Over the course of 15 years, Martin John Callanan collected all the instructions he gave to the image editing software Adobe Photoshop: each and every action, edit, change, or mistake that the artist made to any and all images for himself or others, on any computer. “Each and Every Command” is the complete log of all the edits made between December 23, 2003, through March 13, 2019—presented in human-readable text on a single, 15,562 pages-long PDF file, as well as in a plain text document. The full list of instructions, which comprises 4,589,564 words, is the equivalent to more than eight times the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
In a methodical and overwhelmingly detailed form, the artwork paints a precise illustration of the artist’s work, creating a painstakingly accurate, yet incomplete, account of his creative process. This impressive and somewhat absurd collection of data can be read as a critical comment on the widespread assumption that the quality of an artwork is to be measured in terms of labor, and also as an acknowledgement of the role that software plays in today’s artistic practice.
