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Author: Anselm Berrigan 

Artist: Jonathan Allen

Publisher: Brooklyn Arts Press (2013)

“With each new invention, from the printing press to Google Glass, our expectations for communication swell. Allen incorporates traces of information exchange into his works with written words and coding found in print materials and the interweaving of spoken poetry into his animation. His architecturally inspired images, themselves built in layers, also call to mind the human compulsion to control our surroundings. We amass so much data that we build physical structures to house information—seen in the library of Loading and the server stacks of Pre-listserv. Inherently intangible numbers and letters now shape physical space; works such as Watching and You & your Signals & codes reveal that, in addition to our homes and offices, we now exist in equally real spaces assembled from pixels and code.”

–Art Daily

“Who’s crowd-sourcing, funding, and promoting who? What constitutes the latest media buy-out, or sell-out, by inflated multinationals, and to what form of state or private surveillance are you prey? What Berrigan most wants to know, and, in Loading, finds (however insufficient or bitter—'We like a bilingual hinge about now / you can get some suckle from a / local armoirery too, goddamnit'—a discovery) is his own hunger, admittance of apocalyptic boredom, and complicity in the systems (disaster capitalism, language) to which there appears to be no 'outside —subsumptions both formal and real, subverted only by the sliver of hope in art’s autonomy from 'same.' Berrigan and Allen hold up a mirror up to the reader, demanding an answer to the question of what script you’re following–Oedipal, neoliberal, hetero/queer, marital–and who’s funding you.”

–Coldfront Magazine