THE THREE BODY PROBLEM Language As A Technology As A Photograph As A Language (+ Enigmatic Supplements)
NICHOLAS KNIGHT 1
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THE THREE BODY PROBLEM Language As A Technology As A Photograph As A Language (+ Enigmatic Supplements)
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Nicholas Knight The Three Body Problem Language As A Technology As A Photograph As A Language
eponanonypress new york 2013
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The following is a lecture delivered to the students of Écoles Supérieures des Beaux-Arts de Tours, Angers et Le Mans, site d’Angers, on October 15, 2012. The talk was developed in response to an invitation from Sebastien Pluot. It was presented in the context of the research program “In Translation,” by Sebastien Pluot and Fabien Vallos. It is published here as it was delivered, with minor alterations that allow it to read better in book form.
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This is a new work, a photograph printed on canvas and stretched onto a mahogany stretcher. It is 7 feet tall.
I want to tell a story about how I got here, in 2012, from this drawing, made ten years ago, in 2002.
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It’s a story, which means some things will be left out, but it will include an important stop in the middle.
Along the way, the question of what is left out will return, in shifting forms—as the surplus, the remainder, the extra thing that refuses codification.
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I’ve given my talk today a title: The Three Body Problem, Language As A Technology As A Photograph As A Language (Plus Enigmatic Supplements).
I hope that I can hit my marks. I’d rather avoid quotations at this point, especially from Wittgenstein. But…I can’t. Here’s Wittgenstein, from his text On Certainty: “It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.” So we’ll go back, if not to the beginning, then near the beginning.
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This drawing from 2002 came near the end of an intense three-year period. It is the study for the final painting in a series titled Taxonomes.
These works were an attempt to take the elements of painting and translate them into a formal language that would guide the creation of new paintings, replacing such factors as “personal decisions” or “intuition” with logical definitions.
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The real question for me was the problem of intention. Language in general, and paintings in particular, seemed like they had a hard time connecting the viewer back to the artist’s reason for doing something. I thought that if we could trace a clear path back through the language of the work, back to the conditions of its original intention, then that connection could be established.
So I devised a set of rules that would govern the creation of the painting. Those rules were written out on a series of drawings. They functioned like an algorithmic system: initial conditions were plugged into the system, and the algorithm produced the image. It was my job to act as human computer and execute the system. For the painting on the left, the top drawing above described the rules for the lines; the bottom one charted the color system.
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The idea of a “human computer” is actually quite important here. It echoes in different ways through the concept of technology. But before going into that, I want to mention Alan Turing in this context. Turing is the father of computer science. He transformed the most important mathematical developments of the early 20th century into ideas that could be applied to computational machines. But crucially, his thought model of the “Turing Machine” did not depend at all on a technological breakthrough—in fact, he imagined the computer to be a human, carrying out a set of deterministic mechanical tasks according to finite instructions.
Unfortunately, Turing was persecuted for his homosexuality, and in 1954 he committed suicide by eating an apple injected with cyanide. An urban legend says that the name and logo of Apple Computers is a reference to this event. Of course one is reminded of Socrates’ death by poisoning. Or one can go‌ even further back.
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Coming forward again, and at the same time, back: the idea of a completely formal language is the hope for transparency. It is the hope that what is said will be said with complete clarity. This formal approach always requires a new notation, since our existing languages are too burdened with ambiguity. In the Taxonomes I developed a notation to encode the conditions and variations in the rules.
Here is a transcription of the text from the bottom of the drawing.
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When I was 10 years old, in 1985, my best friend and I took a class at the local university on computer programming in the BASIC language. Here is a list of commands. As you can see, they are just simple logical concepts. When they are strung together, they become complex.
The tradition in computer science is that the first program you write when learning a new programming language is a variation on “Hello World.�
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In its own way, Eve biting the apple is an act that seems to announce, “Hello World.”
By the way, did you ever hear the joke about the computer programmer who died while taking a shower? The instructions on his shampoo bottle said, “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.�
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Sorry. Let’s lather and rinse one of the Taxonome panels. This sequence shows the fifth painting being made. The paintings were made by covering the wood surface1 with tape, cutting away the lines2, painting in the colors3, and removing the tape4 to reveal the clean wood5. To keep track of things as I painted, I made notes on the tape. I realized that when the tape was removed, an important layer of information was lost. So I added a step to the process, and as I removed each small piece of tape, I reconstructed it on a sheet of vellum6.
