Working in video, installation and sound, Charlotte Norwood creates construction sites of metaphorical forms that interrogate the dialogism between aesthetics and language by the experimental use of theory. She will be showing her installation Or Degrees (the grafter):
Or Degrees (the grafter)’ is comprised of two videos, designed to sit either next to or opposite one another. Each video begins simultaneously. Being shown on each projector or television screen is the recording of a randomly chosen participant deciphering the written Morse coded text “without enough constraints to make possible, abstractions will always only be what you understand in that time to be” using a wooden boat oar. Without any other given direction, each participant interprets the text differently and takes different lengths of time to do so.
Screening each interpretation simultaneously creates a competitive atmosphere. It’s in this debate, not only of personality and creativity, but of interpretations found in the sound of the multiple layers of banging which, with no authoritative voice creates the democratic realm in which the degrees, or location of “or” is found. A momentary “x” made from the oar hitting the floor and the shadow it casts, marks a point in a process of realisation of the ‘'abstraction’' described in the text spelled out. Through translating the inscription of the text, these variations transform the objective rhythm Morse code is dependant on to reveal language a tool of pure subjectivity, whilst the positioning of each screen opposite one another further troubles the relationship between signal and miscommunication.
As the irregular banging evokes those working in mines, “the grafter” (also referring to the burden of philosophers) highlights our inability to escape the need to constantly resolve or de-code abstractions in order to understand them, whilst the ridiculousness of the oar, which if used to get anywhere will only lead you round in circles, and help of a dead pan face, ridicules any attempt as mere guesswork. Commenting on the fleeting recuperation of our understanding of abstractions and from those to the next, ‘Or degrees (the grafter)’ uses a curiously light humour to question subjectivities derived from incidental communication.