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JOE BANKS / DISINFORMATION | WEBSITE | RETURN TO TIMES

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“The Act of Creation” is a collaborative neon sign artwork, created by artists Joe Banks and Zata Banks. Genesis 1:3 states “Let there be Light”, and John 1:1 states “in the beginning was the Word”, while the philosopher C.W. Morris defined semiotics as “the science of signs”. In terms of visual semiotics, “The Act of Creation” is an artwork which articulates a message that’s implicit in all neon signs – namely the association between illumination and language; and, in articulating the phrase “Let There Be Language”, “The Act of Creation” is unique among neon sign artworks in the depth of integration between medium and message, since it’s light itself that (literally and metaphorically) illuminates the nature of the play on words. “The Act of Creation” is the winner of the Cambridge Assessment Award for an artwork on the theme of language and light, and was commissioned by Art Language Location for exhibition at the Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, October 2016. (source)

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“The “Language [as] Meta-Technology” exhibit uses a high-end speech synthesiser to articulate the assertion that (quote) “The earliest form of sound recording technology was not a machine, but was written language” -

This statement is quoted from the book “Rorschach Audio - Art & Illusion for Sound”, which was produced in 2012, as the final outcome of a 5 year AHRC funded research fellowship dedicated to studying the psychology of interpretation of ambiguous speech sounds.

This statement also influenced an exhibit at Domo Baal gallery, which explored “relationships between auditory signs and their visual representations”, “interests” which “converge in the fields of commercial telecommunications and corporate branding”. As you can see here, the exhibit focused on the assertion that (quote) “The ultimate form of communications technology is language itself” -

This in turn led to the assertion that (quote) “Language is the technology that contains all others”, as featured in the “Language [as] Meta-Technology” exhibit, which premiered in London in 2018.”

Joe Banks is a researcher, sound artist, and founder of Disinformation, a pioneering sonic and visual arts project started in 1995. He says that an influence for producing these works was his dad’s employment as a graphic designer for Post Office Telecommunications, later British Telecom, from the mid-1960s through to the mid-1980s. You can find out more about his extensive practice here.