A Textbase Exhibition
June 19, 1998
Situated at the end of an alleyway in Melbourne's city centre, Citylights consists of four large advertising lightboxes. It offers an alternative to conventional artist‑run gallery spaces, presenting the possibility of a different audience: the pedestrian passerby. Expecting advertising projecting from the lightboxes, the passerby is instead confronted with images that are not trying to sell anything.
The latest Textbase exhibition, Textbase (in)formation, presented alternative modes of attaining information, using playful and poetic images in the four lightboxes. Textbase's "poetic learning" consisted of four images: an eyechart; a rebus puzzle; a photograph of a children's language game and a child's drawing. Eyecharts test recognition of language as a series of visual symbols, but in this case, when connected and read phonetically, the letters spelt a complete sentence. Similarly, arebus puzzle is a series of words and images combined to produce a hidden message. In the case of the textbase rebus, there was no message to work out, merely a poetic set of partial words and ambiguous images.
The child's drawing consisted of an image of a school with the text “Thank You God For My School" running across the top. The school looked like a prison and the sense of constriction and conformity was highlighted by the teacher's "correct" version of the text written over the top of the child's handwriting. The final image in Textbase (in)formation, the child's game, opened up different possibilities of learning language. Using an origami style paper construction, a child uses a hand to open a possibie choice of four letters or numbers. Each of the images evoked a playful, subversive approach to language, and an equally subversive use of the advertising medium.
Rather than a simple transfer of meaning from adult to child (or even from advertiser to audience), Textbase (in)formation presented a series of poetic texts. These provided a sense of education through poetics rather than through imitation of direct orders (as in the teacher's "correct" version). Rather than present education as a revelation whereby the student is illuminated by the light of knowledge, Textbase (in)formation offered a new model of learning, a playful and poetic linguistic education, illuminated twenty‑four hours a day at the end of an alleyway in the city.
Writers: Julian Savage. Nicole Tomlinson, D.J. Huppatz, Benjamin Brady