dis.grace by francois naudé and stacy hardy
dis.grace is a hybrid art project that digitally re-appropriates South African author JM Coetzee’s controversial Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel, Disgrace in order to explore the failure of language to maintain its authority in a complex global, postcolonial world.
The work literally 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 that is rewritten through the eyes of a global, digital popular culture.
Situated consciously within the context of a post-apartheid South Africa, dis.grace exposes the struggle for primacy between the written word and the image, the page and the screen. It questions the disgraced Western literary parameters of “white writing” considering its history of ideologically objectification and predation, while at the same time exploring the amnesia and historical self-invention that seem to form the basis of the decolonized, post-apartheid mind.
the disgrace website is here
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