fig-2 30/50 Anna Barham

About

Concentrating on text as the main material of her production, Anna Barham furthers her ongoing investigation into the dichotomy of meaning and its translation as various codes - alphabet, sound, and image. Barham’s project for fig-2 bases its structure on her previous live production reading groups in which malleable interpretations of a selected text are created and activated by the participants’ voices and speech to text software. For fig-2 the process is stretched across the duration of a week where the group exists as a series of encounters rather than a simultaneous presence: Every day different interpretations generated the previous day will be provided to each visitor to choose from and to add a new translation of the text by voicing their selected piece. Barham addresses the unruly potential of meaning and the active role of the viewer / reader by setting up complex feedback loops between human and computer processes. Evoking century-old tendencies towards stepping out of meaning production in a language, her work embodies the intentions of Dadaists, and finds a paradoxical freedom in Wittgenstein’s demarcation of human thought within language.