Cross Cultural Communication

Gordon Bleach

Zimbabwe/USA

in everlasting memory
Gordon Bleach

+ 20.09.1999

Installation and Digital artist. Born in Mutare, Zimbabwe in 1953. Earned a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town and an MFA in Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Has shown extensively in South Africa and the USA, and was represented in In/sight: African Photography, 1940 to the Present at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale. Lives and works in Gainsville, Florida.

The Mote Series

A mote is a speck of opaque matter (dust) and, less commonly, also its converse; a specular highlight (gleam). Linguistic allusions include: moat (bulwark, rampart), demote, emote, motive (and its musical feint, motivic cell), motility, motel, remote, smote, bon mot. Mote carries athical freight, too, in the biblical injunction to remove impairments (beam, rock) form one's own eyes before demanding mote removal from others. The Mote Series is grounded on a double image: the artist's retinas. Oriented vertically with the left and right above, the pairing carries Latin connotations from sinister to dexter of the past rising to the future. In the figure-eight overlap, there is a sense of stereo targetting or crossed eyes; of a turn taken in a spotlit arena. The images are voyeuristic, after all, since the flashed camera vision peers through dilated lenses to reveal the darkened global cavities of the artist's eyes. this bright area in each retina to which all veins flow is the blind spot, which absorbs no light and is thus unseeing, but which collects all the image information and transmits it for the brain to envision. Given the artist's surname, it is a slight autobiographical irony that the translation of light falling on the retina into neural information is a chemical preocess of bleaching. Each title follows a standard form (with seperating comma). Each is manifest in the image and should be seen and heard as something of a deadpan mote itself; a highlight and/or blot on the screen, make/shift, in-and-out of place.

sCRYPT

Abstract
It is the interminable fabrications memory buildings of an archival corpus that sCRYPT fixates and embodies. Initialized in 1989 on the Wallace Memorial Library construcion site at the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. sCRYPT proliferates as a viral archive through auditoria, books, bricks, computer bits, continents, individuals, etc. Building walks , Spurous Artifacts, Photographs One key aspect of sCRYPT is known as buildingScrypt. In this, a cluster of small geographic and architectural pathologies (building walks, spurious artifacts) materialized in the interim arenas of the construction site. Artifacts took on material form via the after-hours loan of Libray building materials. Through s-lavish transposition of thought at work in architecture gleaned from the writings of Jacques Derrida, Adolph Loos and Aldo Rossi, the artifacts performed as grafted filiation of material aphorisms. The motif of sCRYPT as a whole - both more than a building and no more of a building - is a material transference from Jacques Derrida's short definition of deconstruction: Plus d'une langue - more than a language and no more of a language.