Robert Bean

Verbatim

Artifacts become knowable in part because they are enmeshed within the back and forth and round about of telling what they are, and because telling devolves upon discernable rhetorical conventions, like genres and specialized vocabularies, that are themselves largely the result of unconscious consensus.¹

The sites and subjects that I explore consider the temporal uncertainty that photographs evoke in relation to memory, technology and experience. The exhibition "Verbatim" is comprised of digital images made with a flatbed scanner. The prints are "contact images" that remember and forget the earlier technological processes of photography and typewriting. Photography, typing, and phonographic writing (stenographer's shorthand) are all historically associated with the technologies of verbatim inscription. The history and memory of our embodied relationship to these technologies is essential to the human-computer interface of contemporary digital technologies. "Verbatim" reconsiders the development of language machines and the subsequent systems of storage and retrieval.

In 1997 I dismantled a manual typewriter. The physical contact with the object was used as a procedure for remembering an obsolete technology that has influenced and predated my experience. The cultural complexity of the apparatus, its design, function, and mechanical precision were conveyed through this process of disassembly. The labour that fabricated and implemented the writing machine was also revealed. Since that time, I have been reassembling the artifacts of this experience as digital images. The mechanical artifacts are texts and stories that may be transcribed and retold. As Lisa Gitelman has noted, "[n]ew inscriptions signal new subjectivities".²

This project is an exploration of organic and inorganic memory through the borders and interface that continue to define the human experience with machines. As a child, I was fascinated with the beauty of the mechanical imprint produced by the typewriter. During the disassembly of the machine, the indexical traces of the type hammer were rediscovered as random letters inscribed into the typewriter ribbon. As the unintended graffiti of a prior vocation, these marks register a presence and an absence. Like the machine that harbored them, they are passé. These ribbons became the source for two scrolls that recollect the embedded memory in the ribbon.

The writing machines had a profound effect on the organization of institutions, labour and the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. They were instrumental in redefining experience as pattern and information. Concurrently, the bureaucracies that utilized writing machines and reproductive technologies during the twentieth century enhanced the systemic efficiency of surveillance, accountability and archiving that have subsequently abridged many areas of human experience. The computer expands and supplements the legacy of this technology.

In this context, the works in "Verbatim" may provide an intriguing encounter with the subjective memory and oblivion that our relationship to technology evokes.

1. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 7.
2. Ibid. 11.