Portfolio of work relevant to Hacktory A.I.R. Application

I work primarily in painting, critical writing, and as an independent exhibit organizer. What unites these different forms of creative research is an interest in the use and function of written language. I have a long involvement in the use of encryption and steganography in my work, and have explored a number of script systems that allow me to conceal messages in images. As a resident artist at the Hacktory, I would like to explore the uses of programming languages and syntax and add these to my 'vocabulary'.

Below is a portfolio of five works that employ codes in various forms. The indicate the rigor of my work, and suggest the thoroughness with which I would apply myself to the opportunity. However, I am not interested in using this opportunity to display language, I am interested in use it to explore the possibilities of employing it to shape a work I have not yet conceived. In this, I am very interested in the language operations of experimental writers from the Oulipo and in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith.

Impossible Book: Principles of American Military Financial Planning (with Mary Beth Brown), 2014, commercially printed counterfeit credit card, edition of 250,  2 1/8 x 3 3/8. This impossible text book deals with the way the United States Congress paid for wars from the 18th- to the 20th-century. Hidden in the sixteen-digit account number are the dates of four major wars; the four-digit security code (1964) marks the year Congress gave the President a 'blank check' to conduct the war in Vietnam.

Impossible Textbook: Four paradigms of Cold War Power (with Mary Beth Brown), 2014, 3D printed ABS plastic, wood, and paper. 6 x 6 x 6 in. This piece is an attempt to produce a low-cost text book that would be useful in a freshmen American history course. The text is printed on eight pyramids that a reader could print from a 3D printer. The book is 'read' like puzzle, by arranging the forms in a laser-cut wooded frame until they describe four metaphors of US-Soviet relations from 1945-1987.

You will forget all the sounds and images, 2013-14, acrylic on canvas. 48 x 48 in. This painting utilizes a tumbling block pattern and maritime signal flags, unlike much of my work, I composed the encoded text in this image in response to the constraint of having three faces of the cube available. 

Blessed are all metrical rules (After Auden), 2012, gouache on paper 22 x 30 in. This image, like a great deal of my work, employs stolen language - in this case a passage by the poet W.H. Auden that praises the use of compositional constraints. The code is challenging to read in part because only one color 'channel' is rendered.

The Recognitions (Umberto Eco), 2009, gouache on paper, 30 x 22 in. This is one drawing from a large series of stolen self-portraits. As I come across words and ideas I closely identify with in my reading, I add them to The Recognitions. In this image, a passage from an essay by Eco describing the way ancient Egyptian scribes employed hieroglyphics to send secret messages alongside ordinary message is encoded in Braille dots - each pixel of the digital photo is replaced by a part of a Braille character. 

Found passages

So, I've been reading Marcus du Sautoy's book on Symmetry and I was some what weirded out by this passage:

Some French mathematicians believe that the quality of their mathematics is a product of the French language in which it was written. [...] Bruno Poizat is particularly proud of the French language and never bows to pressures from journals to write in in English, the universally accepted language of science. One of his most important contributions is a seminal book on mathematical logic and its interactions with the theory of groups. His insistence on publishing in French meant that no publisher would touch it. SO he went ahead and financed the publication of the book himself under his own publishing name: Nur al-Mantiq wal Ma'rifah, Aribic for 'Light and Logic of Knowledge', Because he had complete editorial control the book is rather idiosyncratic. Every chapter starts with a pornographic picture. Poizat explains in the introduction that these pictures are there to soothe the brain before the difficult mathematics that follows.

[...] the last chapter has a picture of the author in a dressing gown, leering out of an armchair at the reader. but the mathematics is so good the book could not be ignored. In Poizat's view, the material is particularly suited to the language in which it is written:

Scientific French, what a beautiful language!...I have no French nationalist feelings, nor a nostalgia for the time when French had a more dominant position...I believe the plurality of languages is use for communication of science has a value per se.

 At a conference I attended in Russia, Poizat insisted on speaking in French with simultaneous translation into Russian, and was obviously delighted to leave the English-only members of the audience in the dark:

Well intentioned people have told me that it is quite rude to address a person he or she cannot understand. If this were true, the community of mathematicians would rate highly in the scale of rudeness considering the number of times its members have spoken to me in English. (174-175)

Is this strange? Or is it not so unusual that people might think that English is re-wiring their brains?
As I was reading du Sautoy, Jun 'ichiro Tanizaki was playing in my mind...

To take a trivial example near at hand: I write a magazine article recently comparing the writing brush with the fountain pen, and in the course of it I remarked that if the device had been invented by the ancient Chinese or Japanese it would surely have had a tufted end like out writing brush. The ink would not have been this bluish color but rather black, something like India ink, and it would have been made to seep down the handle into the brush. And since we would have found it inconvenient to write on Western paper, something near Japanese paper - even under mass production, if you will - would have been much in demand [...] But more than that: our thought and our literature might not be imitating the West as they are, but might have pushed forward into new regions quite on their own. An insignificant little piece of writing equipment {...} has a vast, has a vast, almost boundless influence on our culture.

Tanizaki goes on to wonder how math and science would be different if they were unshackled from English and rendered in Japanese.

Is language really that important to you, dear reader? Or is there some meaning at the core all this that somehow transcends mere words? I would love to hear from you...

This is sad...

Very sad news of the death of critic Ed Sozanski...Use code code D37Q to read the story... http://t.co/UjMrJKlevx
— gerardbrown (@gerardfbrown) April 17, 2014