Graham Parker - Local Heroes

This is a project that reflects a localised technological and linguistic history pertaining to FACT within the actual fabric of the new FACT Centre. The work uses vinyl lettering to fill the 13 glass panels forming the brise soleil at the rear of the building, with a composite set of words formed from the user dictionary files of all the FACT computers.
A user dictionary is a 'live' file which exists on a computer's hard drive and which relates to the spell check function on word processing software. When the program is checking the spelling in a document and it comes across a word which is not recognised by its pre-programmed dictionary, it will query that word and offer the user the chance to change the spelling to one it suggests, to ignore the anomaly, or to add the word to the user dictionary so that that word is never queried again in future checks. It is that small decision to legitimise a word permanently within the future working life of the machine (i.e as a word that is likely to recur) that forms the basis of the project.
Over a period of time this file of 'rogue' words lengthens to include anything from proper names to swear words; from neologisms coined by the user to words we may be familiar with which somehow slip under the Microsoft radar (most variations on 'curate' for example). And when the file is isolated and the list of alphabetically ordered additions is viewed, it is possible to see patterns, moments of legibility and vernacular traces of a working life, inadvertently logged there.
In all the incarnations of this work, the idea of presenting these texts in a way that is appropriate to their setting is important, as to a lesser extent is an awareness of the viewer's physical relationship to the work - whether leaning and squinting at tiny text or being physically surrounded by the words. Something in the work that makes their proximity to it potentially matter - that sense of the words becoming readable at the point where the linguistic (and possibly local) experience of the reader intersects with that of the user(s) who have created the dictionary.
In the project for FACT, Graham Parker has undertaken a sweep of all the user dictionaries in all the computers in the FACT office which have then been compiled into a single composite 'dictionary'. This audit has thrown up numerous words relating to past projects, new media acronyms, regular FACT correspondents and of course text references to specifics of this building project. As a temporal core sample of the linguistic life of the workers and machines in the organisation, much of it is very richly legible.
Having taken and compiled that list it has been installed as a semi-opaque vinyl text on the brise-soleil panels, so that they partially add to the functionality of filtering the sun, but also take advantage of this functionality to be cast as shadows within the foyer and walls of the building. From a distance the visual look will be almost of a texture rather than a text and the words will fill the surface area of the panels in rows running across the thirteen panels.
Positioning the text so that it is likely to cast shadows means that that cross-section in time of the numerous documents and transactions which have shaped the working history of those computers and ultimately the transactions which have brought about the building itself, can be marked within the structure of that building in a way that alludes to the words' virtual existence. It seems appropriate that despite these words' half-life shadowy status in generic linguistic terms, their role in describing a very particular social and professional process be quietly marked in the building.
For the artist, the proposed title is playful - the 'local heroes' being the words themselves and their usefulness in the context of FACT's past and future, rather than (or maybe as well as!) any specific people who may be mentioned amongst the list. It certainly invokes images of the war memorial or one of those boards listing former Head Girls/Boys etc. and that sense of quietly honouring something is important to the work.
Graham Parker
Thanks to :
ASTRA signs

FACT is the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology.

The FACT building project is a new £10m national centre in Liverpool for the presentation and production of film, art and creative technology.

http://www.fact.co.uk