Screenplay I
Description
Georgica Pettus is an American artist and playwright based in New York. Working primarily in time-based media, her practice explores theories of interactivity across dance, language, and computation.
Screenplay I: A Play for Two Computers explores the complexities of communication across human and machine interfaces. Rooted in her ongoing interest in translation, particularly between written and embodied syntax, the work stages a dialogue between two computers, using code, language, and gesture as overlapping scripts. Pettus draws on networks of communication and logistics not only as metaphors but as material systems that shape and govern our physical realities. In Screenplay, these invisible infrastructures are made legible, revealing how translation, whether across bodies, languages, or protocols, can be both a site of friction and a space for poetic encounter.
Translating language, gesture, and logic into a kind of digital dramaturgy, Screenplay finds a compelling counterpart in Patrick Jacobs’s Fairy Ring with White Clover (2010), a meticulously crafted diorama that offers a portal into an uncanny miniature world. At first glance, Jacobs’s work resembles a photographic landscape; a closer inspection reveals a lush, three-dimensional meadow constructed from unexpected materials such as copper and hair. Like Pettus, Jacobs invites viewers into a mediated space that challenges perception— one shaped by both intimacy and illusion.
CAPP Committee Selection 2024 - 2025
Tenth Cycle
Screenplay I: A Play for Two Computers explores the complexities of communication across human and machine interfaces. Rooted in her ongoing interest in translation, particularly between written and embodied syntax, the work stages a dialogue between two computers, using code, language, and gesture as overlapping scripts. Pettus draws on networks of communication and logistics not only as metaphors but as material systems that shape and govern our physical realities. In Screenplay, these invisible infrastructures are made legible, revealing how translation, whether across bodies, languages, or protocols, can be both a site of friction and a space for poetic encounter.
Translating language, gesture, and logic into a kind of digital dramaturgy, Screenplay finds a compelling counterpart in Patrick Jacobs’s Fairy Ring with White Clover (2010), a meticulously crafted diorama that offers a portal into an uncanny miniature world. At first glance, Jacobs’s work resembles a photographic landscape; a closer inspection reveals a lush, three-dimensional meadow constructed from unexpected materials such as copper and hair. Like Pettus, Jacobs invites viewers into a mediated space that challenges perception— one shaped by both intimacy and illusion.
CAPP Committee Selection 2024 - 2025
Tenth Cycle
Creator
Georgica Pettus
Date
2023
Files
Citation
Georgica Pettus, “Screenplay I,” Contemporary Art Purchasing Program - Stamp Gallery, accessed March 12, 2026, https://contemporaryartumd.artinterp.org/omeka/items/show/152.