The Brooklyn Rail

On first glance, it would be easy to mistake Janet Zweig’s 1993 installation Her Recursive Apology for something that a bored paper-pusher might create in her office during a slow day at work. Small stacks of printer paper overlap at slight angles on the floor, extending outward from a central point to form a 9-by-9-foot spiral reminiscent of a Louise Bourgeois installation. The paper is perforated, continuous, and inscribed with the signature pixelated text of a now nostalgic device: the dot matrix printer. Over 8,000 sheets comprise the installation, returning us to a time when “information overload” still had a material form.

Yet further inspection of the content printed on the paper complicates our understanding of the creator’s motivations. Over four million apologies, each with slightly different vocabulary and syntax, pile up across the pages in preposterously tiny type. This suggests, perhaps, that the employee is compelled not by boredom, but by a different set of feelings: guilt, shame, obsequiousness. Perhaps, like Bart Simpson at Mrs. Krabappel’s chalkboard, she has constructed this spiral as comeuppance to her boss—a hypothetical atonement for asserting herself as a woman in the workplace.

Her Recursive Apology lends its name—in a slightly mutated form—to the title of Inventory Press’s new monograph about the text-generative sculptures that Zweig created between 1990 and 2010. The scenario I describe relating to the eponymous work’s origin is, ultimately, a fabricated one. These apologies were not typed by a woman office-worker, but generated randomly by four Macintosh computers operating on a BASIC program coded by the artist herself. Throughout her oeuvre, Zweig probes how computer codes might exceed the limitations of their step-by-step instructions to confuse, invent, distort, and inspire. The boundary between algorithm and affect is intentionally blurred.

While René Descartes’s cogito compels us to ask whether a computer could ever truly think for itself, Zweig queries whether a computer could ever worry. Her machines are frequently overcome by anxiety and self-doubt, their endless torrents of text resembling the ruminations of an overactive imagination. In Mind Over Matter (1993), Zweig fed a Macintosh SE computer three self-assured statements: “I think therefore I am” (Descartes), “I am what I am” (Popeye), and “I think I can” (The Little Engine That Could). Reconfigured into new statements by the algorithm, the text transforms from confidence into insecurity. As it sputters lines like “I can think I think therefore I think I can” through the printer, the computer appears to be reassuring itself of its worth despite nagging intrusive thoughts. The resulting paper piles up in a basket attached to a large rock by a pulley, gradually pulling it down.

Zweig’s sculptures are resolutely time-based, made of material that accrues as days and weeks pass. To ensure a multifaceted understanding of each work, the monograph presents installation images taken at different points throughout the sculptures’ performances. These images are augmented by excerpts from Zweig’s research, scans of the text produced by the printers, and brief didactic texts compiled by the artist and the Inventory Press editors. For The Liar Paradox (Oliver North Möbius) (1991), Zweig mounted two Macintosh-driven computers to opposite walls. A strip of paper runs out of one printer and into the other, then back again, creating a long Möbius strip. In the installation images, the paper seems to be etched with abstract swathes of ink. But the didactic text clarifies the content: printed onto the paper are excerpted questions and answers from Oliver North’s 1986 congressional testimony about the Iran-Contra affair. Over weeks, the printers traded questions and answers until the paper became so dense with black text that it looked like the writing had actually been redacted.

Though Recursive Apologies borrows its title from Zweig’s self-abnegating spiral sculpture, it is The Liar Paradox that she has reproduced across the book’s front and back covers. For Zweig, the recursivity of North’s congressional testimony, which was a veritable nesting doll of lies, parallels the looping of a computer algorithm. As data accumulates, meaning transforms into meaninglessness, while the rational becomes irrational.

The essays in the monograph cast the artist’s millennial output as portending two intersecting contemporary phenomena: the “post-truth” politics of the Trump era and dubious LLMs like ChatGPT. For critic Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Zweig’s computer sculptures reveal how nonsensical absurdity might emerge when hyper-rational algorithms are taken to their logical extremes. To poet Jena Osman, these sculptures bear superficial resemblance to ChatGPT, but ultimately differentiate themselves by inviting collaboration and play—both imaginative actions inhibited by ChatGPT’s narrow predictive models.

ChatGPT derives its authority from its purported ability to define, distinguish, and separate. Yet Zweig’s recursive sculptures, which mutate data as they loop and fold back into themselves, remind us that meaning is messy. This messiness, as book artist and information science scholar Johanna Drucker details in the final catalogue essay, is why linguists developed the subfield of pragmatics to understand the social and cultural parameters in which language is generated. Her note leaves me longing for something largely absent in the book: a consideration of Zweig’s sculptures in the historical context of Clinton-era debates about technology. We know, through Goodeve’s and Osman’s essays, what they anticipate about our present. But what do they say about their present?

In The Prisoners’ Dilemma (1993), two printers mounted on wheels evade each other’s questions while being pulled physically closer by the loop of paper that links them, culminating in a head-on collision. Osman interprets this work as offering a “prescient portrait of today’s technologically mediated and mangled American democracy.” But my reading is much simpler: it is a fine-art analog to the constellation of mid-nineties pop culture phenomena, ranging from the 1995 film Hackers to Damon & Naomi’s 1992 song “Information Age,” which documents collective anxieties about crashing computers. By dramatizing the physical destruction that might be wrought by the digital, The Prisoners’ Dilemma evokes a future five, rather than thirty, years away: the “Year 2000 problem.” Y2K haunts Recursive Apologies like a specter. I only wish that it had fully summoned the ghost.