Imperfect Reconstruction by Hanns Holger Rutz

The image of coding/decoding often includes the ideal of perfect reconstruction. Something real—an experience, a thought, a movement—can be transformed into a finite set of elements that may then be transported and unfolded as an evocation of that original experience or movement. Something is communicated (duplicated and made equal). It bothers us when the reconstruction is not complete, when the distance between the pairs of conceptualisation/perception, intention/interpretation… is not annulled: somebody did not understand. What we are interested in for this exhibition are those distances and gaps that produce imperfection, understood as the resistance of thoughts and movements to become determinate; understood as their durational and iterative configuration. Located at the intersection of computer art and sound art, we are primarily interested in algorithmic movements. In algorithmic practices pieces of code assume the production of forms and establish mutual writing processes between human and computer. Imperfect Reconstruction is an exhibition project for 2016. This RC entry serves to trace its process.

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Spokes

Spokes is an installation of text lines that run across the exhibition space. The vinyl lettering was a medium I wanted to experiment with from the very beginning. In 2015, as part of a documentary exhibition, I had used this kind of material (white vinyl on black wall) to add notations about my work process, and I very much liked the rhythmic quality of this lettering. Taking down the wall text proved quite difficile, as the wall was only superficially painted, and the black colour came off with the letters, resulting in an interesting pattern of traces; I left one word on the wall, 'Unlike', to observe its effect.

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However, two things happened. The first was the appearance of an interesting transformation of the text. The source text came from a dream diary and had been also used in the video miniature Notebook. In its sorted state, one could make out a new rhythm between seemingly generic words, words that you would expect to occur in any sort of text, particles, pronouns, etc. …

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… and those words that are very characteristic of this text …

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[hh 06/03/17]

My original plan for Spokes was to take a text and show the intermediary steps of different sorting algorithms applied to it. Sorting algorithms are somewhat at the core of informatics, and one distinguishes the different algorithms by their convergence properties, the rate at which they approach the target state; what I found more interesting is the intermediate states where the text is halfway sorted, revealing the different strategies of the algorithms which are otherwise considered exchangable. In the end, however, I decided for a relatively long text with the implication that it would not be feasible to display it multiple times at different sorting stages. Instead, I just used the "target state" of the sorted text, which seems to be contrary to the approach of imperfect reconstructions.
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The second was the actual act of installing the text. The concept was to extend the suspended mesh structure into the space, the create vanishing lines of its veins. The exact number of spokes into the space, and their lengths would have to be determined ad hoc, and so for the amount of text—roughly fifty metres—there was an equal stretch of opaque red tape to be able to adjust the run lengths.

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Unlike (artefact / unrealised work, 2015)

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---
meta: true
artwork: Spokes
author: HHR
kind: diary
function: contextual
project: ImperfectReconstruction
place: ESC
keywords: [text notations, vinyl lettering, sorting algorithms]
---

Applying the text became a real performance with various people crawling across the floor, with decisions being made about how to distribute the entire text across the space—in the end, I dropped all the words beginning with the letter 'e', producing an ironic leap from 'durch' (through) to 'falsch' (wrong), and one of the final lines runs across the corridor of the gallery, passing by the office and ending in a bathroom.

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