I cite the frequency of each word’s occurrence in Frankenstein, alongside each unique word to denote its 'value' within my Frankenstein database, thus exploring the interrelationship of landscape, economy, and data. Originally commissioned by ohrenhoch, der Geräuschladen, a gallery in Berlin dedicated to sound works, the complete work was broadcast within and outside of the space, providing a further contextual enmeshment and spatio-temporal auditory (urban) layer to the work, as per the original Frankenstein narrative, which traverses all manner of terrains and countries.

Compilation One: body-birth-action-feeling-food-three-water-number-mind-work-animal-freedom

Compilation Two: change-sky-thing-things-dark-death-people-sight-..ed

Compilation Three: speed-sh-sion-disappear-language-colour-distance-uncertain-..ment-air-happy-movement-light-negative-time-..tions-desire

Compilation Four: adjective-..nc..-place-..ble-..er-eee-name-noise-ending

Compilation Five: war-..y-..ss..-hype-..oy..-five-ru..-ing-in-..ine/ein-home-two-four-..ine/een-gender

Compilation Six: I-..tion-hate-positive-half-hole-..ess-bland-..z..-law-..le..-..ch..-..ur..-money

Frankenstein economy (2022) is an adjunct to my ongoing major Frankenstein2 project (2001-), for which I have also produced an edition of Frankenstein business cards (2021-).

Generating and voicing a Frankenstein database allows me (or indeed anyone) to fully dismantle and enter Shelley’s entire 1831 text, reconfiguring it at will, creating new sets of value relations within a contemporary landscape of subjective encounters, albeit bearing the uncanny spirit of the original, often archaic words, exhumed and reconstituted with new voices and life through the galvanism of our computers. 

Within the other works of my growing Frankenstein2 collection, the underlying database structure only occasionally erupts through the otherwise relatively coherent new narratives, whereas Frankenstein economy lays the database fully bare as the work itself. 

Assuming the data realm as our contemporary landscape, voicing my lists of Frankenstein words aloud functions as a way of simultaneously owning and disowning the text, by reverberating the data within new spatio-temporal and material realms, combining typology with topology.

The strangeness of reading these words aloud in public urban locations creates an out-of-body experience of hyper self-consciousness, mixed with the immersive concentration on the material and temporal qualities of the auditory landscape.

My method adds subjecthood to the objective practice of field recording, making visible the hand behind the machine. By the same token, the rendering of the text into lists perverts the act of romantic creativity, based on the etymological route of roman, or novel, and points to data as the foundation for our generative economy of attention, where we can continuously redeploy any fragment to create value and altered meaning, within our own subjective framework of references and, so, in our own image (an image that is generatively mirrored by algorithms).

I am interested in the idea that the database/spreadsheet has become internalised as our dominant form of (self) governance, effecting an ingestion of our transhistorical proclivity towards list-making genres of expression and administration, finding home in modernist seriality, into infinitely malleable and individualising systems of control.

As an extension of the philosophical figure of the body without organs, my work questions our capacity to intervene positively in these systems of control, expropriating them towards individually grounded and democratically collective-oriented teleologies, that are creatively productive / obstructive / destructive, beyond the politically romantic echo-chambers of our gaseous anxiety.

With public presentations in Berlin and Copenhagen, this project has connected with a breadth of interdisciplinary communities.