If you ask David Clark what “apple” means,
he will tell you that it is the forbidden fruit that
Adam and Eve ate and committed them to sin; it is the
notorious fruit that poisoned Snow White and the famous
computer scientist Alan Turing. “Apple” is
also a record company that represented the Beatles, and
a computer brand commonly known as “Macs”.
But this is not all that “apple” means. In
fact, in “A is for Apple,” viewers are invited
to explore the array of associations of ‘apple’ in
a psychoanalytical, philosophical, linguistic and pop
culture context on an interactive Flash platform.
“A is for Apple” is said to be inspired
by the song “The Glass Onion” by the Beatles1.
Some interpreted the “glass onion” as a metaphor
for understanding things on various layers and perspectives2.
This pluralist approach to understanding had influence
on the creation of “A is for Apple” for Clark
believes that our state of mind on knowledge and understanding
functions in the same way. Knowledge, he wrote, is a “fluid
and historically relative construct…made up of
a web of associations and particularities but not systematic”3.
In providing a sense of that fluidity and multiplicity,
Clark structures his project after the net-browsing model—a
web of linkages, or associations. He wants his audience
to “reflect on the experience of web browsing…surfing
from link to link, from association to association.”4 This,
he believes, “seems to be our post-modern
condition”5 that
results from the deconstruction of the established belief
systems, to the point where we have greater liberty of
searching for knowledge in various sources with different
insights. Using the ‘web’ as a model for
knowledge system, Clark demonstrates the complexity of
our awareness of an object as trivial as an ‘apple’.
On the other hand, it also profess the surplus associations
that are “hidden”, or more appropriately,
unbeknownst to us.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theory, it
is important to clarify what Clark refers to “hidden
meanings” as. As much as “The Glass Onion” was
a mellow tune that people grooved to, it was also one
of the “cheeky” songs that the Beatles produced
in the 1960s. In late 1969, Paul McCartney was falsely
reported as being killed in a car accident. In a crazed
hysteria, the fans looked into the band’s lyrics
for clues regarding Paul’s death. Some read “the
walrus” in “The Glass Onion” as a metaphor
for Paul6. The fact
that people desperately searched for clues and ‘found’ meanings
in those lyrics fascinated Clark, even though John Lennon
had openly
declared that he did not intentionally create meanings
in those lyrics. Clark became obsessed with people trying
read ‘hidden’ meanings in given texts that
may have a specific or non-specific intended meaning,
like the game of ink-blot reading. Naturally, this added
to Clark’s interest in cryptography, “the
deliberate encoding of meaning to hide it as well as
for our great curiosity about the meaning of the world,”7 and how cryptography plays in provoking and producing
knowledge.
Footnotes:
4Knight, Brooke.
Email correspondence interview March 16 2004
5Knight, Brooke.
Email correspondence interview March 16 2004
6Knight, Brooke.
Email correspondence interview March 16 2004
7To define meaning
in terms of authorial intention is the so-called 'intentional
fallacy' identified by W K Wimsatt and M C Beardsley
of the 'New Critical' tendency in literary criticism
(Wimsatt & Beardsley 1954). We may, for instance,
communicate things without being aware of doing so
8Knight, Brooke.
Excerpt from artist statement for Digital Visions submission
9Knight, Brooke.
Email correspondence interview March 16 2004
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