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I’m colorblind. I can paint, but I don’t actually see most of what other people see when they look at the canvas. What I see clearly are the hex codes — the six-character strings that name a colour. I work off the text, not the wavelength. When I’m mixing, I’m reading. When I’m choosing a value, I’m parsing. #3a2c4f is more legible to me than the violet it stands for. It took me a long time to stop being embarrassed about this, and longer still to notice that this means my paintings have been made out of language all along.

For my day job I build captioning systems. I spend my time inside the gap between a voice and the text that tries to capture it. Live captions are one of the most beautiful and most violent technologies I know. A caption can let a deaf student attend a lecture they couldn’t otherwise reach. A caption can also subtitle a francophone professor’s accent into pure nonsense in front of a hundred undergraduates. The technology stutters and stumbles and sometimes produces poetry by accident. [indiscernible]. [inaudible]. [Music] in a moment of perfect silence.

The Argument with Writing

The inverse technology — speech-to-text — is what I use to make almost everything I write. Including this. I’m dictating it, then editing it, because being asked to sit down and write an essay was one of the formative violences of my education. I have a lot of feelings about being made to write at fourteen with the threat of a grade behind it, and many of those feelings are still present at thirty. Speech-to-text doesn’t fix that. But it lets me get the sentences out of my body without the desk, the page, and the teacher behind it.

Three Rooms

So here are three things I’ve been carrying around as a painter. A colour system mediated through text. A daily intimacy with mistranscribed speech. And a long argument with the act of writing. Until recently I kept these in different rooms. The painting room had cows in it. The captioning room had product specs in it. The writing room was locked.

What I’ve started to wonder is whether they’re actually one room.

What I Want to Paint Next

The painting I want to make next has captions in it. Wrong captions, ideally. Captions that don’t quite match the scene they’re underneath. A pasture at the Experimental Farm with [INDISCERNIBLE] running across the bottom in a typeface that has nothing to do with the painting above it. A portrait whose subtitle is a hex code. A landscape stripped down to nothing but the colour names that built it — an oil painting of a horizon line where the only mark is the text #3a2c4f placed where the violet should be.

What This Isn’t

This isn’t a manifesto and it isn’t a series of finished paintings. It’s an exploration, and I want to be careful about the company I keep on the way in. Christine Sun Kim has been the closest reference for me — the way she takes captioning’s failures and absurdities as visual subject — but her work comes from Deaf experience and is rooted there. My vantage is different. I’m a colorblind painter who builds caption software for a living and was punished into a complicated relationship with writing as a kid. The translation systems I move through are: voice into text, colour into text, instruction into text. I want to find out what happens when those translations get painted instead of obeyed.

More to come. This page is a working document; I’ll add to it as the work develops, and I’ll be honest when something doesn’t survive the wall.