howTo.write(poetry) brings together two artworks by Mitchell F. Chan and Michelle Gay that deeply engage with historical texts. Each artist communes with another author’s writing through a computational translation of the original. Chan rewrites conceptual artist Sol Lewitt’s instructions for a wall drawing using Processing code while Gay employs automated machine translation to subtly alter the surviving text fragments of Greek philosopher Parmenides. Both pieces are poetic systems in the ancient Greek understanding of poiesis, meaning creation or formation. They are engines that generate endless variations of each artwork. Continuing a conversation across time, language, and media, Chan and Gay speak to and through the embedded historical concerns of their primary texts, adding a digital perspective as they grapple with the relationship between thought and being, idea and thing, meaning and interpretation.
Curated by Farah Yusuf
Artist Bios:
Mitchell F. Chan is a new media artist and educator based in Toronto. His artistic practice employs overly elaborate techniques to explore the futility of perception and communication. His works have been exhibited in galleries and festivals across North America. He is also co-founder and principal partner of public art and design firm Studio F Minus, working in architectural scale technological installations. He is represented in Toronto by Angell Gallery and can be found online at www.mitchellfchan.com.
Michelle Gay studied art and art history at the University of Toronto and received her MFA from NSCAD (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her work often experiments with the ubiquitous desktop PC, as a site of intimate virtual or digital experiences – teasing out resonant connections between machines and bodies and between digital and actual spaces. She often collaborates with her brother and particle physicist Colin Gay on these “artware” projects. Interested in the possibilities of touch and poetics within new media platforms, they develop artware designed to play with technologies in non-useful ways. She is represented in Toronto by the Birch | Libralato Gallery and can be found online at www.michellegay.com.
Image credit: onwhatis, Michelle Gay (2013)
