Ofir Feldman
Our first guest contribution is from Ofir, the lovely and vibrant artist who has created a new economy of words... you can only speak with the words you have withdrawn from your wordbank. There are different forms of accounts, of course mine would be filled with poetic words. He tells me there are currently only Italian words available - although even if I withdraw these I won't suddenly be able to speak Italian!
WordBank | About the artwork
Can a word currency actually exist?
WordBank is a conceptual art project, composed of a set of multimedia sub-projects.
This ensemble forms the body of the artwork, creating a comprehensive presentation of a “bank of words” which enjoys the visibility of a real institution: branding, campaigns and a wide graphic, textual infrastructure, all of which animate the illusion that the bank really exists. It is this very illusion which constitutes the concept of the artwork.
In spite of its convincing appearance, the banking entity remains completely metaphoric, non-practical and non-commercial. WordBank purports to manage our vocabulary and to supply us with an access to different languages and socio-linguistic registers, which are out of our reach.
The artwork illustrates a new, invented term: Verbal Economics, which, to use Ferdinand de Saussure's terminology, has been created by attributing to the signifier “word” the signified “money”. This semantic switch helps to open up a space for questioning the value of every single letter and word. Moreover, it calls for the magical powers and the sacredness of the word (as understood by the Cabbala) to be restored.
The term Verbal Economics serves as an axis along which all the other fictitious terms of WordBank terminology are being placed: silence as the savings account; the spoken, written and consciousness accounts; the six socio-linguistic-register accounts etc. These terms are being translated into an aesthetic experience by means of video presentations in different languages and with the help of a website, a street campaign, commercial ads in video and animation, fliers and postcards.
Ironically though, it isn't possible to become a costumer of the bank. Despite the appearances generated by her self-presentation, the bank cannot live up to what the viewer may expect of her. The resulting gap between the potential customer's expectations and what the bank actually has to offer invites to reflect on the real meaning of the term virtuality.
For here, virtuality is being dispossessed of its ‘traditional’ status as a substitute for the real thing. On the contrary, virtuality is rather being re-defined as a target and destination in itself, leading up to real virtuality instead of virtual reality. For his part, the viewer comes to the realization that he is his own autonomous bank of words.
At this point, the individual has become his own corporation.
A grinning semicolon
The Berlin-based Israeli Ofir Feldman has developed a “World bank of words”
The model on the brochure puts a finger to her lips: talk is silver, silence is golden? Both are equal in the WordBank whose ad the brown-eyed lady is promoting. Silence can be deposited as well as words – you can invest in sociolinguistic registers and raise body language credits. WordBank offers checking and savings accounts as well as telephone and internet banking. Even investment banking is possible.
multimedia DAYDREAM It’s yet not possible to actually open an account. The WordBank is fiction, a multimedia daydream, constructed by Ofir Feldman. Equipped with professional flyers, advertising clips and a detailed website containing catchy promotion slogans, a bank history and a business philosophy, the 33-year-old conceptual artist – on his homepage he describes himself as a “visual philosopher” – presents us WordBank as an elite institute where you can faithfully deposit your vocabulary.
WordBank has been created to demonstrate the perfect presentation and thus open a reflection space about topics like virtuality, economy, and language. In Feldman’s animated wonderworlds composed of graphic signs, the semicolon mutates to Alice’s Cheshire Cat, the colon becomes the invitation to plunge deeper, the question mark and the exclamation mark beat each other until they finally fall in love. “Of course it is possible that this has something to do with where I come from,” Feldman says, “this battle between two different parties who actually need each other”.
Language is an oft-recurring topic for Feldman: born and raised in Israel, he went to New York and later to Florence and Rome. There he studied “just classical painting”. “I was confronted with the Christian culture of images, and realised then that I come from a writing culture. I just reflected this difference.”
Economy, the second pillar of his WordBank, has also always been a topic for Feldman – but rather of necessity: “I invested in art, but art has never paid me back”. In the jobs he has done to make a living, he has developed an ambivalent relationship with administrative systems, as the jobs on the one hand have helped him survive and fascinated him for their functionality, but on the other hand have kept him from producing art.
PRIZE MONEY For Feldman, winning the Hobnox art competition and receiving the prize money of $30,000 was the best that could have happened, as it helped him push forward his bank project which he has worked on over the last six years together with many helpers.
The Holon Museum of Digital Arts in Israel has already included Feldman’s promotional clips for word accounts in its database. Since last week, a new video called “Even, Shoshan” has been screened in an exhibition in Jaffa. By the end of the year, the website is to be available in English, German and Hebrew; up until now there is only an Italian version online.
After that, the Israeli, who has lived in Berlin for two years, “because art is much more vital here and life is affordable”, wants to present the project in a gallery – including all informational videos in 14 languages, poster motifs and advertising clips for the sixAccounts. “In times of SMS and Twitter, they’re in danger of extinction,” says Feldman, showing a serious expression not to be trusted. “This is why the clips have to promote them”. There are even more chasms behind the bank’s façade. In his project, Ofir has always been interested in the power of language and its controlling function: “The idea that you have to be a bank client to gain access to your word savings is unfortunately not that absurd”.
www.wordsbank.com
Ofir Feldman (ISR)
Born in Haifa, 1977. Lives and works in Berlin.
Began his art studies at the “School of Visual Arts“, NY, and graduated the “Accademia di
Belle Arti“ in Rome. Feldman explores mechanisms of alienation in the contemporary society and within the art world itself, while practicing a particular sensibility to the tension created between verbal and visual languages.
Recent works:
WordBank is a conceptual multimedia artwork; it deals with economics, marketing and the politics of the verbal language.
Even, Shoshan is a video art which deals with foreignness as an inherent (linguistic) state of mind, and with the presentation codes of video art versus those of the cinema.
101 curators is a video performance in which the artist reads the list of the top 101 curators from Flash Art magazine, with an attitude of poetry reading.
Art Idol is a performance with Aya Eliav based on the famous TV realitycompetition, this time to find the new solo performance talent. The winner is determined by art critics and by the visitors through SMS text voting.
http://ofirfeldman.com
http://vimeo.com/ofirfeldman
