“Family Index: Videogram I & Videogram II and Index Memoriae (ex Hetrotpic Index I)” by Graham Howard
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Mapping has been a significant feature of the work since the early Indexes of Art & Language, when the indexing of discourses functioned as a device for the conception of a representational practice, in a context layered with misrepresentations, and void of adequate critical theory. The work, produced then, was centred upon the text and its transformations. Now similar issues are being addressed but the focus of attention has shifted to concentrate on the image in its relationships witb texts.
Maps can be understood as complex devices that allow for the representation of multiplicities, shot through with fissures, fractures and bybridisations. They are not linear traces through the world, although such traces may be threaded through them, but configurational dynamic figures, whose elements fade and iridesce, migrate and translate. The individual, conceived as structuring a meteoric trace within such maps, is used as a figure throughout the work.
The individual’s immediate chthonic context is related to the shimmering intersections of immanent worlds to suggest the extreme tendentiousness of such picturing.
Indexing from one element to another, and across different worlds is a feature of how we all live, but any representation of this, is problematic and inadequate. We are left with snapshots of moments, incorporating fictions and facts, ironies and distances, creation and erasure, alienation and desire. Readers will continue the process and elaborate the palimpsests for themselves.
Family Index: Videogram I and Family Index: Videogram II are two captured moments, elements of which are re-indexed in Family Index: Electronic Iteration VI. All of these and much else inhabits the hypermedia form of the work, Hererotopic Index I; this is a dynamic multidimensional confluence of maps.
