T   E   X   T   S
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MATHEMATICS SERIES, 1976-77

I photographed the blackboards of the mathematics department of the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign. Daily, hourly, these boards are filled with symbols and diagrams: within that context, the hand-drawn symbols and diagrams need only point to corresponding mathematical concepts and their ordering; the visual properties of the marks that compose the symbols are not significant.

To this arena, I applied a specific camera operation. By partially advancing the 120 film between exposures, the roll of film became not a series of distinct and isolated frames, but a series of multiple image strips which varied in length by the number of exposures that composed them. This way of using film is not in itself an innovation, but rather a stance on what a photographic image can picture. In the continuous field of the single image photograph, the visual cues that indicate form, depth and scale depend on the simultaneous recognition of camera perspective, size relationships of known objects and surfaces, and tonal rendering of those objects and surfaces. When the separate exposures are overlapped as in these strips, the collision of perspectives, size relationships, and tonal renderings within shared areas creates "illusions" of form, depth, and scale that can extend, complement, run counter to, or depart from what is pictured within each individual frame. Thus the strip pictures what cannot be seen were we to isolate each frame, but does so in the same terms as the single image photograph: perspective, scale, tone.

These strips were juxtaposed by contact printing and became the functional units of the final print. In the first 20 prints, the strips are in groups of three and printed adjacent to each other; in the last 15, the strips are in groups of two, three, and six, and are printed both adjacent to and overlapping each other. Through the overlap and/or adjacency of the strips, the final print can extend, complement, run counter to, or depart from what is pictured within each individual strip. Consequently, the strips function within the print as the frames function with the strip.

The prints are exhibited in a sequence, ordered in terms of increasing complexity so that one print can be understood in terms of previous prints. The frame, the strip, the print, and the sequence form the context of the work. It is within this context that the visual properties of the blackboard marks become significant.

Paul Berger
May 1977
SEATTLE SUBTEXT 1981-82

The project that became the book Seattle Subtext began as a response to how I perceived photographs as functioning visual objects. Photographs are seldom reclusive or solitary; they most often gather in groups along with their uneasy ally, text. Together, they are the cohabiters of the most common "picture" of all, the printed page, where photographs, texts and graphics cluster and recombine.

My work began with this arena of the printed page as a format and a context. The work was originally a wall piece composed of twenty-two “double-page spreads”, each one a 19”x24” b&w silver gelatin print composed of many complex multiple printings in the darkroom. These “opened book” simulations were printed in the 11”x17” format size of a standard magazine, and as such were “camera-ready” when the Seattle Subtext Series (1981-82) was printed as a book at VSW Press in 1984.

While the "shape" of the 22 double page spreads in Seattle Subtext invokes the magazine double-page spread, it departs from it in the following ways: (1) Columns of text have been replaced by columns of overlapped television imagery; (2) The topics of the pages shift from the normal magazine section headlines ("Nation," "Show Business") to more generalized, fictionalized or personalized areas ("Writing," "Memory"); (3) The visual cadence of the imagery becomes more akin to film, television, or computer display than to the mass distribution magazine; and (4) Pages labeled "Display", which occur in between the major topic sections contain annotated versions of the pages that both precede and follow them, creating image/text echoes and refrains from the “database” that the major topic sections are drawn from. This work was my first project that involved the use of the computer. It was used to both manage the visual database of imagery (in a program I wrote myself), and to supply imagery in the form of database listings and graphic maps that dominate the “Display” pages.

Seattle Subtext is an imaginary and reordered magazine. By drawing on the conventions of "layout," it becomes possible to construct complex relationships among still photographs and television imagery, typeset captions and computer text. These relationships posit a personalized environment of great density and simultaneity in a format usually thought of as fixed and given (the magazine), and anticipates the eventual domination by the format that comes to maturity some 10-15 years later: the World Wide Web.
PRINT OUT, 1984-87

I want to see the "face" of a computer, not its "interface". But this is not a technical question or desire.

I take the computer to be first and foremost a general purpose machine, one that speaks like this: 0010 1101 0101 0111 1011 0010. Yet our (visual) experience of working on a computer tends to be a composite of images from specific programs designed to perform specific functions. I think we must a some point turn our heads away from the screen to "see" what the computer is like. This is why I am not interested in "computer art", that is, letting the computer supply the borders of the picture. I generate images with computers, but feel it is important to then remove them from their source of generation to an arena of image interaction.

