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already noted, the printer is installed amongst empty
shelves.
The first qualification the pavilion attendant makes
is that not all the things listed are regrettable. One
is of cured diseases. There are also extreme trivia,
discontinued product lines. The point—the framing
of the presentation explains—is that there is no ‘moral
lesson’ offered by the work, no lamentation of loss,
just acknowledgement.^1 Mitchell is not declaring a
position, playing up that essential feature of any art
that what we make of it is partly up to us. As a form of
abstraction (as we might see this refusal to represent),
it seems intended to ask us instead what we represent.
The synthesised speech is played through a speaker
in an anechoic chamber, its elaborately baffled interior
displayed through a specially inserted window
(through which we might also catch a muffled trace
of the performance). A microphone turns the sound,
redundantly, back into an electronic signal, carried to
other speakers that in turn reproduce it as sound in
the semi-public space of the pavilion. The ‘voice’ is
that of a commercial product Amy, whose gendered
pitch and geographically aligned neutral British
accent is a cypher, an exemplar of cultural hegemony.
The airless recitation is not much fun to listen to.
Unflagging, unhurried thoroughness makes for
something to sample rather than to settle down with.
The effect is to make the data seem beyond us, already
taken care of perhaps.
Perhaps this is science fiction, ‘after this’ literalised
to a grim prediction? The futile automated ritual
might satirise a future in which the legacy of not
just culture but all life is a muddle of data, calmly
whistled by a computer sailing on into nothingness
or broadcast through mock vegetation with the sadly
scentless sterility of tinsel Xmas trees. If we sit with it
for long enough to stare past the off-the-rack elegance,
and the relatedly ‘neutral’ use of artefacts of actual
telco tech and scientific apparatus, there is a yawning
horror here of useless precision, retentive nostalgia,
and decontextualised, merely enumerated data.