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Although many colors were used to make the paintings, I used a small number of brushes. When I changed colors, I would wipe off the brush. That produced interesting patterns on the rags, so I added another step.
Each painting began with a clean sheet of paper for wiping off the brushes, which generated a drawing.
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Works like these are what I have in mind with the phrase “enigmatic supplement”. As a container or a frame, it is generated by logical instructions. Yet the content within that frame is resistant to logic. It exceeds its definition: what is interesting about it is only what cannot be reduced to a description of its method. I want to offer a reflection here about language and technology, if it has not already become clear. Technology is an effect of changes in culture just as much as it is a cause. It is the effect of our human need to amplify and extend our abilities. The purpose of the digression into computer science was to show technology’s relationship to language as being prior to its relationship to electronic devices. In fact, perhaps we can say that language itself is a technology, because it is the original tool for extending and amplifying our human abilities. To take that claim further: technology produces one effect that is common to all its forms: it produces a double. This double is the appearance of a representation that is mapped onto the original. The original technological double, then, is the one produced by language.
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This is a drawing I made in 2006. It is based on a sentence diagram. Sentence diagramming was developed in American elementary schools in the 19th century as a tool for teaching grammar to children. The diagram is a visual analysis of the grammatical function of each word in the sentence. The form of the diagram is determined by the structure of the sentence.
I also make these works as wall drawings. This one was made for an exhibition in Marfa, Texas, in 2006. It depicts Wittgenstein’s famous claim, “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and about that of which one cannot speak, one must stay silent.”
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We’ve heard this idea already. It’s the hope for transparency in speech. It’s the hope that people who hear us will have direct access to our meaning.
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Notice that this wall drawing is a double-analysis: it includes the original German text and its English translation. Notice also that the structure of the two languages is different. Does it really seem possible to speak with absolute clarity through the shifting formations of the translation?
This image gives a good idea of the scale. There is, literally, open space inside the diagram. The problem with formal languages, like I was pursuing in the Taxonomes, is that there is no empty space inside them. This is fine for some technical tasks—in fact, it’s essential for the computer!—but it’s not how people think and talk. Too much is left out. The sentence diagram approaches this problem in a different way. The diagram technique asks for complete precision—the rules for drawing them are quite specific—but there remains space inside for the language to escape analysis.
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Here are two drawings from 2005. On the left, a quotation from Gaston Bachelard: “The words of the world want to make sentences.”
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On the right, one from Goethe: “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.”
Both of these sentences push back against the act of being analyzed, albeit in different ways. They both insist on something that cannot be resolved. It is the re-presentation of the sentence in the diagram that opens up a new space for reading it again, and reading it differently. The diagram is a tool, or a technology, that creates a double of the sentence, and that double generates a new meaning.
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This is a large work done at Villa Arson in Nice in 2010. It combines a quotation from Jacques Derrida and a quotation from Henry James into a single drawing. But since Derrida wrote in French, and James in English, I included both sentences in their original forms, and both in translation.
The collision between these two sentences creates an argument that never happened. Derrida says, “There is nothing outside the text.” And James says, “It is easier to read between the lines than to follow the text.”
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The drawing is made by creating a stencil with tape directly on the wall. The darker gray is powdered graphite rubbed through the stencil. The lighter gray is powdered slate, a type of stone. An armature is drawn first with pencil, and that layer remains visible in the final work. It is the structure the holds the diagram, which is itself the structure that holds the text.
In this work the consequences of doubling are made very explicit. Each repetition opens more space for misunderstanding. The two sentences are visually interwoven but they are also taken completely out of context. The analytical method of the diagram insists that the original context is disregarded. This produces a double that is untethered from its source. This is an idea we’ll return to shortly, in a different form.
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When I make the wall drawing, I use a vinyl stencil for the text. After rubbing the pigment onto the wall, I carefully pull the stencil off and re-position it on a piece of paper, creating a new drawing.
These drawings are open to chance and irrational combinations. They become the “enigmatic supplement� from the process of making the sentence diagrams. There is always another message left over after the reading.
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This one was made at Domaine de Kerguehennec in 2007. It is a quotation from Roland Barthes, in both French and English. In it, Barthes is discussing the relationship of graffiti to the wall on which it is written.
