 Ben Rubin's video sculpture Anecdotal History (2011) types out excerpts from Wikileaks. This was my favorite piece at this year's Armory Fair in NYC, shown by the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery. The piece runs like this: one letter at a time, the individual words are typed out, appearing in the type gate and accompanied by the sound of the manual keys being pressed as if being invisibly typed out on the machine by an unseen observer. When the line ends, there's a carriage return and the typing starts over; when the page is full the type disappears for a moment then starts over with different text.
The title, Anecdotal History, reflects the observational, allusive quality in the text itself. At times funny, there is always an element of fragmentation to the phrases, a sense that there is something more, an unknown, like the invisible author, that can make the whole become coherent.
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