Post Internet/Friday, February 19th, 2010

For 400 days, Charles Broskoski diligently worked his way through a downloaded torrent file of 356 .pdf files displaying computer programming books written in a highly technical language.

As he read through the books, Broskoski took daily notes compiled in .txt files, as well as a series of .jpg-compressed photographs depicting a list of the downloaded programming books.

In each photograph, he would cross an entry out every time he successfully completed a book.

This performance art is the bedrock of his work Computer Skills.

In the wake of the performance, there was an exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York in which Broskoski exhibited two trace elements of his performance:

1. A sculpture.

O’Reilly, the company which publishes the computer programming books read by Broskoski, agreed to send the artist physical copies of 250 of the books which he stacked in a grid of four columns—each column of the grid fit into the cut-out nook of a brick wall.

Framed by the bricks in the wall—each of which are roughly the same height and length of a single O’Reilly book inverted horizontally—the book sculpture takes on a bluntly sensible mass.

One feels the volume of information read and notated over 400 days by Broskoski.

2. An epic poem.

Broskoski printed out and bound a book consisting of the notes and digital photographs he took during his performance organized chronologically.

Each page of notes in the book is framed by a pair of thin black lines which form a round-cornered box around the body of the text.

This framing—both within the pages of the book and by the binding of the book, itself—affords one the opportunity to view the chronologically organized notes as something not noted, but written–one reads the notes as though they were intended to be read.

In this reading, one starts at a beginning:

Broskoski is outside of the books—treating them as data to be consumed, mastered.

As the performance goes on, though, and as the volume of information being taken-in by Broskoski begins to mount to absurd levels, his notes take on less the tone of a manifest destiny and more of a coming-to-terms with the fact that he’s not in control of this information.

He asks existential questions and, crucially, begins to view the books, themselves,  less as resources to be mastered and more as labors to be felt—labors composed by beings not unlike himself—beings who work in time.

In retrospect, he writes:

Honestly, the thing that resonated with me the most was the amount of times the authors thanked their significant others for letting them spend time on the computer while they were on their honeymoon. I think what I gained is a heightened sense of how computers operate, and a better idea of the humanity behind all programming languages.
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With this in mind, one views Broskoski’s performance as, itself, a labor—a work of performance art.

By Gene Mchugh
From Post Internet
February 19th, 2010
Charles Broskoski