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Graham
Parker: End Users
Graham
Parkers End Users is a specially commissioned installation
for Gallery 3 which develops the artists ongoing concern with the
inadvertent traces people leave when they live and work in cities - particularly
in their relationship to technology. End Users samples user
dictionaries from numerous computers around Manchester primarily
from a number of architects offices within the city. A user dictionary
is a file of words which have been added to a computer by someone whilst
they are checking the spelling on a document. Any words which dont
match a preset dictionary (usually Microsofts) are queried by the
computer, at which point the person using the machine has the options
to change that word, ignore its use in that instance or to add it
or learn it presumably acknowledging that this word
may be useful for the future working life of the machine.
The words that are added then exist in a separate
file in the computers system so that in the future words such as
balustrade, Rainchester, Situationist
or BS4360 will not be queried when they are used, but will
still have a kind of rogue paralegal status. The alphabetical list of
professional neologisms, place names, contacts, theory terms, slang and
even swear words is never fully integrated into the standard dictionary.
Graham Parker has used that fact to make portraits of peoples
uses of technology for a particular profession in a particular place
portraits made visible only by existing in relief to linguistic rules
defined elsewhere. The resulting lists of words are legible in that the
viewer wants to impose order on them and begins to see patterns and even
mini-narratives within them as they match them against their own internal
knowledge of place and use of language there.
The installation itself consists of a single line of text on the gallery
walls (a composite of all the architects dictionaries) alongside
a number of individual text portraits of artists, writers and creative
professionals within the city who occupy the same built environment sampled
for the architects dictionaries, but whose relationship to it may
be one of reinvention, the crafting and retelling of local popular mythologies,
allegations, speculation, desire, subjectivity. That thoughts of some
or all of these concerns might influence an architects working process
is not in question, but the configuration of these individual portraits
as tiny columns of text on loosely pinned paper against the architects
text directly on the wall of the gallery, adds a further layer to the
idea of the End User. It is the name given to inheritors of
an environment be that a city or a computer programme, who are
given a basic set of tools to navigate that environment with. The tiny
columns of text, which from a distance look like vertical soundwaves and
which can only be read up close by maybe one person at a time, reinforce
the idea of tiny intimate transactions which have been made by an individual
asserting their own vernacular, sleepily adding a mistake, or altering
an anomaly of American English. These decisions have accrued over time
as the person writes themselves into and around their immediate personal
and professional environment.
Graham Parkers work ranges across a broad range of disciplines including
performance, video, drawing, electronic art and public art. Currently
his work can also be seen at Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth; d.u.m.b.o Arts
Center, Brooklyn; Gallery 2YK, Berlin and International 3, Manchester.
Information on his current project as artist in residence in Ordnance
survey grid square 84E 97N (the square he lives in in central Manchester)
can be found at www.squarecity.net He has previously had work commissioned
by Henry Moores Institute, Leeds and Tate Gallery, Liverpool; Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council and Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool;
as well as a forthcoming solo show at Project Arts Centre, Dublin and
group shows in London, New York and Philadelphia. He is the Visual Arts
Officer at Salford University.
Useful links:
www.squarecity.net
www.bonoandsting.com
www.art-review.co.uk/ARTREV/decjan2001/views.htm
www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4112758,00.html
www.manchesterpavilion.org/
www.u-net.com/set/index/archive.html
www.theannualprogram.com
Opening times:
Mon-Fri 12-5:30pm
Saturdays
12-5pm
Sundays closed
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