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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the non-written becomes legible ... Otherwise what is outside of us should not insist on communicating through the word, spoken or written: let it send its message by other paths.
- ltalo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveller.
It is always difficult to review a group show, especially those without a strong curatorial position and even more so when most of the works point to the failure of communication between the author of a work, artistic or written, and the viewer (and reviewer). In the first instance the reviewer must try to focus on some of the more interesting works in the show rather than its premise; in the second they can merely state that all readings are personal rather than proscribed. The futuretext artists' introduction of text into the 'more' subjective 'other path' of art served to highlight the arbitrary nature of the written. Despite text's recourse to its definition, both art and text gain semiotic value through the viewer, and in this 'futuretext' is like 'past-text', just more fashionable.
Saul Kallio Edmond's work in this exhibition consisted of sixteen labels each stamped with the techno-babble sentence 'character text invalid please repeat', like printouts from another failed communication in computer/human interfacing (why does your computer never say 'excellent command or filename'?). Each label was testament to the viewer's and the artist's inability to proceed, even with the right password or key. The artist had attempted to move beyond the default setting and presented the trophies of the computer's denial as a mirror of the artistic process. Edmond's work possessed similarities with Glenda Pontes