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Greg Haun:
Personal Dictionaries
Nine Gallery, 1231 NW Hoyt St.
Ends July 1, 225-0210
In his current series at Nine Gallery, Greg Haun has captured the base materials of his subjects' brainstuff by raiding their personal spell-check dictionaries. (For those who aren't computer addicts: When you use a word that's missing from the standard dictionaries of spell-check programs, they give you the option of adding the new word to the memory. You thus avoid having to verify each subsequent use.) Haun has overlaid photographic portraits with printouts of his subjects' spell-check additions. Here the images are overwhelmed by the text; the faces become a mere back-drop for this unedited parade of words. "Late 20th-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between real and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed," Donna Haraway wrote in A Cyborg Manifesto. "Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert." Computers tend to standardize expression, especially for the slothful. Be it grammar correction or graphic design, computers make it easier to create the gloss of professionalism with minimal effort. ("This appears to be a run-on sentence," offers my helpful computer.) Haun's series is a celebration of human idiosyncrasy and an indication of where our language might be heading-the count of abbreviations, acronyms and numbers is depressingly high.by Kevin Francis
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