Lee Henderson

@bornsnippy.bsky.social

134 Followers 160 Following

I make art about death. But don’t worry, it’s funny the way ‘King Lear’ is funny. Also writer, inventor, teacher, and malvivant. Toronto & Montréal.

A humanoid robot being launched in Moscow trips and falls right into the uncanny valley.
Black and white 16mm film footage of a silhouetted woman with a guitar. She stands alone in an empty soundstage, as a single lightbulb swings on a pendulum behind her. Atmospheric music plays, but is slowed so that it sounds like large machines and distant howls—cutting to closeup we see her temove her guitar, rehearse some quick dance moves absentmindedly as if she’s running through a program; she sets her foot on a raised stage as the film ends, and bold white text appears on a black background: Jane Inc. on video performing 2120 ; Human Being ; Picture of the Future ; Ordinary Thing ; Every Rip (Full credits when I post the full video later—outta room!)
A laser cutting through frosted acrylic sheet, its beam visible intermittently as it gets refracted through the metal honeycomb pattern under the plexiglas’ surface.
A photograph of a closed book, titled “Tracings: Writing Art 1975-2020” with the author listed “Ian Carr-Harris”. On the book cover, “Tracings” is rendered by hand in cursive in chalk on a blackboard, while the rest of the title and author name are in a black typewriter font on a pistachio-coloured background. I note that when I first moved to Toronto in 2009, I knew exactly one person: Ian Carr-Harris. We had met a few months prior, after a talk he gave at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina—I believe I had described his work (“Empire Piece”) as looking like it had been “made at the Bauhaus if the Bauhaus had been into a DIY basement-y grandfatherly-workshoppy sensibility at the time.” We connected instantly and have been co-conspirators ever since. —LH
A blue text reading “god is in the alt-text” oscillates vibrantly against a saturated red background. The two colours are in conflict with each other, generating a retinal-spasm, a metaphorical alt-text referenced by the text (and by this literal alt-text). Of course, you already knew the value of alt-text—it’s why you’re here, how you knew to click on it. And why you’ll click on it again, elsewhere, in case someone has put care into it, invested it with significance beyond the descriptive, or hidden easter eggs within it. It’s strikinh that a platform limiting itself to small numbers of words or characters per post would allow 2,000 characters in an alt-text. One logical conclusion to draw from that is that they’re anticipating (even hoping?) that the alt-text will be used as a space for play, for experimentation, for more text, for sub-text. What, then, should we make of the visual choices in the image? The vibrant conflict between red and blue, the way the design shakes the eye? The use of Futura as a typeface, its own history wrapped up in midcentury training, education, textbook, propaganda? If god is in the alt-text, then we should perhaps not be surprised that the alt-text is long enough that it raises questions of its own, questions of interpretability, signification, meaning-making, or ambiguity. All metaphors are kinds of ambiguity, after all. Perhaps the alt-text is like any other text, then—at its most fruitful when it is composed with an awareness that the methods by which language is made specific and precise are the same methods by which it is made imprecise, interpretable, interoperable, hypertextual. So I hope you didn’t click to expand this text hoping for mere description or didactics—I don’t have much of those to give, with so simple a graphic. Consider this alt-text block, then, as a meditation, a chamber for contemplation (despite its verbosity—I really can’t help but fill the 2,000 characters on offer), and the opening of an exploration.