CUBE

18.07.01- 04.09.01

'End Users' explores the artist's ongoing concern with the inadvertent traces people leave when they live and work in cities - particularly in their relationship to technology. The work samples ‘user dictionaries’ from numerous computers around Manchester – primarily from a number of architects’ offices within the city. A user dictionary is a file of words which have been added to a computer by someone whilst they are checking the spelling on a document. Any words which don’t match a preset dictionary (usually Microsoft’s) are queried by the computer, at which point the person using the machine has the options to change that word, ignore its use in that instance or to add it or ‘learn’ it – presumably acknowledging that this word may be useful for the future working life of the machine.

The words that are added then exist in a separate file in the computer’s system so that in the future words such as ‘balustrade’, ‘Rainchester’, ‘Situationist’ or ‘BS4360’ will not be queried when they are used, but will still have a kind of rogue paralegal status. The alphabetical list of professional neologisms, place names, contacts, theory terms, slang and even swear words is never fully integrated into the standard dictionary. Graham Parker has used that fact to make ‘portraits’ of peoples’ uses of technology for a particular profession in a particular place – portraits made visible only by existing in relief to linguistic rules defined elsewhere. The resulting lists of words are legible in that the viewer wants to impose order on them and begins to see patterns and even mini-narratives within them as they match them against their own internal knowledge of place and use of language there.

The installation itself consisted of a single line of text on the gallery walls (a composite of all the architects’ dictionaries) alongside a number of individual text portraits of artists, writers and creative professionals within the city who occupy the same built environment sampled for the architects’ dictionaries, but whose relationship to it may be one of reinvention, the crafting and retelling of local popular mythologies, allegations, speculation, desire, subjectivity. That thoughts of some or all of these concerns might influence an architects’ working process is not in question, but the configuration of these individual portraits as tiny columns of text on loosely pinned paper against the architect’s text directly on the wall of the gallery, adds a further layer to the idea of the ‘End User’. 

It is the name given to inheritors of an environment – be that a city or a computer programme, who are given a basic set of tools to navigate that environment with. The tiny columns of text, which from a distance look like vertical soundwaves and which can only be read up close by maybe one person at a time, reinforce the idea of tiny intimate transactions which have been made by an individual asserting their own vernacular, sleepily adding a mistake, or altering an anomaly of American English. These decisions have accrued over time as the person writes themselves into and around their immediate personal and professional environment.

Organised and curated by Graeme Russell