2013
calligraphy pen and inkjet printer ink on paper
43 × 18 3⁄4 in
While making EDM House I downloaded numerous instructions from the Internet showing how to make different kinds of electronic dance music. I tried my hand at several genres before settling on a kind of house beat for the work.
For How to Program a Dubstep Beat (CMYK), I took a particular set of these instructions and wrote it out by hand in blackletter, a variation on what monks in the Middle Ages used to copy the scriptures. I used cyan, magenta, yellow and black inkjet printer ink to do this, each letter written with the consecutive inkjet printer ink—the first letter cyan, the next magenta, then yellow, then black and then back to cyan. Each time I dipped the pen, the ink from the previous pot would intermingle into the next, making the colors of the letters turn brownish and less saturated.
The work is a reflection on the dissemination of information, and on how an author is and is not a transparent agent of dissemination. As with EDM House, this work displaces a new form—the dissemination of knowledge over the Internet—onto the ruin of an old one, that of handwritten calligraphy, today practiced by a relative few.