EpicTales

Carlo Zanni's EpicTales offers us a prism through which we can view our own society and its' militaristic tendencies. Using a php based online engine, EpicTales translates and substitutes English words with Old English words drawn from the Beowulf manuscript. When a user types in a url (www.cnn.com <http://www.cnn.com> for instance) the page is displayed in a disconcerting combination of modern English and the Anglo-Saxon of an ancient warrior culture.

The work recognizes the ephemerality and ghostliness of the webpage and employs it to expose the old mankilling currents that run beneath the gloss of contemporary language. This is most striking when Zanni's engine is used to scan news sites and reportage of current events. The cosmetic sheen of political spin doctors and compliant journalists is stripped back, baring the raw violence of war that is so carefully packaged for consumers.

At the same this process makes us aware of the gap between the terrible banality of war today and the way in which we glamourise the act with hindsight. Beowulf raises the act of a warrior to 'epic' status, granting authority and dignity to a culture that lives by the sword - a high culture propaganda vehicle for a ruthless ideology.

Zanni's choice of poetic vocabulary has other consequences. The Beowulf poet often confers a dream quality on his narrative, rendering it a hallucinatory internal experience for his audience. Making strange the world around us, we gain a new perspective on our language and culture.

Recently the Irish poet Seamus Heaney prefaced his translation of Beowulf by pointing out that there is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet's sense of the world that gives his lines immense emotional credibility and allows him to make general observations about life that are far too grounded in experience and reticence to be called 'moralizing'

This honesty that Heaney describes brings us back to EpicTales and its' logo based on a drawing by Leonardo entitled 'fight for the standards'. It may be likely that Leonardo was suggesting soldiers should rally to their flags and regimental standards. It is tempting though to misread the title as a call to defend other standards in society - a realistic awareness of the implications of military power, a clear appraisal of the glamourisation of past wars and recognition of the value of plain speaking.

Francis McKee

Francis McKee is a writer (see http://www.francismckee.com) and curator working in Glasgow. He is Head of Digital Art and New Media at CCA in Glasgow and is a research lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art where he teaches on the MFA course.
He has curated many exhibitions including 'Words and Things' for the relaunch of CCA in 2001. For the past ten years he has written extensively on the work of Scottish artists such as Christine Borland, Ross Sinclair, Douglas Gordon and Simon Starling.
This has been paralleled by texts on other international artists and he has recently completed a short book on the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist and co-published a book on the Icelandic Love Corporation in collaboration with NIFCA (Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art).
Whit Kay Pallister he is curating the Scottish participationat the Venice Biennale 2003.