I have worked since the early 70's with photographic imagery in structured sequences; since 1979 I have turned towards the collision of photographic and electronic pictures in the form of digitized video "frames". This collision of photography - an analog, optical rationalization of space characterized by the smooth, continuous modulation of light and tone - with the relentless digital, binary and quantified nature of electronic image processing provides a unique way to look at the nature of the computer beast. Specifically, I place these digitized images in the context of each other and against a "background" wall or webbing of non-picture computer output that becomes a new arena for viewing. The content of these images are drawn from the endless stream of electronic imagery that exists for everyone at all times, and is grabbed, converted and re-contextualized. The mechanics of this image production can become rather complex and technical, but the desire to engage this imagery is no more "esoteric" than the urge to change the channel on your television set.

In the present day, for most people a computer is a TV sitting on a typewriter. Time spent with this machine is time sitting, peering into a small box. I would like to make the experience of that box into a wall.
CARDS SERIES, 1989

In the realm of the material, a computer image is capable of nearly seamless collage. Its lack of inherent "surface", its existence as first and foremost a "description" of a picture, makes this so. At the same time, its ability to gather images from such an array of sources - photography, drawing, diagrammatic rendering, video, broadcast television - provides an opportunity to create highly charged composite images with multiple and even contradictory references to science, art, reportage, media. It is significant that these sources are themselves inherently collage-like.

Specifically, I am interested in the general phenomenon of "modeling", especially in the quasi-scientific variety which is best represented in the nightly television weather report. The convention of the satellite or geographic map that is presided over by a human guide, is a theater both epic and egomaniacal. I have chosen to represent this and related "diagrammatics", such as the ubiquitous man-at-the-blackboard, in the basic graphic format of the card or simple poster. This allows for a playing-card style of narrative and repetition, and forsakes photographic verisimilitude for a cruder and more open-ended picturing style more akin to the flickering television set.

These images were generated on a Targa video digitizing board with a variety of software in an IBM clone, and printed as 2K 16-bit images on a prototype Fuji inkjet printer at Jetgraphix in Los Angles.
WORLD INFO SERIES, 1992-1994

In the realm of the material, a computer image is capable of nearly seamless collage. Its lack of inherent "surface", its existence as first and foremost a "description" of a picture, makes this so. At the same time, its ability to gather images from such an array of sources - photography, drawing, diagrammatic rendering, video, broadcast television - provides an opportunity to create highly charged composite images with multiple and even contradictory references to science, art, reportage, media. It is significant that these sources are themselves inherently collage-like.

Specifically, I am interested in the general phenomenon of "modeling", especially in the quasi-scientific variety which is best represented in the nightly television weather report. The convention of the satellite or geographic map that is presided over by a human guide, is a theater both epic and egomaniacal. I am interested in the evolving look and ideology of computer "interface", that is, the graphic appearance of the computer screen that links the general user with the sometimes complex functionality of a computer program or network, demonstrating to us mere humans that something is, in fact, going on. I am fascinated with linking the broad range of contemporary computer graphic interface conventions (icons, floating palettes, menu bars) with the older, pre-computer conventions of mechanical hand-drawing (graph-paper) and camera based imaging (photography and video). I think of this as a way to visualize something of the conflict that exists between these competing informational vehicles and the way we think of them. I use imagery of global weather and global mapping to link the two, as it represents the largest scale material referencing that we are generally familiar with.
CARD PLATES SERIES, 1998-99


Our current image landscape comes from a wide array of sources: photography, drawing, graphics, film, video and “synthetic” 2D & 3D digital imaging. These elements also reside together in a wide variety of formats and temporalities: prints, publications, movies, television, and software/website "interactivity". This density and blending of temporal and spatial landscaping is a reflection of the implosion of all image making systems currently underway within our culture with no clear end in sight. We must find a way to thrive, navigate, play, and stay up-right within the image world we have created and continue to expand. My work reflects this desire.

The Card Plates series, composed of fourteen 30” x 22” Iris prints, begins with the metaphor of the uncut press sheet, raw off the printing press. Each print has the dauntingly dense and composite look of a pre-signatured codex, before folding and gathering, or an open collection of parts that is simply pre-trimmed. This weaves a repetition and redundancy across a quasi narrative space: a cross between a mosaic and a comic strip. However, it is clear relatively soon that there is a basic card unit sub-structure to this image-wall, and that these sub-units are as much alike as they are distinct – like a deck of playing cards or a set of collector cards. The format in each card (there are 274 in total) reveals itself as composed of three picture spaces: one to the upper right which is larger and of photographic aspect ratio, one to the left which is a thin vertical, and one on the bottom right which is a long horizontal. At the juncture of all three is one of a small number of simple 3D image-wrapped objects: a board game-like “token” consisting of either a chair, a sphere, a book, a bowl or a television. The length and structure of the “deck” is only implied, as each sheet is uncut. It might be endless or partial, it might be complete but simply scrambled or shuffled, it might be like a card game which can never be won – or lost.
WARP & WEFT SERIES, 2000-2004


This work is composed of two interrelated series: Warp & Weft: (Figure), and Warp & Weft: (Ground). Both series are composed using the same grid design.

