When I was a kid I once asked my mother what language she thought in.  As a Sephardic Jew from North Africa who grew up in the Middle East and settled in North America, her answer was appropriately complicated:

• Day to Day: English
• Dreaming: French
• Family Stuff: Hebrew
• Programming: FORTRAN

But why is it that we should think in any language at all?  If every facet of modern existence including the structure of our mind is filtered through language, what are the implications for the world of human ideas?  I developed Character Profile to work with artists whose work brings these questions to bear. Eighteen months ago  in the middle of Golden Gate Park, I experienced a sudden flash of inspiration in the form of a sequence of twenty-eight free associative phrases. Quite immediately I felt  I wanted to develop this into a substantial art piece.  In American Fistfight, these phrases receive a full visual treatment as the narration of a multi-projector slide show in a manner akin to title cards in a silent movie. American Fistfight was produced from images produced in a process that resembles a rudimentary film shoot, and is the latest in a series of screenprinted motion picture studies I have been developing.  Unsuspecting but adventurous friends met me at a photo studio and improvised short scenes and motions, which I recorded with a video camera.   Digitally cutting out and incorporating the figures into screen prints allowed me to assemble simple visual stories frame by frame, and the result resembles something in between a period silent movie, a comic strip, and the pre-cinema locomotion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. The slides were made by combining screenprinting, consumer inkjet prints, and dyes directly on 35mm film.  This completed an intentionally drawn out process that transformed these images from digital information to film positives used in the screenprinting procedure, then to squeegeed ink patterns on plastic, and finally to light projected on the gallery wall.   Controlled by a boxing robot that is maneuvered by visitors, the overall presentation evokes arcade culture, particularly the fighting games that briefly terrified American parents and have inevitably drifted towards the realm of nostalgia. From a certain perspective, a simple play on words is merely an inadvertent glitch in the structure of language.  After spending much time with these phrases I have come to value how a surface level playfulness that features rhyme, alliteration, and wordplay, also serves as an extended tour through many artifacts embedded in our communication system.  That such an abstraction can generate an emotional reflex exposes the startling extent to which our ideas, our capacity for compassion, and our fistfights are inseparable from our words.