Teagan Dorsch
The River Thames estuary, London,
UK
London, Labour and the Forgotten - PDF
‘London Labour and the Forgotten is a fictionalized re-imagining of Henry Mathews ‘London Labour and the Poor’. It takes the form of an annotated epistolary novel with the narrative presented as textual juxtapositions creating space between the fragments allowing the audience to build their own narrative connections based on key information that surfaces to them. It becomes a series of Priming fragments, whereby the order of the pieces influences how the subsequent artifacts become read.
The work re-examines Henry Mayhew’s tonality and harsh description of the mudlark. This is done through a perspectival shift into the imagined first-person perspective of Mayhew’s Mudlarkers, shifting his words and descriptions while giving them space to tell the narrative; and into a second-person perspective exploring the experiential embodiment of Thames foreshore. Fragments of the text are then inputted into Inferkit’s AI Text Generator as a process to explore how tonality affects representation. This is Done through the AI’s intensification of the tone of the input within its developed responses. The AI then can be understood as a mudlark in the expanded sense of how it gleans the input text for important words that surface to it for it to generate a response from. The text then becomes annotated with handwritten notes and marks attempting to mudlark the keywords that influenced the tone of the AI between it and the fragment text.
As a final act, the text becomes obscured and effaced by being buried in the mud at the river’s edge. This obscuring of text draws on the happenstance of mudlarking, whereby objects become buried and unburied by the chance of the Thames and the mud of the foreshore. Creating text that become buried under the mud while others surface on the page.‘
Teagan Dorsch