Here is the origin of the phrase I keep returning to today, “Enigmatic Supplement�.
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The diagrams are a way to keep the idea of formal structure and analysis but at the same time open a space for the meanings of language to shift inside that structure. Every representation, every technological double, creates the problem of a lost context. The diagrams bring this to the foreground.
One solution to the problem of lost context is to confront it directly, and to acknowledge that, for culture to remain meaningful, it must generate new relationships with its new audiences. What matters is how it can be used, again, in a new way. This drawing is the result of a project I did with a class of 18-year-old students in Savannah, Georgia, in 2006. I gave them the same sentence shown on the left. It is very difficult grammatically, and all 36 student versions were different. I assembled all their versions into one large image. This work emphasizes their effort to think through the sentence rather than the correct analysis.
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Here is the same sentence installed this summer at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. It reads, “Mas has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses, only to justify his logic.�
“Only to justify his logic.� Earlier, we looked at computer science to show how its relationship to technology came after its relationship to language. Now I want to make a similar point about photography.
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This work is from 2007, titled Intension: Tethered. A photograph of a standard electrical outlet is mounted on a panel, and an extension cord—modified so that is has plugs on both ends—is plugged into the outlet and the photo. The leaning panel is held in place by the tension of the cord.
The sentence diagram removes a quotation from its context, and the analysis of the drawing is meant to fill in some of that missing understanding about the claims of the sentence. But the most profound example of lost context that we have today is the very act of photography. Photographs are constantly in danger of losing their tether back to their source.
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In fact, the danger is so strong that we need to ask, what holds a photo in place at all? This piece, Double Frame / Torn Photo, is an attempt to ask the question clearly, rather than answer it. The way photography makes a double of the world is uncontrollable. It divides and divides and divides. Each of those duplications of the world through photography is a little rupture. It makes me think of dividing cells, copies making copies of themselves.
In these photo pieces, I was trying to clarify this process by reversing it. Instead of the world being divided and duplicated, I tore the photo in half, and framed both pieces. Then when the photo doesn’t match the wall, we have a moment when photography’s betrayal is opened up for us.
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These works insist on very strict conditions for their creation and display. They are always remade in each exhibition, so that the images show that new space. When I impose these rules, they are meant to act like the tether that keeps the photographs legible.
The photographs enact a logic that exposes, at the base level, the mechanism of doubling, and the way that the double always introduces a shift, telling us that the original came from someplace different than the double.
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In this piece, a single photograph of the gold frame and wall is printed over and over, from dark to light, so that it covers the entire wall. The work is installed by hanging the photograph and then sliding the frame along the print until it matches. The world shifts to accommodate the photograph.
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I said before that the rules and conditions were meant to keep the photographs legible. It is a photographic convention to include standardized color bars in a photograph meant for reproduction. Since the printers know how the color bars should look, they can conform the full image to that standard.
The color bar is a piece of visual technology. In this work, the bars have been manipulated, flipped, reversed. Their legibility is made unstable. 59
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What does “legibility” mean here? It is a term usually used for written language. But the technology in our culture generates another kind of reading. Images now pass through many different contexts with great fluidity. We read these shifting contexts and place ourselves in relation to them constantly. Here is an installation view from my exhibition “Declaimed” in Chicago in 2011. Notice the picture on the left.
Here we move from an installation view of an exhibition containing the work to an image of the work itself. This is a picture I took of a television commercial for a mobile phone; I printed the picture on canvas and painted over it; on the screen in the center I painted a copy of another photograph of mine.
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Here is that photograph. From 2007 – 2009, I traveled through museums taking pictures of people’s cameras and phones as they photographed artworks. These images were the beginning of letting the world flood back into my work in a visual way. I found myself very provoked by the question of the function of these cell phone photos of artworks.
But first, let’s complete our journey through these shifting frames. Here’s the 1st-century Roman sculpture of “Youthful Hercules”, now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. We’ve gone back to the beginning, and will try not to go further back. Except I’ll note that, of course, the Romans were referring back to an even older story. We’ve gone back to the first century, and arrived at marble, a very solid thing, something we can touch (if the security guard isn’t looking!). But what is it that we would be touching? Surely not Hercules, whoever that might have been. Even against stone, our touch is cloaked in doubt, lost in the space opened up by a language that produces a different world than the one our senses give us.
