Bad Keys
CF + Dr Tim Brook
Altered keyboard, screen, code, dimensions variable, 2019
Please sit down and type: this work is not connected to the internet, nor is it being recorded. You can tell it anything. Suggestion: tell it your fears; the words that pull you down; labels that you have carried through the years; things that you have never shared with anyone. See if this helps.
Bad Keys is an ephemeral participatory drawing program that absorbs confessional impulses without judgement. It is one iteration of a larger project to explore ways to subvert and convert the hurt we carry after encountering word attacks. The attacks I mean are anything from online troll attacks at one end of the spectrum through to simple insults that might be said in jest but reverberate in our psyche for the rest of our lives.
Bad Keys uses the QWERTY keyboard as a coding system in its own right. As one person types, their words are translated into drawings, performing the text for others. No matter the content, each offering simultaneously builds onto and threads into the previous participant’s drawing, emphasising our connectedness.
Bad Keys continues my work on material translation and the idea of transcreation as discussed by de Campos and Gibson (2007 (1963)) and Bernstein (2003) as an ethical and political way to move ideas between languages. They argue that the act of translation is re-creation, a making of something new from the original both as acknowledgment of the impossibility of complete accuracy and as resistance to a political reduction of the original work. In this case, while input and output are text, one of them is visually abstracted; if it were recorded and assessed, it could be read according to the system behind the coding, but it is active and ephemeral and creates something new that the audience can encounter on their own terms.
Bad Keys is a relational iteration, and its format changes with every outing of the work. The first presentation of the work was in the exhibition Line Work at Tuggeranong Arts Centre (ACT) in July 2019. In that version, the person at the keyboard sat in a dark booth and watched themselves create a drawing on a large screen while onlookers had to watch over their shoulder.
The second appearance is in [dash]topia at ANCA Gallery, Dickson (ACT). Here there is a wall between keyboard and screen. The typist is alone, concentrating on the fall of their fingers. They will not see what they have typed unless someone snaps an image or records it, or if they have time before the next drawing overwrites it. The former is an act of collaboration. Meanwhile, people at the other side of the wall see an ‘animation’ on the screen, or a still drawing if no-one is typing. There is a disconnect between input and output, a public privacy that is rare to experience.
