Encyclopornia
| This work, conceived for "Beyond/In Western New York" biennial in 2010, is part of an ongoing series of work entitled “Encyclopornia.” It is a follow-up to a project from the 1990s (“Smartbooks”) that addressed the migration of primary sources of information from analogue (books) to digital (internet) media. Working with images from early dictionaries and encyclopedias pointed out a gender gap in printed works of collective knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. The fact that most encyclopedists were men of a certain economic and social standing is no surprise considering the lack of articles and visual information depicting women. The current work builds on themes of “gendered” information while acknowledging the overwhelming volume of information available today. Reworking images from an early twentieth-century encyclopedia with late twentieth-century images from gay magazines alludes to an embedded desire in the body of the book. This practice also conflates our culture’s addiction to information with a more commonly acknowledged addiction to pornography. |
