Words fail Greg Smith. So, Absent Word Double is an experiment-cum-exhibition in which the artist jettisons all but 2048 of them. The remaining 2048 words are both a truncated language and a future year taken from the BiP39 protocol (a preferred way of securing digital assets). As such, Absent Word Double is inspired by and implicated in the crypto-utopian project, embodying its optimism, its delusionality, and its commitment to D.I.Y. world-building. To quote the artist,
Sometimes constraint is exactly what is required to slip the bonds. I respect the urge in the crypto/tech folks who, fed up with the garbage, attempt to start anew. Under the mountains of hype, people are serious about trying to do governance, social groups, and cities in a new way. There's potential, but I'm also deeply skeptical of the possibility of making a clean break. The gears spin furiously and promise so much; this project is both about how it breaks down, and how it can be used differently.
The artworks in Absent Word Double are a series of gestures and mechanisms that try to fill the resultant holes left by Greg Smith’s BiP39 language-cull. Constraint here becomes a crucible, a laboratory for replacing what’s missing. A calendar, for example, is scattered through the gallery, but it lacks those six months that didn't make the cut. The artist provides his own replacements; lost time is restored with ruffles, wax, commas, and old men.
What to make of this campy new economy, hamstrung and handmade? Wrapped up in loss, full of holes, scattered, exuberant, corrupted by money, artificial, and “functional”, Absent Word Double offers a doppelganger of the utopian urge, internal skepticism included. In the wise words of the 2048:
Only people that embrace chronic divorce truly under stand life under endless decline among that crucial vivid fever camp govern axis.
