Arts Thread

Motherboard maps an exploration of language in relation to the human psyche. It expresses our hybridized existences between original, physical realities and those we inhabit digitally: virtual spaces, dependent on the upkeep of code to sustain them. Beginning with an underlying grid – numerous shirts, splayed and flattened out – we find linguistic common ground. This is the uniform, blank structure we have wordlessly agreed to fill in. Layers creep through, building atop. Symbols knitted in bas-relief disrupt the grid, mimicked nearby by the embroidered, quasi-binary language of cable knit plotting. Curling over on cords are negative imprints, ceramic fossils, of the knits. The symbols themselves may not present obvious meaning, but the vulnerability thereof in its stages of translation comes into question. Codes and words are dynamic (alive, even) in their meaning. How long do they mean what they originally set out to say, or mean anything at all? Cables and cords allow us to plug into the Motherboard, taking us back to our origins in language: the “pre-verbal”, our "mother tongue" (paraphrasing John Berger in Confabulations (2016), pgs 4 & 137, respectively). Peculiarly, in a similar way to which we were written up in our genetic codes, we have begun to program and encode our own digital identities. Photographed by Lisa Deurer Modelled by Isabella Yu