Tamper Evident

1996

Tamper Evident is a set of four ASCII works Shannon Novak made in 1996 for Frame Rate. Each was typed into a plain .txt file, then pasted into the channel, where it scrolled into view line by line.

The images shown here aren't the works themselves. They're flat JPGs made recently by opening the original .txt files, so the pieces can be seen online. The art is the text file.

The works respond to the Robert Mapplethorpe Retrospective at City Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, which ran from 9 December 1995 to 20 February 1996. Wellington was the tour's only New Zealand stop. It was the first censored show the gallery had run: rated R18, with three photographs seized by Customs and a protest outside on opening night. The catalogue was sold sealed in plastic, and the most explicit works sat in vitrines. Mapplethorpe's flowers, the calla lilies and poppies and orchids, hung in the same rooms as his most explicit images.

The starting point came from Devotion, Wellington's annual gay dance party and festival, run to raise funds and promote safe sex. Its February 1996 programme listed the Mapplethorpe show, describing its range through to "the sensual flower studies and still lifes". That phrase became the first title. The other three move into the rest of Mapplethorpe's work: his BDSM images, the body, and the Polaroids he began with.

Each title is broken across four lines, cut mid-word. SENSUA. LFLOW. ERSTUD. IES. Nothing arrives whole. The words come in small, safe packages, the way the show itself was delivered to the public. The break is the point too. SENSUA isn't the word anyone expects. Its L spills onto the next line, past the edge where it should stop. Like tamper-evident packaging, the works show where the seal has been broken. That's the line crossed and the rule broken, which is what Mapplethorpe's work did, and what his show did by arriving at all.