pygmalion, 2009

A black screen with text emerging on the bottom, akin to that of captions, coinciding with a voiceover narrating lines found on an internet generator of random sentences, simultaneously consumed, forcefully cause one to connect the two disparate sources to create a narrative, to ponder the ontology behind meaning and its consumption. The lines on the screen are taken from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, in which an individual of a lower class was ‘transformed’ into one of high social standing by way of education of social tropes such as language, attesting to Foucault’s contention of the non-neutrality and power of knowledge mixed with gender politics, as well as meaning being contingent and relative to their own governing system, weaves with the lines from the random sentence generator and its inherently implied arbitrariness, its fluidity, transferability, and therefore, a certain weightlessness and inconsequence, of language and meaning.