Johanna Flato, "Screen Test Portrait Mode" installation view, "Sirens in the Blank," Royal College of Art, London, 2018
Johanna Flato, "Screen Test Portrait Mode" installation view, "Sirens in the Blank," Royal College of Art, London, 2018

Screen Test Portrait Mode

2018

On a small video screen mounted on the wall at head height and scale, the bust of the artist, encased and anonymized in a full body grey spandex suit, becomes a placeholder — embodying the ubiquitous "blank" of the greyed-out avatar silhouette. Donning headphones, the viewer hears, in the left ear, the artist reciting in spliced and broken loops  —  from often-mistaken memory, for thirty minutes — a meditation on pleasure, pain, and ethics, while in the right ear, a computerised male voice drones on in automated, unwavering latin.

This duelling left-right arrangement reflects the source of the text: a unique 1914 first edition of Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, or “On the Ends of Good and Evil,” in which the Latin original text is shown side-by-side with its English translation. The first words on page 36 of the book, “lorem ipsum,” are meaningless without the prefix left hyphenated on the previous page; reconnected, the words are “dolorem ipsum” ("pain itself"). Today, a scrambled version of the paragraphs that follow is ubiquitously utilized in word processors to autofill a page with loops of nonsensical placeholder text, a curious de-contextualization of philosophically earnest material.

In this work, the artist attempts to embody these found juxtapositions of meaning-making and gibberish, pleasure and pain, embodiment and constraint, effort and automation. With the scale of the work and the intimacy of corded headphones, she embeds the viewer in this liminal state as well.

MATERIALS:
digital video, monitor, headphones
DIMENSIONS:
COLLABORATORS:
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