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The Apostle Thomas’ gesture is an attempt to fuse those two worlds. (It is interesting to note that in both Aramaic and Greek, Thomas’ name means “twin”, obviously a very special kind of double.) Thomas’ hands are the instrument by which he confirms the world’s claims.
For many of us, that instrument is now the camera. In this sense, the screen of the device is more important than the photograph it produces. The act is one part confirmation, and one part possession: the technological double produced at that moment belongs to the viewer.
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After spending time observing and photographing this behavior, I concluded that each new photograph was like Duchamp’s “infra-thin”: each one produces a barely perceptible change in the world, but all these slices add up to a new story. They change what the world is, because they are part of the world.
The shifting frame, the escaping image, the position of the instrument. When Sherrie Levine photographed Walker Evans’ pictures, she meant for the new space of the double to be filled with her own theoretical and political claims. That is, the difference between the two images had primarily to do with language. It is language that fixes the photograph to its source, and Levine was exploiting the instability of that language. In my photo, what political or theoretical content should we imagine flowing into the space opened by a woman re-photographing Sherrie Levine’s photograph of a Walker Evans photograph? How could Doubting Thomas make sense of these shifting frames, trying in vain to confirm the world with touch and not language?
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This work from 2010 shows the back of a 4x5 view camera. The grid is part of the focusing plane, referred to as the ground glass. The camera is pointed at a simple studio setup, just a small piece of crumpled picture wire against a white backdrop. I photographed the back of the camera and printed the picture. On the surface of that print, I traced over the wire with white ink, or what used to be called “correction fluid”. To me, this was bringing touch back to the surface of the instrument. Instead of going further in, we’re coming back out.
After all, the instrument opens up the world to us, but it does this at a cost. The world it opens is already a story, already a double on top of the “real” one, whatever that might mean. The instrument—the technology—must fracture, divide, refract. How can we guide our touch to confirm this story?
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We’ll turn this corner with a particularly enigmatic supplement. The debates surrounding the Shroud of Turin extend to topics outside our current concerns. But what does interest us now is the collision of doubt and touch. The faithful claim that the visible image is a direct imprint of the body of Christ. Yet the truth of that is contested by all types of “scientific investigations.” Some have even said that this piece of linen is the world’s first photograph. The closest touch, the direct trace, even these cannot fix in place the truth of the language that surrounds this cloth.
Let’s take another trip to 1985! When I wasn’t taking computer programming classes, I was playing basketball. Yes, that’s me. The computer science side we’ve already discussed. It led to formal languages and algorithmic paintings and analytical diagrams. Those investigations opened up spaces that stubbornly refused to be fixed by logic, language, or image. The shifting frames of technological doubling can become a chasm.
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So in 2010, I began to work on a project that put me in place of Doubting Thomas, so to speak. I decided that the athletic touch of sports could be another way to approach all the topics that we’ve been discussing. So I began photographing and filming basketball games in New York, on the court where I’ve played for more than ten years.
Since these basketball players were also my friends, I began making prints for them to have, and I took these prints to the court in a shoebox. To my surprise, the box of photographs became the center of this community of people. Between games, or while others were playing, everyone would gather around the box to look at the pictures, tell stories, and, of course, make fun of each other. What I learned was that these pictures did not suffer from the same sort of “shifting frames� effect. They were tethered to their source: looked at on the same court, by the same people. At the end of the summer, I made a video about the entire project. It showed us all playing basketball, but it also showed us looking at the box of pictures.
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The next step was more difficult, however. I wanted to keep the tether of the photographs intact. That meant finding a way to depict the experience without directly using the original footage.
So I went back to the video and transcribed all the audio I had captured, and I formatted that text into a screenplay. There was no narrative, really, just the kinds of things people everywhere say when they’re playing basketball.
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In 2011, I asked actors to perform the text. They were not given any instructions about how to make sense of the language. Much of it is quite close to gibberish. But because it is so wide open, it was used by the actors to inhabit the present, rather than re-create the past. From this performance, I made another video.
In a way, I think of this video as the result of shifting my focus squarely onto the “enigmatic supplement.� The language captured while making the original film was excess, it fell outside of my intentions. But by turning the process inside-out, language and politics rush into the space that is opened.
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That, in turn, sets free a different kind of picture: these new photographs of the basketball hoop, printed on canvas, free of people and language, shown in shifting light like Monet’s haystacks, exposing their framing both in front and behind.
