dis.grace by françois naudé & stacy hardy
dis.grace is a digital project that re-appropriates JM Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace (1999) in order to explore the failure of language to maintain its authority in the postcolony.
The project translates the full text of Coetzee’s novel into images using the Google Search Engine’s “Image Search” functionality. It matches each word in the book with its equivalent No.1 Google search image* to create a new book, a visual text rewritten through the eyes of a global digital popular culture.
It combines chance, play, bad taste, incomprehension, artifice, and a lack of truth to up-end the “disgraced” Western literary parameters of “white male writing” considering its history of ideologically (and sexual) objectification and predation. It shuns the authority of the author and the omniscient narrator used in the Western novel as the equivalent to the intruding phallocentric colonizer while at the same time it questioning the amnesia and historical self-invention of post-apartheid consumer society.
*Google images search rates pages according to popularity thus creating a seemingly “democratic voice”, based on the consensus of the
majority of internet users.
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