Definitions by Matthew Cheeseman
#Analogue
Bread. Neanderthal. Warm. A hairy hand and a smooth hand. When the fear is history daring to repeat itself. Difference, resonance, all those words. One tradition of the doppelgänger; that it is close, not exact. Fighting fantasy.
#Aura
One day I will have a cybercafe shop sign. It will be bought from a large collection of similar signs that all deploy the @ symbol and phrases like 'superhighway' or 'world wide web'. I am sure there is a lock-up full of them in East London. One day soon, not quite yet, I will pay good money for a beautiful day-glo PVC or acrylic sign advertising 'Global eMessage Bakery' with a cool picture of a keyboard and ghostly fingers typing by a cup of coffee, the whole thing manufactured sometime 1997 to 2003 to advertise email services to people who could not afford the internet. I will put it on the long wall in my kitchen and people will talk about it.
#Cast
To cast an eye, to look, appraise. With that, forecast, as Emma says. To throw one's eyes into the future. To cast the self in a new form. To cast the self into a developing situation. It is not synonymous with 'give'. There is the sense that there will be a return. A faith in profit.
#Digital
A line of stainless steel mint imperials that are endlessly pleasurable to manipulate but feel a little cold in the mouth. The other tradition of the doppelgänger; an exact, psychopathic copy. Capable of rage in growth only. Hunger incomprehensible. Not mad, exactly. Not an alien yet.
#Ghosts
One sound becomes all voice. By return, the echo cannot be reduced to a singular form. The host. A single imprint stands for all imprints. One memory is all memories. Ghost armies, ghost nations, ghost code, ghost language. The wild hunt; folklore as fossil. The devil and the improperly buried. The resurrected will commune as one in heaven. All souls.
#Materiality
Maintain possession of the earth. Resist the drive to fly, the desire to leave, to exit, emanate, dream of form. Possible to sublimate such desire into creating a kind of heaven on earth, a wondrous place, golden city, paradise, or vision thereof? To bullshit this spirit with talk of alchemy, which recognises that shit is gold.
#Post-digital
Easily the hardest term to define. Turning to the OED (online version), I find the word was first cited in 1883 to designate a 'scent gland behind the digits of the forefoot in the Indian rhinoceros'. While pleased to learn this, I note that the usage is considered both obsolete and rare. Was the animal extinct? No, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (also online) it is vulnerable, with the last survey (in 2018) suggesting a global population of 2,200. All of which is demonstrative of digital logic (cf Seb Franklin, cited by Erika) and an affirmation that we're not, of course, post-digital, whilst at the same time recognising that, a) even if we were the Indian rhinoceros got there first and b) if there's going to be a post-anything in this definition then that, sadly, is also likely to be the Indian rhinoceros.
#Replica
People describe firearms as replicas when they lack the capacity to kill people.
#Reproduction
Process denatures the yeast of desire. Cells, growths, populations tabulated to averages, outcomes and targets. Wombs must incubate in ignorance of (bio)power.
#Original
'OGs. Originals. Not a retro, not a re-release, but the first time a shoe is released is the only time a sneaker is called OG.'
#FactsFriday—A Beginner's Guide to Sneaker Terminology, Shelflife.
#Immateriality
To dismiss as inconsequential and of no use, especially to the matter at hand: 'The angels are utterly immaterial in this instance, your Holiness.'
#Exhibition
Potentialities of being suggested by curation/space/art and a (g)host of audience factors such as promotion, wealth, cultural capital and how hungry you are. When an exhibition dictates limits on these factors it is better thought of as a machine that produces experiences.
#Exhibition
The virtual tour of ‘A strange weave of time and space’ is not the same as the exhibition, but rather a translation. Like all translations, it is a wedding. It has something borrowed and something new.
#Data
One thing is for sure: we are going to miss each other.
#Authorship
One of the paradoxes of authorship is maintaining consistency. Every day is different. Yesterday, when I began contributing to these definitions my voice was quick, poetic, abstract. Today brings a contemplative, serious writer, more interested in narrative and making sense. For authors the struggle is maintaining a voice. This is only amplified by use of the first person. As Erika Balsom says, 'a declaration of situatedness, surely.' Surely so. Today is both not yesterday is both not tomorrow.
#Artefact
A betrayal. Wherever it is mined from (the archive, from earth, or data), in its examination, the artefact 'betrays' another thought form: a distant civilisation, the experiment's apparatus, or, perhaps, the motion of the artist's fingertips.
#Archive
A computer's hierarchy of memory is based on access time. The fastest is the processor register, followed by the cache and then storage, online and offline. To archive is to move the object of memory down this scale, from cache to RAM for example, or from disc to tape. It is this archival movement that is (and will be) thought of as a creative action in the life of 'A strange weave of time and space’.
#Authenticity
Thinking about authenticity seems to produce the uncanny. There's a Vonnegut quote about sixties people dreaming of living as if they were in the stone age. I often think about it when I hear mention of Paleo diets, imagining Californian bellies overlapping in sugar-free fantasies of caveman plenty. Authenticity draws its energy and undeniable power from the correspondences between logic and emotion, two systems within cognition. No doubt, as Erika Balsom comments, it is an artefact of the represented self. Here, in this exhibition, authenticity emanates in the overlap between forms and doubles. In this strange weave, copies dream of being another copy of themselves.
#Copy
As Esther Leslie says, it is possible to possess a copy. Book collectors are used to the phrase 'a fine copy', or 'a reading copy only' (the latter meaning it's knackered). Being a copy allows you to experience time apart from other copies. You can be kept on the shelves, pristine, or you can be carried around and doodled on. The text you all share—your common structure—can never be wholly possessed, only referenced. In the same way, Mowgli can visit the waterfall in step with Christopher Robin, who takes a walk with Winnie the Pooh. They live different lives and yet they are the same.
#Dissemination
What I like about this word is that it can be deployed without implying the action: 'upon examination image files are never found grouped together but always disseminated throughout the hard drive'.
#Hand-made
The Tremulous Hand was a thirteenth-century glossator who worked on manuscripts stored in Worcester. His script is characterised by an action tremor that manifested whenever he tried to write: his hand shook in a surfeit of control. Nothing else is known about his body apart from this hand movement, through which we can follow his interests in his glosses: linguistics, Old English, word division, punctuation, doodles.
#Object
If something is 'no object', then it is not a problem and of little consequence: something that does not need to be 'objected' to. Actual objects must be found on the obverse side of this lack. This exhibition is full of objects and their no objects.
Last seen: 4 years ago