Lu Gillespie’s can-you-hear-me-over-the-files (2024) is an interactive, conceptual piece that orchestrates through a series of commands on the user’s personal device. The files are forced into a structured composition on the user’s screen, creating a collaboration between the artist’s ZIP file and the user’s device to create “a reckoning with digital content and personal archive.”
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Journal Entry && Capsule of Time:::::>
i borrowed inspiration from the old “Border’s” bookstore cd listening stations. i’ve lately been obsessed with the rapid obsoletion of cds, and the now archaic practices that surrounded them during their brief and intense prominence in the music-listeners community. among them, bookstore listening stations: so many sunday afternoons were shared with those communal headphones leaking foam stuffing and brief fifteen second sound clips from selected discs (disks?). how then could i encapsulate this memory without risk of overriding it?;
i borrow, too, from Sol Lewitt’s conceptual art practice, where he posits that “the product” = “the process”. his work consists of instructional sheets, abstracting the idea behind the work, and allowing the implementation of the art itself to be democratized, able to be rendered by any hand. when the process of creation becomes abstracted, contextualization matters. in this case, each computer operator’s machine will read the instructional sheet and render the work, but the user’s desktop background, screen resolution, and external environment will inevitably alter the way that the work manifests;
the body of work includes documentation of projects from class married with excerpts and fragments of my poetry; the work is written for the most part in the first person voice; the work examines the downloaded file as a marking of time, inextricably linked to its metadata; the work will examine images where:
SCREENSHOTS==“photography of otherworld”
EMBODIED_IMAGES==“emancipation of commoditized self //acceptance of commonality”
PLASTIC_IMAGES==“manipulation”
DESKTOPS==“accumulation, composition, organization”
ARCHIVAL_DATA==“digital warehouse” || “MIDI files” + “deep youtube” + “flickr b-stacks”
this is a reckoning with digital content and a personal archive.
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Compositions:::::>
=the_sunshine_sends_its_forgiveness – – – – > screenshotted desktop composition, screenshotted youtube videos in a flip book style, .wav file
000imthespaceimmissingfrom000 – – – – > embodied image gif, personal poetry, .wav file
reluctantly_i-return-to-how-i-was* – – – – > collaged compressed/dithered/fried images from early 2000s flickr bedroom pages, AI gendered 3d model, .wav file
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Click here to download and run the file. (Video preview below.)
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Lu Gillespie is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist whose practice involves the examination of digital obsolesce and memory through mechanisms like file corruption, online archives, and computational algorithms. She completed a BS in Computer Science with a minor in Studio Art from Washington University in St. Louis. She currently works as a software engineer focused on researching and developing experimental interfaces within emerging technical landscapes.