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Finally, I’ll close with one more diagram, from the first group I ever made. The pieces involving basketball are not yet all resolved. It remains interesting because I can work on it, push against it, and new surprises are revealed. It brings to mind this quote from the 18thcentury geologist James Hutton: “The result of this physical inquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.�
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WORKS ILLUSTRATED
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Hoop (July Evening), pigment print on canvas, custom stretcher, 2012 Study for Taxonome VIII, pencil and ink on vellum, 2002 Writing / Written, oil and pencil on canvas, 2011 Method of Coincidences, oil and pencil on 12 canvas boards, 1999 - 2003 All Screens Simulated, pigment print, 2009 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, bronze, 1902 Taxonome VIII, oil on wood, 2003 Taxonome V, oil on wood, 2002 Study for Taxonome V, ink and pencil on paper, 2002 Color Study for Taxonome V, ink, pencil and oil on paper, 2002 Glyn Hughes, Alan Turing Memorial Statue, Manchester, 2001 Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787 Hans Holbein, Adam and Eve, 1517 Hugo van der Goes, The Fall of Man, 1470-75 Lather, Rinse, Repeat, oil on six canvases, 2004 Taxonome V Brush Marks, oil on paper, 2002 Various Brush Mark and Masking drawings, 2001-03 Our Own Effort (Proust), ink, pencil, and collage on paper, 2006 Silent (Wittgenstein), pencil and vinyl on wall, 2006 Sentences (Bachelard), ink, pencil, and collage on paper, 2005 Interesting (Goethe), ink, pencil, and collage on paper, 2005 Text / Texte, graphite and slate powder on wall, 2010 Between the Lines, vinyl and slate powder on paper, 2010 N’ Nothing Pas, vinyl, graphite, and slate powder on paper, 2010 Graffiti (Barthes), graphite and acrylic on wall, 2007 Logic (Dostoyevsky), ink, pencil, and collage on paper, 2008
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Logic (Dostoyevsky): Composite, pigment print, 2006 Logic (Dostoyevsky), graphite on wall, 2012 Intension: Tethered, pigment print on board, modifed extension cord, 2007 Intension: Hanging, pigment print and modified extension cord, 2007 Double Frame / Torn Photo, torn pigment print, frames, pencil on wall, 2007 The Meeting of Strategy and Syntax, photographs mounted on glass, 2007 Exposure Stack Horizontal, frame, pigment print, pencil on wall, 2008 Color Bars (1-4), pigment prints taped to wall, 2008 Screen Images Simulated (Youthful Hercules), oil on pigment prints on canvas, 2010 Taking Pictures (Youthful Hercules), pigment print mounted on aluminum, 2007 The Three Body Problem [detail], iron-on transfer prints on muslin, 2012 The Three Body Problem [detail], iron-on transfer prints on canvas, 2012 Taking Pictures (Grunewald), pigment print mounted on aluminum, 2009 Taking Pictures (Levine [Evans]), pigment print mounted on aluminum, 2009 White Out (Ground Glass), white ink on pigment print, 2010 Doubting Thomas, collaged pigment print on canvas, 2011 The Three Body Problem [detail], iron-on transfer prints on linen, 2012 Ball Today (Converse), pigment prints in shoebox, 2010 Ball Today (Screenplay), printed book, 2011 Ball Today (Reading), performance with 10 actors, 2011 Ball Today (Reading), HD video, 2011 Hoop (April Sunrise), pigment print on canvas, custom stretcher, 2012 Hoop (May Morning), pigment print on canvas, custom stretcher, 2012 Hoop (June Midday), pigment print on canvas, custom stretcher, 2012 Hoop (August Dusk), pigment print on canvas, custom stretcher, 2012 Vestige (Hutton), pencil, ink and collage on paper, 2002
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Nicholas Knight The Three Body Problem: Language As A Technology As A Photograph As A Language
Published by EponanonyPress, 2013
with thanks to: Joianne Bittle Sebastien Pluot Christian Dautel Fabien Vallos Nina Safainia Geoff Lowe Jacqueline Riva Artworks by Nicholas Knight are copyright of the artist. All rights reserved. Other images used for illustrative purposes are drawn from publicly available sources, and the copyrights belong to their respective creators.
nicholasknight.net ISBN: 000-0-0000000-0-0
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