About the password paintings Formally, they reference online text fields such as the Google search form

field. The text is literally a password or phrase. They are rule based paintings.

They are real passwords or pass-phrases and therefore carry a potential to provide an access to a normally private, protected, body of knowledge such as a private database or an email archive GMAIL for instance, YAHOO MAIL or Verizon call records and billing data. This obviously engages the notion of art as a practice that might either cloak or expose something hidden or mysterious inside human culture. The spacing of the text, the strongest formal element, the design is generated through a rule based process that actually has a real use value and is determined by means of a password generator. A password generator is a common form of simple online software that helps construct a password by assessing its strength against a set of parameters. See the attached image sequence. The paintings are situated within the history of the first and second waves of linguistic conceptualism and Modernist rule based artistic production. The extreme horizontality of the work is anti-Modernist in the way that it opposes the common oppressive verticality of Modernist forms - specifically, something like the zip of Newman or some other generic vertical sign of dominance. Conversely, in certain instances, I allow for the vertical orientation of the object. The reorientation paradoxically adopts an awkward verticality (the text is sideways) while at the same time offering up a freer kind of object, one that can deliver up a sign on either axis. They relate to the work of the text based artists as diverse as Ruscha, Holzer and Pierson. Another way to think about them has to do with how they relate to the history of Concrete poetry. Fluxus artists like George Maciunas, George Brecht and even someone like La Monte Young. Graphic tendencies that are related to distributed forms, publishing and the keystroke shaped poetry of the 1960s. THIS is a kind of joke painting, mockingly self- reflexive and medium specific. CAPNCRUNCH is coded on multiple levels. It refers to legendary phone hacker John Draper who discovered that the free captain crunch whistle (included in the cereal box), played a tone of 2600 hz which when blown into a phone opened a free ATT line for long distance. Possible the first phone hack.

Constructing PW strength and complexity STEP 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

The Password paintings while signifying a certain near proximity to something generative like concrete poetry, something formally determined are actually quite rule based. The commonality between Wool, the Holzer and the password paintings involves the directed experience of assembling the word and therefore the meaning. Wool crowds the letters Holzer make the act of reading a kinetic exercise, directing the reader toward a wholly determined experience. The reader, the spectator, in front of a password painting engages in a real act of deciphering; that is, cracking a simple code. The painting itself is literally a public secret, formerly

hidden, something shared. An access. The question then becomes what kind of access is staged in the space? Access to what? What kind of pass-phrase is
O M O M I MY? GO T T AP E E PE EIN TH E D ISC

The password checker is useful for several reasons. One, it helps create a strong password. It helps undermine the self-conscious formal decision making process and allows for a kind of satisfying engagement with the historical process of rule based art making. Process becomes fore-grounded in a way similar to that in Lewitt; the entire decision making is done before hand and the execution of the work itself becomes a rather mundane affair. The checker software is coded so that it is able recognize and rate alpha numeric linear configurations for strength; it helps the user construct the kind of strong password that is the least likely to be cracked. I mostly use linguistic passwords without numeric characters, so Ive learned that in order to assemble a strong password it is essential to include spaces. That is, space bar strokes. This is the origin of the spacing of the letters in the field of the canvas. Conveniently it suits my purposes for formal arrangement. Coincidently if the password is rated strong, lets say 98 percent strong by the PW strength meter, the formal distribution of letter forms about 98 percent visually satisfying. Interestingly a void in the pass word field of my painting is a kind of representation of something tangible. An action. A keystroke. Agency. Heres a quote from Alexander Galloway regarding biometrics inevitably supplanting the PASSWORD itself. identity--external objects like an ID card or key, or social relations, like a handshake or an interpersonal relationship, or an intangible, like a password that is memorized or digitized--now is being replaced by biometrics (identity checks through eye scans, blood tests, fingerprinting, etc.), a reinvestment in the measurement and authentication of the physical body. Authenticity (identity) is once again *in* the body, in sequences and samples and scans. Passwords, like cinema, ultimately fail us and fall into disuse unremembered, either fully or partially. How then should we preserve them? Should we even? What good is this information? Does it allow a social access, one that was previously denied? Perhaps it is merely a configuration of letters and spaces that function as a kind of linguistic key to whatever unknown body of information hidden behind the wall. Orphaned. Perhaps the information is economic. Certain questions are raised. What is at risk in the exchange? What is the real nature of the exchange, this symbolic, coded access? If this painting carries a real password, Ive learned it but how to apply it then? A password alone is useless. Where to put it? etc.