The basic rectangular “unit” is a grouping of three photographic elements: a tall vertical image on the left, a larger rectangular image on the top right, and a long horizontal image in the lower right. The final grid is composed of twelve of these units, four rows and three columns.

The title “Warp & Weft” references weaving generally, and more specifically a tapestry, which was a way to illustrate adventures or events to be remembered. The Warp & Weft: (Figure) series alludes to the front of a tapestry – the event(s), the adventure(s) brought back in photographs. The Warp & Weft: (Ground) series alludes to the back of the tapestry – the merged and more generalized echo of what is vivid in the front. The fundamental grid structure of weaving, of the loom, was given a precision, and an algorithmic repeatability with the invention of the Jaquard loom at the beginning of the 19th century – arguably the first “general purpose machine”, or computer. I adapt this weaving metaphor for the arrangements of photographs, as a way to give the notion of a relational database a visual form.

The “front” of the tapestry, the Warp & Weft: (Figure) images are composed of photographs taken during trips, walks, or just looking around. They are the traces of adventures, albeit fairly ordinary ones – a trip to the zoo, to the beach; a look around the garden, in the kitchen. Clusters of photographs are arranged within a matrix that has the feel of both a panorama and a comic book – a narrative of multiple threads.

The “back” of the tapestry, the Warp & Weft: (Ground) images are more similar to each other, more merged together, as the back side of things often are. The photographs are arranged in the same grid as in the “front” side, but are of a single location: the steep edged ravine in my backyard that holds a small creek at its bottom. The variations are not of place, but time.

The two series taken together, the (Figure) and the (Ground), constitute a unity of how we see and process the multiple perceptions that make up our daily life; the front and the back; that which remains vivid and distinct on top of that which becomes merged and integrated.
SECOND LIFE – 2006-2009

You take a photo in the regular world, and it only looks sort-of-like what was in front of the camera. You take a “snapshot” in Second Life, and it looks exactly like what was on the computer monitor. It IS what was on the computer monitor. Think about all the time we will save not having to argue endlessly about “indexicality”…

My attraction to the current manifestation of Second Life centers around the paradox between the experience of fluidity in the “life-like” flow of being-there, and the sophisticated but ultimately crude and cartoony visual appearance.

“Virtual” worlds indeed… Where are Max and Dave Fleischer when we need them?
PANORAMAS SERIES, 2008-2010

In the Panorama Series, I have been exploring extended synthetic panoramic imaging, wandering into a kind of “bovine vision” of visual horizon grazing between 240 and 360 degrees. It is the camera vision of choice for those who scan the horizon wide, eschewing the specificity of the pointed gaze for the more generalized awareness of a uniformly focused peripheral vision.

Technically, this series, as has been the case with most "straight" photography in the past, at first appears to be a seamless, straightforward transcription of the three dimensional world.  However, they are, in fact, the result of a highly processed data stream.  This stream begins with a sequence of seven to ten wide-angle (24mm) individual photographs, taken with a digital camera attached to a tripod on a head that allows for rotation about the “nodal” point of the lens.  The resulting images are merged, in software, into either a cylindrical or spherical digital space.  After adjustments, a two-dimensional frame is imposed within this space (the final “photograph”) and the result is exported back into a conventional digital file.
from the exhibition "Paul Berger: 1973-2003", at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL

Persistence of Vision
by Rod Slemmons

After nearly twenty years of exponentially widening availability digital imaging technologies, fueled by thousands of university computer art courses, it is interesting that the technology, in the hands of serious artists, has so quickly become transparent. Those that have incorporated its possibilities compelling and imaginative ways, have generally continued the explorations of appropriation and collage begun in the first third of the 20th century by artists like Kurt Schwitters, Paul Citröen, Hannah Hoch, and John Heartfield, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Aesthetic breakthroughs and poetic invention, as usual, occur in slow, steady steps, much more related to world events like war and economic depression than to improvements in the technology or process of picture making.

