archive explore

On the occasion of transmediale’s thirtieth anniversary, Florian Wüst selected Jeanne Finley's work Involuntary Conversion (1991) to be explored in the Technology Languages of the Past, Present, and Future event, a curatorial endeavor by him, Daphne Dragona, and Kristoffer Gansing that aimed at activating and commenting on artifacts found in the festival's archive. Via linguistic analysis and a look at the history of political gobbledygook, in this essay the artist, filmmaker, and curator Caspar Stracke dissects the “Doublespeak” employed in Finley’s work—an overlay of text, image, and spoken word made possible by recent technological developments at the time. Involuntary Conversion may be a prime example of early 90s video art techniques, but as Stracke incisively demonstrates, her attention to language’s capacity to obscure is no less important in this century.