Adriana Ramić sees the Writing on the Wall

6/3/2014

How does a village cope when it has been marked for demolition?

One of the houses in the town set for demolition, I Wish Village, was discovered filled with writing on the walls. Adriana Ramic documented the white-washed walls with hand-written messages before a bulldozer tore down the building. She then fed the images through Optical Character Recognition and Google Translate to transcribe the messages in English. Only a few random words and phrases survived the process, embedded in streams of computerized nonsense. Ramic then draped the translation over hand-hewn chairs and photographed them immaculately in the space.

Photograph from Architects of Gamma Bad.

The outcome was Adriana Ramiç’s e-book Architects of Gamma Bad, a collection of the transcribed text and photographs from the scene. Ramiç’s e-book serves as a true testament of the synergy between analog and digital documentation. Optical Character Recognition and Google Translate help preserve writing which would have been lost forever, albeit in a nonsensically coded form. Mediated through these technological platforms, personal confessions, memories and names of past lovers become numbers, symbols, and indecipherable “web-speak.”

To see more images of Ramiç’s Architects of Gamma Bad, be sure to pick up an issue of GRAPHITE’s Issue 5 when it comes out on June 6.

Installation view of Craigslist-assisted Readymade.

We also love Ramiç’s project Craigslist-Assisted Readymade, a website which randomly selects a U.S. region and three items posted under its “free” category on Craigslist. As you click on the page, new items continually surface. Pets, pool equipment, and wooden palettes abound. Spend some time perusing the project and see what other people are so eager to give away.

Stay tuned for more contributor profiles and interviews.