23. Parasitic Printing
(2016)
What Hath God Wrought? 2016
I was thinking about mechanical reproduction and what it means to reproduce work.
These pieces are documentation of performances that I made at Tesco's in Nottingham over the course of a year. I was researching early messaging technology and communication and was particularly interested in the first messages sent by each of them (always by men). The first message that a technology makes sets the tone and I was surprised by how anxious and apocalyptic these messages are. The final messages are unlikely to be recorded, like a river.
In the receipts, the text of those messages is built via acrostic. I did this - as you might guess - by scanning goods in a certain order through the self service scanner at Tesco's. It took quite a lot of preparation to get this right (longer than anyone would reasonably imagine) and I was constantly being tripped up by inconsistencies in the way that the data inputters at Tesco’s named goods. My students helped me by saving Tesco's receipts so I could see how various items appeared on the when you scan them, but also sometimes it differed from shop to shop so it took quite a lot of work to get to the place where I could make the final performance. I had to remain calm whilst doing the performance which is not something I'm terribly good at. Any mistakes would render that receipt useless.
I think these are amongst the favourite pieces of work that I've ever made because of the way that they inhabit the bleakness of the self service checkout. These are made to eliminate the inefficiency of human interaction and it felt good to haunt them with an artwork.
I always wanted to do a piece using the self service paying in machine at the bank because I really like the tiny reproduction of the check that you got on the receipts for those. I have never quite thought of a way of making it work though.