When digital technologies hit the photographic world, a very high percentage of artists who use photography were trapped in teaching jobs in universities. Because they couldn’t get away easily, they had to find more interesting ways to photograph instead of more interesting things to photograph. What appeared at first to be a limitation ultimately resulted in an exponentially expanded field of photographic practice. There was a renewed interest in mass media as subject, and perhaps related to this, autobiographical modes based on a new self consciousness about being a visual artist in world blanket bombed by imagery.

Paralleling this turning of photography back on itself in academia was the Post Modern critique of art and culture begun in the mid 1970s. This critical position (simply stated) encouraged artists to carry their imaging urge into the secondary “forest of signs” of our mediated world, rather than the primary experience of the forests of Yosemite. Because digital technologies had been in use by the media, the military and advertising long before artists gained access to them, they were appealing to those responding to the new critical theories. What better way to examine the human consequences of mediated culture than with the tools that make it possible?

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This exhibition celebrates the achievements of Paul Berger who first included a computer in the production of his art in the early 1980s, based in part on the metaphoric possibilities of its characteristics—it could sort on key words like the mind, it could recombine information to come to different conclusions like the human memory, it had a “face” that intricately hid its motivations, etc. He began his career more than a decade before, however, with an exploration of how and what we learn from the photographic image, and more specifically the image combined with text, as a student in California and New York. This present survey of his work from 1973 to 2003, tracks his methodical progress before and after the digital divide, driven by a finite number of structural and conceptual concerns. His career reveals a concentrated dedication and clarity of purpose: how do we know what we know in a maelstrom of images specifically designed to confuse us and rob us of access to our own experience, opinions and knowledge? How do we test the difference between information and knowledge when replication in the form of imagery is increasingly substituted for experience? How do we get behind the “face” of our experience.

The pre-digital 1976 Mathematics series is the source of four important long-term concerns for Berger. The first he calls “the site of notation,” the point at which ideas become graphic. By accident he found a room full of blackboards with mathematics formulae at the University of Illinois where he taught. Initially he was drawn to their formal beauty, and the way black and white film recorded them as free floating in a black space. As is his habit, however, he became immersed in the project and met some of the mathematics faculty. He found that these (to him) incomprehensible marks represented the edge of an exploration into the nature of knowledge that was very similar to art in the sense that their gestural formal beauty derived to a certain degree from the raw excitement of the frontier of knowledge they recorded. This space where the hand makes the mark, where thought becomes image, became and remains a central concern in Berger's art. In a peculiar way, it is a pure space where communication is abstractly symbolic and concretely calligraphic at the same time. We think of experience as the product of consciousness. But these diagrams and formulae might be as close as we can get to seeing what consciousness itself looks like.

Another of his concerns is the mechanics of narrative, especially an articulated sequence of imagery. Berger is not so much interested in telling stories as he is with figuring out how the sequential narrative, as a conventional device, gets the story told. To keep this inquiry honest, Berger has generally mined structured elements of his childhood that many can share and none could claim they don’t understand: baseball cards, comic strips, television news and sports. Cartoons as a condensed, purified form of narrative, create a story with a minimum of clues in an arena of maximum illusion and multiple viewpoints. Berger began with the form of with these simple, closed arenas as models for a larger concern with how we, as he says, “figure” photographs, as the ultimately confusing graphic representation of experience. He has refused to forget, or ignore, that photographs, that seem simple facts, are really just flat, frame-bound, closed arenas of evidence that don’t admit to anything without a human eye attached, without human experience to support their abstract claims.

This interest in closed arenas is evident in the large 1979 Camera Text or Picture series that uses a two page spread, comic strip structure with internal frames that often break loose to float and overlap. Between the strips is a gray grid that isolates them in a Platonic formal simplicity. The imagery in this project is drawn from televised sports events played within defined spaces or arenas that provide another set of internal frames. In addition to being enclosures for narrative, frames have become a metaphor in Berger's work for the importance of understanding context—both literal and figurative frames of reference—in media and popular culture. Ideally, we know who we are by the response of those around us. We are framed by human contact and interaction. In media space, as Marshal McLuhan noted in the 1960s, we are defined by our response to a model of designed human responses to which we have no real communication access.

The fourth element of the Mathematics series to remain with him was the notion of the automaton, his word for the relinquishing of part of the creative responsibility to his equipment and materials. In this case, he was using a camera with an unpredictable film advance that, in both a real and figurative sense forced him to break out of the conventional photographic frame. His first uses of the computer, and subsequent use of early frame grabbers and digital cameras for the 1984 Print Out project, would necessarily involve the acceptance of productive error.

