VOID SCREAMS (2021)

Void Screams was an artistic project undertaken with the project/platform I've Never Been To Tulsa, a signboard in a front yard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to which artists are invited to submit short texts for display. Though declaiming its situated location in Tulsa, a requirement of the artists is, paradoxically, that they have 'never been to Tulsa', and the project's principle viewership is overwhelmingly via Instagram. It sits in a liminal space between the situated and the dispersed, as well as between text and image.

I sent a guttural scream of repeated vowels to the curator in Tulsa. This utterance was put up on the signboard, and a photo sent back to me. (All of this instant transcontinental communication took place by textual code and data of course.) I then photoshopped apart the signboard-image from its background, and deleted every occurrence of that vowel within the raw textual code of the background image, before putting the image back together (now explicitly highlighting its digital, textual basis) and it sending back. These images were then posted to Instagram, notably different to those around them which show the signboard in its 'real' surroundings.