“MY ALGORITHMS ARE ALL FUCKED UP”
I watch the words of this phrase – printed in an all-caps, blue serif font – slowly vanish as the paper they’re printed on burns and turns to ash. In Christina Battle’s Notes to Self, a four-channel video installation featured in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded section, the artist’s reflections on social media are rendered with droll clarity. Brightly lit notes, often containing no more than six or seven words, rest upon a concrete surface framed against a dark background. Each of the screens features a unique loop of notes bathed in a blue light reminiscent of a computer’s glare. The textual fragments, akin to social media status updates, appear briefly in their entirety before the tip of a lighter enters the tight frame and sparks the paper. Lines like “DELAYED DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE,” “SO MANY FORGOTTEN PASSWORDS,” and “‘REALITY HAS A WELL-KNOWN LIBERAL BIAS’” appear, ignite, and disintegrate at staggered intervals.
Despite its dire messaging, there’s something strangely soothing about taking in Notes to Self amid the chaos of the Berlinale, or the backdrop of a city centre more generally. The positioning of the screens, installed equidistantly within the circular Marshall McLuhan Salon at the Canadian Embassy, means that the viewer can never fully perceive all four videos at once. Though the phrases linger for some time, the more one tries to parse their individual meanings, the greater the impossibility of concurrently seeing, or indeed considering, multiple notes becomes. In this way, Battle cleverly simulates the affect of digital distraction and teases out a bit of FOMO along the way. (During the course of writing this review, I’ve checked at least three social media platforms and made the decision to mute and then unmute my phone, so I at least found Battle’s format uncomfortably familiar).
Notes to Self is an ongoing project. Battle began aggregating personal reflections in 2014 while working an administrative job in an office cubicle, recording notes on her phone before printing, shooting, and uploading them, often all on the same day. The resulting collection of asides, observations, and gestures of solidarity (Battle’s complete list of notes, viewable on her site, include hashtag responses to Black Lives Matter and other social and political movements) seem to express both existential stress and bemused optimism. In the Berlinale presentation, the four channels feature four or five note loops, each individual video lasting approximately 30 to 60 seconds. Corresponding with the artist, I learn that Battle or a curator selects notes that seem most relevant to the exhibition context. This year’s Forum Expanded theme, ‘ANTIKINO (The Siren’s Echo Chamber)’, purported “to discuss the changed relationship between moving images and lived life… explor[ing] multiple ways of leaving the echo chamber.” The repetitive structure of Notes to Self fittingly reminds the viewer of the patterns of daily thinking and the work required to vanquish ever-returning frustrations.
Watching the edges of Battle’s notes singe and curl, the cut-up slips of computer paper turning a rare cobalt-charcoal hue before being engulfed by orange flames, a low-key catharsis seems possible. Whether sincere or arch (the tone of the notes varies), to see the uncontrived phrases consecrated by smoke – rather than diminishing in a digital timeline – is uniquely satisfying. Taken individually, this textual content recalls the particular effort involved in maintaining a sense of self or criticality while working under alienating circumstances. Messages that resonated for me included: “I’M ROLLING MY EYES ON THE INSIDE,” “TWITTER, YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN,” “HEAVY TIMES,” and “NONE OF THIS IS OK.” Battle’s practice of note-taking and expunging on-screen also brought to mind other recent and now-iconic engagements with notation in Emilie Pine’s and Adrian Piper’s practices, respectively.¹
By suspending moments of digital disappointment through a closely framed and unmoving lens, Battle reveals the perpetuity of micro-anxiety and doubt. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, as the adage goes. The fleeting, yet cyclical, presence of the notes on-screen also poses questions about the legibility of social media more broadly. How is one to evaluate, let alone respond to, digital content when it disappears so fast? Whom is the writer of a social media post really addressing? What comprises an online audience versus a community, and are these even different entities? And how often is a status update a means of letting off rhetorical steam rather than a genuine invitation for collective dialogue? These questions are not new, but Battle’s formal directness allows for a fruitful engagement. The formatting of the notes and the shots themselves is hyper controlled and consistent: we see the same font and the same ratio of words to paper in every video. However, the human presence that marks each notation – the occasional glimpse of Battle’s hand as she lights or relights a paper, or the diegetic sounds of the surrounding neighbourhood and Battle’s breath – remind us that we’re witnessing a ritual.
Rather than using one-liners as a means to shut down conversation, as so often happens online, the contents of Notes to Self invite a kind of meditative response. The urgency of the steadily advancing blaze refers the viewer back to the quotidian challenge of deciding which lines of thought to maintain and which to abandon in order to go about one’s day. There is no real crescendo, only a faint sense of anxiety when the viewer turns to a new note and realises some of the words have already disappeared. The ambiguous stakes of self-reflection are aptly alluded to in Battle’s aesthetic simplicity. (No melodramatic fireballs, billowing smoke, or garrulous politicking here!) The blue light and looped footage almost provide the feeling of watching a security camera. The viewer is invited to select which screen(s) to watch and which note(s) to read without the pretext of a narrative resolution. Consequently, Notes to Self offered a much-appreciated counterpoint to the more conventionally structured features at the Berlinale. Watching the phoenix-like cycle of Battle’s notes appearing and disappearing, the viewer exists in a productive limbo, compelled to reflect on our idiosyncratic engagements with newsfeed-driven media and the way it may be simultaneously destroying and restoring us.
1 Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self: Essays (2018) explores topics from the author’s life in a committed, first-person style that can be read within a wider context of 21st-century experiments with essay and auto fictive approaches, while Adrian Piper’s highly influential performance projects, My Calling (Card) #1 and My Calling (Card) #2 (1986)— featured in the 2018 MoMA retrospective, A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 — use “business card–sized, text-based works that confront the reader’s own racist or sexist tendencies.” — source: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3924
Esmé Hogeveen is a writer and editor based between Toronto and Montréal. Esmé tweets here.