29 PARALLEL STRIPES
The top photo is the installation for the GLI.TC/H Festival 2011 gallery show, which was hosted in Chicago. To overcome the difficulty and expense of shipping the art from the UK, I decided to send just the 50m roll of cotton tape, which fitted neatly into a small padded envelope, together with the installation instructions. The organisers did a great job in choosing a beaten-up shipping pallet as the support for the tape winding. It was a calculated risk to install the art in this collaborative way, but I couldn't have been more delighted with the result.
The idea is that two-dimensional images we see on our digital devices are stored as one-dimensional arrays of numbers. The black-and-white markings represent binary data, and the cotton tape is the linear organisation of this data. The final two-dimensional form depends upon the width of the rendering surface around which the tape is wound.
From the gallery notes: The art is therefore a one-dimensional data stream, in which all synchronization cues between the data and the rendering surface are absent. Thus, any two-dimensional rendering of the data is merely one of infinitely many possible choices.