Transcripts for the Audio Guide of the Technotexts Exhibition

##Room #1 Concrete Confessions & Other Botts Blocks: What materials can you use to write? The historical answer is, in fact, almost anything! Down through the centuries, seemingly anything close at hand, and many things not easily acquired, have become the stuff of writing, including acorns, aluminum, alcohol, bamboo, birch bark, bitumen, bone, bread, bronze, copper, chalk, clay, dung, electrical wire, felt, feathers, fiberglass, flax, gold, grass, goat hair, graphite, gum, hemp, hides, iron, lemon juice, knives, linen, lead, leaves, mulberry, mercury, nitric acid, oil, ocher, papyrus, pottery, especially broken bits, plastic, quipu strings, rags, rice, resin, sandstone, silk, steel, soy, sunlight, terracotta, tortoise shells, ultraviolet rays, vinyl, wax, water, wheat, wood pulp, X-rays, egg yolks, and zinc, among countless other materials. In this case, Professor Botts is doing as the Romans did: he is writing in concrete, a process that required him to begin by “writing” in reverse in his mold so that the message would face the viewer correctly. Writing in the “artificial rock” that is concrete is far more permanent than our scratchings on paper. What words are worthy of such treatment?