A game of image, representation and reference: is what you hear what you hear; is what you see also what you hear; is what you see what you see? The question has been asked in a definitive form by Magritte in his famous painting 'Ceçi n'est pas une pipe' which appropriately appears here from time to time on the screen. This CD-Rom contains a game with language and text-related fragments with the sentence 'this is a sentence' as its central point of departure. If you explore the screen by clicking randomly, however, you begin to entertain doubts about this sentence's truth. A cry, a snarl, a laugh. Are these still sentences? Or, to put it more formally : 'all sentences end with a full stop' is therefore not a sentence and also makes nonesense of the main sentence. The CD-Rom contains selections from the twenty-five year collaboration between Partridge and Cunningham which consists of productions developed from interactions of image (text) and sound. At another level, however, the makers do not regard interaction as essential to the CD-Rom as a vehicle, which is a view that runs contrary to what is usually expected of games published in this medium. The attraction of the medium for the makers lies rather in its intimacy and its capacity to combine sound, images and text into a coherent form. 'Unfinished' is a better term than 'interactivity', and this creates a link with John Cage and the Flux movement . The makers are also intrigued by the relatively poor image quality of QuickTime, which can be taken as a reference to the early days of video art, of which Partridge in particular can be regarded as a pioneer, and also as a reminder that the circle of image and representation cannot be broken, despite applied technology.
– Loek Stolwijk
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Stephen Partridge ° 1953, Leicester (UK)
Lives and works in Dundee (UK)
David Cunningham ° 1954, Armagh (Ireland)
Lives and works in Londen (UK)
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