/S/T/R/O/B/E////L/I/C/K////

Flat Time House, London
25.11.21 - 13.02.22

Now forget everything you ever k-n- ew or thought or saw, and imagine there was nothing, nothing a-t all. A blank, dark nothing.

/S/T/R/O/B/E////L/I/C/K////a solo exhibition at Flat Time House produced in collaboration with partner Arcade, is the culmination of five years of engagement with John Latham’s writing and with his archive.

Barham selected poems and prose by Latham for a process of transformation through repeated interpretation and vocalisation. Using collaborative reading groups recorded through speech recognition software, an original piece of writing is spoken, recorded, then re-presented. Each time, the clumsy attempts by artificial intelligence to reconstruct verbal language, from a stream of particles and phonemes, creates unanticipated outcomes. Increasingly mutated, each generation draws further from the original message, yet this unfolding of meaning begins to reveal new auto-fabricated subjects.

The title of the exhibition and new video work, /S/T/R/O/B/E////L/I/C/K////, refers to a Barham's methods of image production. Returning to FTHo, Barham used a strobe light and handheld scanner to make images from residues, surfaces and the unnoticed objects inside and outside the house that sit between the everyday and the archived. Bouncing stroboscopic light from glass surfaces captures the tiny scratches, paint flecks, dust and even snail trails over the material - a kind of 'licking'. Barham combines this with remnants of auto-generated text to form the fabric of the works and installation, intuitively creating new connections and a dialogue between the geological passage of time and the immediacy of the present moment.

>> /S/T/R/O/B/E////L/I/C/K//// video