Berger’s exploration of this extended notion of narrative continued in Seattle Subtext, which resulted in a Real Comet Press book in 1984. Using the template of the layout divisions in news magazines such as Time and News Week, he constructed his own alternative narrative. As raw material for his version of the news, he used images grabbed from video and television, his own photography, and some family snapshots. Instead of text, he used printouts of a data base he devised to catalog his collection of VCR tapes copied from network television. This complex and dense work braids various lyrical sequences of images and words into a reflexive narrative--each providing metaphors for the others, but certainly never resolved in the convention of the single source editorial voice of the news magazine. Occasionally the standard magazine divisions are ironically subverted. The "World" section, for example, consists entirely of a visual inquiry into his family’s world just before he was born, again juxtaposed with his relational database filing system. The snapshots of the pre-Paul family are, in a sense, a database for discovering Paul.

An interest in cards of all kinds--playing decks, the Tarot, baseball cards--and the fact that they define in their various uses a closed system while allowing for a tremendous variety of combinations--led Berger to explore new notions of narrative. He became intrigued with the idea that visual and conceptual connections between arrays of images can work both in union and at cross purposes, resulting in interesting internal conflicts. In addition, sometimes the graphic connections can be causal and generative and sometimes relational and transformational. In the first, groups of images work in unison to produce a cumulative meaning beyond themselves—they generate a whole greater than their sum. In the second, different combinations of a series of discrete images can produce entirely different net effects, and imply missing information between them.

In his 1988 Cards series, a set of large ink jet color prints, Berger employed a finite number of iconic images pulled, for the most part, from television, but in some cases from his own photographs. These cards are clear and modular in their design but cryptic in the connections between them, even though they are built from entirely accessible and familiar elements. At this point he began to consolidate his thinking about human and computer memory being similar in that they are random in their process but not haphazard in their selections. Like the vaguely repetitive connections between the imagery in these cards, elements of memory can be unreasonable or even bizarre, but they always have the potential of interpreting experience in useful ways. Like the abstract, two dimensional battle of card games, the conflict between what we can remember and what we can imagine seems to be intended to tune us up for experiencing real conflict, for example, between what we see and what we believe. An image saturated world dilutes the effectiveness of this conflict.

A following project, the 1992 World Info series continued Berger’s exploration of the effects of both scientific and graphic models on cognition, or more specifically, on our ability to think for ourselves without them. Weather maps with their familiar symbols and graphics are a good example of a model and serve in many of Berger’s projects as a central metaphor for how trust and confidence can be confused with, or substituted for, understanding. The spaces between models, however, allow diverse and alternative explanations to fall through. The “meteorologists” in business suits laying hands on an image of the world always appears smooth and controlled even though the reality they describe usually is chaotic and totally unpredictable. What they profess as special knowledge can usually be much more easily understood by simply looking out the window. Most of the images in this series are grounded on a fine blue graph paper grid, the matrix of scientific modeling before the computer’s ones and zeros. This underpinning is an echo of his earlier use in Print Out of columns of computer code beneath images representing media news and science models.

The recurring image in Berger’s work of the late 1980s and 1990s of a tragically exploding Challenger space shuttle, in the same resolution and format as the cheerfully self-confident pseudo-scientific T.V. talking head, exemplifies events not covered in terms of their human consequences. This event and its “coverage” is both a shocking failure of the scientific models of what we can know, and of the media models of what we need to know. The “news”, for example, is only of real interest to those to whom nothing has happened. The experience of those in the shuttle at that moment was, to them, neither describable nor explicable.

The Card Plates series, fourteen large Iris prints, in Berger’s own words, “begins with the metaphor of the uncut press sheet, raw off the printing press. Each print has the dauntingly dense and composite look of a pre-signatured codex, before folding and gathering. Each weaves a repetition and redundancy across a quasi-narrative space: a cross between mosaic and comic strip. However, there is a basic card unit sub-structure to this image-wall, and their sub-units are as much alike as they are distinct-- like playing or collector cards. The format in each card (there are 274 in total) is composed of three picture spaces: one to the upper right which is larger and of photographic aspect ratio, one to the left which is a thin vertical, and one on the bottom which is a long horizontal. At the juncture of all three is a simple 3D object, like a board game token—a chair, a sphere, a book, a bowl,or a television. The length and structure of the “deck” is only implied, as each sheet is uncut. It might be endless or partial; it might be complete but simply scrambled or shuffled. It might be intended for a game which can never be won or lost.”

