End Users (2001)
Installation at Centre for the Understanding of the Built Environment (CUBE)
Vinyl lettering, Giclee Prints

End Users was a specially commissioned installation for CUBE which developed an ongoing concern with the inadvertent traces people leave
when they live and work in cities - particularly in their relationship to electronic technology. End Users sampled 'user dictionaries' from around
800 computers around Manchester - primarily from a number of architects' offices within the city.

The work used the 'rogue' words added to the dictionaries to make portraits of peoples' uses of technology for a particular profession in a
particular place - portraits made visible only by existing in relief to linguistic rules defined elsewhere. The resulting lists of words are legible in
that the viewer wants to impose order on them and begins to see patterns and even mini-narratives within them as they match them against
their own internal knowledge of place and use of language there. The installation itself consists of a single line of text on the gallery walls
(a composite of all the architects' dictionaries) alongside a number of similarly sourced text portraits of individuals within the city who occupy
the same built environment sampled for the architects' dictionaries, but whose relationship to it suggests different lexical orders re-invention;
the crafting and retelling of local popular mythologies; allegations; desires.