dis.grace by François Naudé and Stacy Hardy (Video)
At the Franschhoek Literary Festival this weekend, I hosted a discussion called “The Re-wiring of the Writer’s Mind”, in which Aryan Kaganof, Lauren Beukes and Stacy Hardy talked about whether and how the internet is changing literary creativity.
Towards the end of the hour, we showed clips from a recent artwork by Hardy and François Naudé called dis.grace. It’s an animation of JM Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, that employs Google Image Search and a voice-over narration by Richard E Grant to “republish”, or “render” the book into a new (and newly invented) medium. In Naudé and Hardy’s own words:
dis.grace is a digital project that re-appropriates JM Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace (1999) in order to explore the failureof language to maintain its authority in the postcolony.
The project translates the full text of Coetzee’s novel into images using the Google Search Engine’s “Image Search” functionality. It matches each word in the book with its equivalent No.1 Google search image* to create a new book, a visual text rewritten through the eyes of a global digital popular culture.
It combines chance, play, bad taste, incomprehension, artifice, and a lack of truth to up-end the “disgraced” Western literary parameters of “white male writing” considering its history of ideologically (and sexual) objectification and predation. It shuns the authority of the author and the omniscient narrator used in the Western novel as the equivalent to the intruding phallocentric colonizer while at the same time questioning the amnesia and historical selfinvention of post-apartheid consumer society.
*Google images search rates pages according to popularity thus creating a seemingly “democratic voice”, based on the consensus of the majority of internet users.
Naudé and Hardy’s work elicted strong reactions from audience members, some of whom (including Eben Venter) loved it, others the reverse. It was certainly talked about quite a lot during the remainder of the festival.
I thought others might be interested in taking a look, and asked Hardy if she would consider supplying BOOK SA with a short excerpt from dis.grace. She has very kindly obliged; here’s a clip of dis.grace from Chapter One:
- Not playing? Watch on BOOK SA TV
The image at the top of this post shows how dis.grace would look if it were published in book form, as images only. At the artwork’s website (www.disgrace.co.za), you can find a dis.grace search engine, which has been pre-applied to the site’s text (click any word to see how it works):
The language he draws on with such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites. Only the monosyllables can still be relied on, and not even all of them. What is to be done?
To view a longer version of the work, head to the Chimurenga Library installation at the Cape Town library on Darling Street (which runs until 21 June). dis.grace will eventually be published/rendered in full on the artwork’s homepage.
Book details
- Disgrace by JM Coetzee (new SA edition)
EAN: 9780099526834
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- Disgrace by JM Coetzee (old SA edition)
EAN: 9780099289524
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- Disgrace by JM Coetzee (UK edition)
EAN: 9780099535140
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- Disgrace by JM Coetzee (US edition)
EAN: 9780140296402
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- Disgrace by JM Coetzee (new US edition)
EAN: 9780143036371
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
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