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Post -- 
Perry Hoberman (www) / Downgrade
In "Downgrade", images slip and slide past the screen, caught in a endless variable vertical roll. The physical screen is thus a virtual window onto an extremely heterogeneous set of images that come from numerous sources: images used in and of earlier work, personal and found snapshots, and media images from both the past and present. As the full-screen images scroll by, fragments of other images drift over them, often leaving behind traces that corrupt the subsequent image display. The images appear in a non-repeating (but hardly random) sequence, and are accompanied by a computer-generated voice, hovering between sense and nonsense, delivering everything from random phonemes to excerpts from complex theoretical texts. The sources of both image and sound are far from the digital realm, but both are subjected to specific digital distortions, degradations and effects. The image set and the spoken text are being continually augmented ("downgraded") with new material over the course of the exhibition, in an attempt to open up the claustrophobic space of the computer screen. "Downgrade" was created with a computer that I haven't used for years: an Amiga 2000, nearly obsolete. This system has strengths and weaknesses that force a different approach than the currently dominant Macintosh and Windows systems. I am curious about the consequences of making art in a medium that privileges a constant and frenetic pace of change. How much are we defined by our tools? It may not be long before current operating systems achieve the status of dead languages, forgotten and incomprehensible. What happens then to our memory, and to our artworks?


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