ENCODED & ENCRYPTED
Exhibition at the Brizdle Schoenberg Special Collections Center
2nd floor of the Alfred R. Goldstein Library
Ringling College of Art + Design
On view May 24 through August 31, 2017
To encode, some kind of conversion takes place. When we markup text for the screen, <strong>this</strong> displays this. With encryption, a conversion of form occurs as well, only with the added intent to restrict access. A receipt displays X’s to hide all but the last 4-digits of your credit card number. It harbors a secret, your secret, and protects it. As acts of translation and acts of concealment, encoding and encryption reside on the same twisted möbius.
The artists’ publications on display at the Brizdle Schoenberg Special Collections Center are brought together under this premise. The exhibition highlights a facsimile (1963) of the visually and linguistically coded wonder of 15th century printing, the Hypnerotomachia poliphili, and asks in what ways has symbolism always been a form of encryption?
This early exemplar is accompanied by a selection of contemporary bookworks by artists, designers, and writers. Many utilize sign systems to encode and encrypt, as is the case with the subversive shorthand of Barbara Leoff Burge in None of Your Damn Business (2009); the storytelling ideograms in Warja Lavater’s artists’ books (c. 1965–1974); and the braille compositions in Rachel Simkover's An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Braille Edition) (2013). Other works in the exhibition like Book from the Ground (2013) by Xu Bing are encoded to reach a global, expanded readership, while works like Gelbes Buch (2004) by Cyril Dietrich participate in willful distortion and refuse to be read. BEAUT. E (Code) (2005) by Karen Hanmer can be read by both humans and machines, human: bot (2014) by Joe Milo is written from the perspective of a machine to a human reader, and the beguiling world of the Codex seraphinianus (1981) by Luigi Serafini is a sendup to an imaginary civilization of human-machines.
The exhibition entangles the visual and linguistic possibilities of the alphabetic, the ideographic, the algorithmic, and the enigmatic.
For more information, please contact Janelle Rebel, Digital Curation and Special Collections Librarian ([log in to unmask] / 941.3
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