privater entangles web space with both performance and studio work.
Its preoccupations include the translation of information across the digital/analog divide, public availability in relation to the private space of the studio, the textual underpinnings of the digital, and also language and its relation to performance, situation, and action.
The work samples below touch on various aspects of these questions & related practices in my recent work.
Studio practice involving text and typing, including binary typing.
Performative practice in public spaces where money is used to create situations.
Publishing across the digital/analog divide.
Art as an open-source instruction set.
Bio & CV
Sal Randolph lives in New York and makes art involving gift economies, social interactions, public spaces and publishing, including Opsound, an open exchange of copyleft music, the Free Biennial and Free Manifesta, a pair of open, internet-mediated "biennials," Free Words, a book infiltrated into bookstores and libraries, and Money Actions, an ongoing series of interventions in which she has given away several thousand dollars to members of the public. She is currently investigating games, recipes, algorithms, codes, and texts. http://salrandolph.com
FEASIBILITY
I've designed and coded some large websites in PHP (Opsound.org is one example), so I don't anticipate any technical difficulties.
As mentioned above, any human difficulties in realization are to be considered part of the work.
PROJECT TIMELINE
Preparation: 2 months
- - PHP coding/web development: 1 month
- - Mental preparation: 2 weeks
- - Publicity preparation: 2 weeks
Performance/Website Live: 4 months
- - Website live, statuses accepted: 3 months
- - Cleanup, catching up: 1 month
Project total time: 6 months
BUDGET
- - Artists fee: $2500
- - Materials & postage: $350
- - Web hosting (provided by the artist): $0
Total Requested from Rhizome $2850
MORE INFO
More info: Sal Randolph
Contact: salrandolph [at] gmail [dot] com