The Red Words
Mark Bo Chu with Comp-syn technology

Watch This Space and the Alice Springs Squash Association are excited to celebrate the second annual Squash Court Exhibition.

Artists are invited annually to submit proposals for an artwork that thrives in an environment battered with a small rubber ball, over and over, by two or four active spectators for the course of a year. This year, Mark Bo Chu’s new artwork ‘The Red Words’ will keep the ball hot.

Please join us at the intersection of art and sport for an opening match.

‘The Red Words’ is a digital artwork highlighting the collective aesthetics of internet users as well as the strength of algorithms to make meaningful contemporary art. It links science and art, language and imagery. Colourgrams are at the heart of this work, developed to generate visual outputs for textual inputs, by algorithmically entering text into online image search engines in order to collect banks of image outputs, which are then averaged into single colourgrams. In short, colourgrams were devised to show the colour of words. Their research application extends from linguistics to cognition, and feature both in experimental contexts and gallery exhibition. 'Vessels' (pictured above) depicts 144 colourgrams of vessels, ranging from generic kitchenware to recognizable branded goods.

Curated by painter and scientist Mark Bo Chu, ‘The Red Words’ was specifically generated for the Alice Springs Squash Centre, a composite colourgram of the 2388 reddest English words. These colourgrams were taken from a larger work showing the 40,000 most common English words, which were ordered by hue type, starting with infrared, as per the visible light spectrum. Red was chosen specially to enhance the functional properties of the court, as the exhibiting space is in the tin section of the court (‘out’ when hit by the ball) ordinarily marked by a red net tape. ‘The Red Words’ continues the redness of the tape and the grid mimics a tape, thereby acting as an artwork which offers its own interdisciplinary messaging as well as honoring existing values of its installation space.

Bio

Mark Chu’s artwork has been featured in Vice, The Australian, ABC News, SBS News, and The New York Times. A painter of people and streetscapes, he was Highly Commended for the 2022 Lester Prize. Chu regularly publishes research in complexity scientist, and was a past writer for The Good Food Guide. Chu has recorded as a piano soloist with the MSO and WASO, and holds an MFA from Columbia University.

EXHIBITION
OPENING

11am-1pm
Saturday 26 August

Alice Springs Squash Centre, 13 Gap Rd