States (2007) by Anthony Discenza
New work made for New Climates
Launch Project in a New Window
States is a set of 200 words drawn from scientific and corporate language. Organized into separate, randomly shuffled columns, these word sets combine to produce over 6.2 million potential phrases (or “states”) suggestive of planetary changes either reflective of, or causally related to, human intervention in the climate. By turns absurd and ominous, these randomly generated, linguistically distanced phrases create a continually unfolding series of speculative fictions which contemplate the dystopic and/or catastrophic scenarios produced by climate shift.
– Anthony Discenza
In States, four-word sequences rhythmically appear in a black void. These words, selected by the artist but displayed at random by the software, combine to form often poetic and always surprising discursive “impressions” of the climate change crisis. Rather than recycling or creating images of climate change, already abundant in our visual culture, the Flash project prompts the viewer to generate her/his own mental percepts to accompany the word-strings. At times, chance combinations—such as “Critical Climate Combustion Chronology”—exhibit linguistic phenomena as unexpected as inclement weather and as profound as skillful haiku.
Discenza accesses the discursive network that has been used to discuss climate change in the scientific and corporate worlds, deconstructing and reconstructing it in order to allow for new and potentially subversive combinations. Simultaneously, States illustrates the ways in which meanings are applied to words based on the framework in which they appear—the words acquire “states” of relevance or valence when they are (randomly, endlessly, mechanically) juxtaposed within the context of an exhibition on climate change. In turn, Discenza suggests, these recombinant poems have the potential to shift one’s state of mind, sparking chains of association and new lines of thinking.
