F. C. Zuke

between Gods & Dogs is an exhibition, comprised of two installations, that raises questions about belief, authority, knowledge, and power. The Word That Binds Them is an interactive installation involving books that have been put in positions of authority or treated as sacred by religions, political parties, academic institutions, and other communities. As viewers navigate the work, they are faced with questions surrounding power and ideological belief. Creating the work involved consultations with the Internet Sacred Text Archive, research of citation rankings, and discussions with followers of various belief systems to inform the selections of books. All of these texts play an important role in historical and present-day power structures. The work demonstrates how art—specifically interactive art—is rich territory for questioning and deconstructing systematic ideologies and our interactions with them as humans.

While The Word That Binds Them questions the beliefs, knowledge, and power we acquire from books, Most Retrieved Words questions what we might learn from an unexpected source— our canine companions. The project began by engaging the general public in order to collect sounds of their dogs barking and short writings describing what they have learned from their dogs. What can dogs teach us about freedom, play, curiosity, love, forgiveness, risk, danger, and other important concepts? The collected sounds are altered so that they embody qualities of sacred choral music. Visual content in the work is comprised of hundreds of videos of dogs that have been extracted from found footage. These individual videos are composited into an immersive four-channel video projection that contains thousands of dogs running in mass along the walls of the gallery.

Premiered in solo exhibition, between Gods & Dogs, Art & Design Gallery, Lawrence, KS, March 2020

The Word That Binds Them invites viewers to gently interact with twelve famous books. This work began with an examination of books that have been elevated to a sacred or authoritative status by religious, political, and academic systems. After several weeks of analyzing the texts by conducting word frequency counts, and after studying these results for trends, discrepancies, and oddities, there was a single word that appeared more consistently in all the books than any other word: power. The work removes thousands of sentences containing ‘power’ from their original contexts. Without knowing the source of each quotation, audiences are left to navigate these fragments without usual presuppositions. The dictionary in the installation allows participants to request ‘power’ quotations based on another word. For example, if a participant submits "knowledge", the installations rains down quotations containing both the word "power" and "knowledge".

As viewers open the books, voices from inside each book’s pages begin speaking. These voices belong to the books’ authors and people who hold positions of power in promoting each book’s teachings. Some of these individuals include occultist Aleister Crowley, members of the 113th United States Congress, author Ayn Rand, Chairman Mao Zedong, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the Saudi Imam and Qur’an reciter Maher Al Mueaqly, Christian clergy members, and Jewish rabbis. The Word That Binds Them can be installed in several different forms and configurations. In March of 2020, the work was included as part of the "between Gods & Dogs" exhibition in Lawrence, Kansas. The texts included in this installation included:

The I Ching, translated by Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes
The Tanakh, trans. by the Jewish Publication Society of America
The Holy Bible, King James Version
The Holy Quran, trans. by Abdullah Yusuf Ali
The U. S. Constitution, 1787
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848

To read about the methodologies and processes involved in creating these two works, click the button below.

Premiered in solo exhibition, between Gods & Dogs, Art & Design Gallery, Lawrence, KS, March 2020

Most Retrieved Words began by engaging with the general public and asking dog owners the question, “What have you learned from your dog?” Participants were also asked to submit short audio clips of their dogs barking. This material was used to position dogs as valid sources of knowledge, wisdom, and power. The sounds of the dogs were manipulated to mimic the spacious reverberations of sacred architecture. In this way, the gallery takes on sacred sonic qualities. The visual content in the work contains hundreds of videos of running dogs, extracted from found footage.

The work functions best in an immersive, multiple projection installation space. Accompanying the video projection and 8.1 channel sound system is a list of words that were generated by analyzing text responses from the general public for the most frequently appearing words. The 250 most popular words from these responses are as follows:

love, me, taught, unconditional, patience, life, time, always, no, truth, trust, people, loyalty, contain, imagine, more, know, live, enjoy, unconditionally, god, now, matter, never, family, years, better, care, good, happy, loyal, need, friend, give, humans, feel, tail, kids, patient, everything, times, came, left, compassion, home, happiness, think, going, walk, old, kind, children, play, hard, look, attention, comfort, meaning, fun, fur, small, kindness, food, gift, outside, guardians, walks, pure, responsibility, myself, worth, world, earth, above, forgiveness, amazing, peace, nature, laugh, outdoor, important, animals, acceptance, stay, greatest, keep, gave, rescue, takes, human, wrong, lost, greet, gives, hope, moments, devotion, reminder, miss, companionship, thank, rescued, want, gentle, smell, sad, eyes, beloved, house, creatures, sick, elderly, anxiety, once, passed, thought, friends, respect, lucky, scratch, long, special, head, deeply, help, sometimes, riddle, boundaries, catch, complete, days, friendship, mind, puppy, playing, wagging, running, real, ride, together, laughter, roll, eat, smart, alone, wag, wet, why, support, compassionate, free, perfect, empathy, full, unselfish, sense, relationships, adopted, past, forever, saved, working, call, calm, weather, energy, protecting, devote, exceptional, awful, sharing, follow, heaven, death, value, intuitive, legs, blessed, wonderful, health, experienced, strong, instincts, hate, hear, enthusiasm, commitment, speak, beautiful, study, hurt, scary, lesson, bones, angels, sleep, perseverance, control, minds, ourselves, dignity, age, greater, stressful, cry, relationship, end, experience, giving, companions, caring, snuggles, medication, welcome, chase, please, persistence, conversation, creature, feelings, honored, honest, tears, ability, adopt, choir, guard, surprised, teeth, annoyed, impulsively, connected, presence, celebrate, future, mouth, affection, guide, sensitivity, believing, potential, transform, independence, listening, resilience, reason, trained, focused, unconstitutional, faithfulness