I’ll be your interface.* is a two-phase project conducted in conjunction with Dexter Sinister that questions the neutrality of computer interfaces as depoliticized spaces by asserting that software demands and generates its own ideologies, politics, and behaviors.
PHASE 1 (COMMISSION): in New York City, a data visualization company will commission Dexter Sinister for design consulting services over a four-month period. Research will address issues of information bubbling, identity profiling, and discrimination that result from efficiency-oriented thinking. The goal is to collaborate in the development of visual interface proposals that manage and represent data according to other, less directly instrumental criteria.
PHASE 2 (EXHIBITION): in CCS Bard at the Hessel Museum, an exhibition of previous works by Dexter Sinister will be presented. Together with supporting material drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection and the Special Collections Archives, this exhibition will address similar problems of information mediation and distribution.
These two phases run in parallel, meeting at different points, feeding off, and informing each other. In both the design commission and the art exhibition, work shares two related qualities:
1. the goal is to transmit information
2. this is done by aesthetic means
The key difference lies in intent: some work towards a functional purpose, while others work to an aesthetic purpose. Some appear to be functional, but are actually aesthetic, and vice versa. But what if we blur these differences? What if we establish a space in which the functional and the aesthetic stand on equal footing?
This project presents objects with different purposes asking: how can the aesthetic and the functional–as exemplified through the exhibition and interface–serve to disclose and modify patterns of information transmission within the data deluge we live in today?
I’ll be your interface at the Judd Foundation
On Thursday, March 26th from 5:30 – 6:30pm at The Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, NYC, Dexter Sinister, and Roxana Fabius, will speak about differences and commonalities between Dexter Sinister’s practice and the work and writings of Donald Judd. Brief tours of the 101 Spring Street building, Judd’s New York residence and studio, will be available preceding and following the dialogue.
