ultra

I have punched a computer punch card. I learned binary the way you might learn Morse code. I was a tourist in the land of data input/output, but coming back from that land of zeroes and ones, I retained an interest in the recording of data, its march from notched sticks, stone carvings or the equivalent of hashmarks in wet clay tablets through ledgers, wax cylinders, and bytes.

What’s fascinating is that in mere decades after data became invisible, recorded on magnetic tapes rather than ledgers, vinyl disks rather than sheet music, the interest in making it visible again has just recently skyrocketed: data visualization has never been so hot. Blame Tufte or take it as a natural reaction to data’s invisibility, to the ephemerality of data recordings (when did you last back up your computer? will your email be archived as the carbon copies of the letters of your favorite author have been? do you trust Facebook to archive of your posts?)

Portland-based artist Derek Faust makes art that accumulates visible evidence of obsolete methods of recording data, specifically overlarge one-off vinyl disks sent to record stations for broadcast, player piano rolls, and the cards used to create the intricate patterns on a Jacquard loom. The OCAC graduate’s current show at Alpern Gallery (2552 NW Vaughn) is anchored in the back room, really, with a set of prints: “Transmission Lineage.” They are hung one in front of the other in three groups with just enough space between them that you can sneak a peek at those behind the front print from the side. The black and white prints are fine enough to show evidence of record grooves, even as filtered through the holes in the player piano rolls. The way they are hung—providing the viewer only fragmented views of the whole—mirrors the prints themselves as fragmented impressions of the original physical data storage objects.

The groove of the record is translated into sculpture in one of the wall pieces in Alpern’s front room. Untitled, it’s a long roll of clear vinyl in which a large circle has been cut (record form) and two leaning pieces of wood bearing the marks of repeated shallow cuts of a saw. Another hanging work of grooved pieces of white painted wood splayed out around a vertical spindle is meant by the artist to suggest the kind of machinery that traffics in data…its clear plastic tubing implying conduit or perhaps fiber optic cable. Of the lot, it’s the least convincing. Faust is best when he addresses the recording of data directly as when in an unassuming and somewhat haphazard pile of slats on the floor, he’s really riffing on the cards that drive pattern in the Jacquard textile loom. This card-based data storage system was a bridge between the production of goods, namely luxe textiles, and the production of information; the loom’s punched cards later becoming a conceptual model used in computing.

Faust’s whole project becomes metaphor for art itself, for what is art but the recording of data, and what is abstraction but the disappearing of that data deeper into the work. Looking forward to seeing where this project goes.

images: top, Derek Faust, Transmission Lineage, 2009, Series of 23 24″x36″ Prints. bottom l-r, detail. Derek Faust, Transmission Lineage, 2009, Series of 23 24″x36″ Prints.