The reference to weaving in this quote bridges to the two latest projects, Warp and Weft: Figure, and Warp and Weft: Ground, completed in 2003. These two groups of seven very large Iris prints are a continuation of the pattern used in Card Plates, but with larger, fewer, and less dense units. The concepts of point of notation, the narrative sequence, the automaton, and the closed arena are all still present. The metaphor of weaving in the Warp and Weft series, occurred to Berger when thinking about a rug in his childhood home. There was a figure of an animal in the frame of the border (another closed arena) that stood out clearly in the standard illusion of figure and ground. The back of the rug, however, where the illusion was created and sustained, was messy and not clear at all. So there were two layers of encryption, first in the conventional model of depth in a flat field, and second in the more mysterious code know only to the weaver, working backwards with colors reversed. This is another metaphor for what Berger has been exploring all along, seen earlier in the discussion of the mathematicians, and the digital underpinnings of the communication industry and its various media. We are seldom encouraged to turn over the rug to understand the messy and ambiguous reasons for our confidence in what we see.

The subjects of the two series are two aspects of Berger’s daily life in Seattle, a return to the honesty of subject in his earlier work. Warp and Weft: Ground is derived from photographs of a deep ravine in his back yard that meanders according to gravity, generally wild and ignored beneath and through the superimposed grid of the neighborhoods. Warp and Weft: Figure observes the human life that occupies the grid. As in his previous work, what the camera cuts into and through are layers of cycle and repetition, seasonal invasions and loss—metaphors for the unstoppable weather patterns of perception and memory that have to be contained into categories and models for us to be able to proceed. But also, the Figure series are the equivalent of the front side of the rug and the Ground the back side—both series were created concurrently. Berger, in this project, continues his overall project of trying to understand what the back side of the photograph looks like—what we need to know to qualify and accept the front, the face.

While Berger knows more and more about the computer’s possibilities, he is still willing to let it off his leash, to let it make a few decisions for him, as he did with the faulty camera he used for the Mathematics series. There is an even more revealing continuity of his method, spanning between his sorting of film contact strips to create Mathematics in 1977, and his physically laying out of small color prints to determine the form of the Warp and Weft series. This may have something to do with his father being a tile setter, and it may also be a need to keep his own real hands on the controls of a graphic arena that can quickly become seamless, faceless, and inescapable.

ArtForum, June 2003 - Reviews: Chicago
by James Yood

Paul Berger: Museum of Contemporary Photography


In the '60s and '70s a generation of photographers appeared, concerned with both the intrinsic nature of the camera and the social nature of the photograph, and began to investigate all aspects of what might be communicated in the act of shuttering a moment. Paul Berger, who lives and works in Seattle, has, since the mid-'70s, been particularly attentive to how images inevitably combine and recombine and to the processes we evolve and employ to "read" what we see. This retrospective began with the black-and-white "Mathematics" series, 1976-77, in which the photographer shot and reshot sections of university chalkboards covered with mathematical notations. The abstract language of the notations was unintelligible to Berger, but he noted that their left-to-right articulation and sequential organization in horizontal "statements" paralleled the way text works into pattern. By partially overlapping his film while it was still in the camera (rolling it back and forth, shooting it over itself) and printing the resu ltant disembodied bits of signage, Berger made his chalked data even more disjointed and isolated, so that they made up a kind of endless stutter at the edge of communication. That images can accumulate and yet never result in narrative and that this accumulation can become another form of communication grew into one of Berger's central concerns. The advent of personal computers in the early '80s soon provided new ground for investigation along these lines. Berger's artistic output could constitute a mini-history of computer-graphics technology, from the clumsy and warping pointillism of ink-jet and daisy-wheel printers on perforated paper to today's digital Iris prints. Sidebars, pictures in pictures, highlighted borders, charts interacting with photographic images--the humdrum strategies of graphic design or production--are regularly autopsied in his work. Throughout the '80s, Berger combined disparate and seemingly disconnected images, attempting to show how inexorably they become visually composed, "read" through a consensual frame that domesticates and homogenizes them. The fact that we don't run screaming into the street when we see the weatherman, "gigantic" beyond belief, superimposed over an image of the planet (or, put differently, how two different and seeming irreconcilable visual languages can collapse into a new relationship) is what Berger repeatedly investigates.

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