Eye Exam
Wall Text
Michael Workman

I paid a visit to Bill Gross's apartment gallery this past weekend, 65 Grand (online at www.65grand.com), where he was helping local artist Jon Satrom with a new installation. As soon as I saw the announcement, I was intrigued. Satrom, known for his work on such projects as the r4WB1t5 micro.Fest (http://r4wb1t5.org), was an unusual pick for the gallery. Many of Satrom's projects are concerned with the connection between technology, interactive visual images and language, regularly employing "leet speak," a term that Wikipedia defines as having "evolved as a way of forming exclusive cliques in online communities, notably bulletin-board systems and online multiplayer games. The mechanism was simple: by taking standard text and corrupting it with a dynamic cipher, only those privy to the cipher could understand what was being conveyed in the ciphertext."

Satrom has essentially translated the architecture of the space with a program used for translating images into text. Using the artificial light taken from nighttime photographs of the walls of Gross's apartment as his map, Satrom translated the light-and-shadow pattern into text. His program output as standard keyboard characters the various light gradients in his source photos. The capital letter "X," for instance, produces a higher density of dark ink on the page than the rows of small-letter "c." These pages were then output onto rolls of paper that stretch floor to ceiling, perfectly matching the existing light in the room. Two intense spotlights from ceiling tracks are positioned right in the middle of the center rolls, producing an odd layering effect of light and light reproduced as text-based work on paper. I sat down with Satrom and Gross to discuss the work, scheduled to open this coming weekend.

What script did you use to output these images?

Jon Satrom: It's a script that was written in the mid-nineties, and there are a lot of different applications that do this, called "pict2ascii." I'd used it back in the day, so I felt comfortable with it. It's more of a process than just photographing and translating it: we took a large-format picture of the wall, sliced that up into columns and then, because the script could only handle like 64k of memory or something, I couldn't do full columns so then I had to slice it up into ten-inch strips, or paragraphs, as they came out, then copy and paste those. I used Photoshop as far as looking at it, visualizing, slicing it and all that. Each of the rolls are 126x36.

Newcity: So the idea is essentially to transform the physical architecture of this space into a text?

Satrom: Bill had seen a piece I did a while back, in a show at Marwen, a picture I did of my girlfriend in ASCII, and then I was thinking about how to engage the space, since so much of the work I do is non-physical, more video or sound or web-based. This has made my text work into an object. As with this cord, [indicating a cord plugged into a wall outlet] this was photographed in place--but I took it out, and it's weird because of the sunlight, but I just repainted just the shadows [moves the cord, revealing that its shadows are actually part of the underlying text pattern].

Tell me about this work on paper installed by Rebekah Levine outside the front door of your gallery. I know Levine used to be a member of the Chicago-based art collective Law Office. In this piece, there's this recurrent phrase, "kernel panic," what does that mean?

Bill Gross:"Kernel panic" is when a Mac OS X dies--I guess the worst sort of computer damage, when it's really dead. She was telling me that her fish and her computer died on the same day and people where she works were saying she has electronic hands that were killing things and there are people, I guess, who believe that certain people have a magical talent for destroying machines. She wanted to make work a piece about that. And as it turned out, she decided she wanted to do a Kinko's-reproduced style work, so that synched up really well with what I'd been discussing with Jon.