Oracles

The installation presents what appear to be excerpts of regular text message conversations. Yet on taking a closer look they are devoid of meaning. The messages are generated with a smartphone; the artist has chosen only the first word, followed by the automatic next-word suggestion – using always the same key between the three proposed by the smartphone, in order to eliminate any human decision. The resulting text is an incomprehensible mix of the program’s words and rules, and some idiosyncratic expressions of the user: the writer becomes an undefined hybrid between a human and a program. The display, quotations printed on Plexiglas, freezes something that usually happens within a flow: it suggests that these texts could have an author, thus paradoxically highlighting its indetermination.