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Materials: Recycled aluminum and wood, LED panel, monitor speaker, printed text.
Notes on the process (bear with me): This work is based on my interest in short-circuiting meaning found in the advertising language of financial firms. The black aluminum panel is a replica of a typical electronic billboard module. It displays scrolling slogans from various financial institutions and is turned towards the wall of the gallery where the ‘message’ is reduced to a flickering glow. As a second gesture of abstraction, these slogans are translated back and forth between English and Hungarian using Google Translate. This process is repeated until a US Letter-size page is completely filled up, where the result of each act of translation is fed back into Google Translate as the original text. All miss-translations are left intact and the slogans slowly lose their meaning with each loop of translation. At a typical exhibition, 100 copies of the resulting text are stacked on top of the pedestal/speaker and the prints are free for the public to take. In the final gesture of abstraction, the original text takes the form of a sound recording played by the speaker/pedestal. It consists of the reciting of the abovementioned slogans where the replay speed of the reading is slowed down to 1% of its original speed. Here, language becomes unintelligible and turns into a field of humming sound.
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