As the Internet era is well past its coming-of-age, concern with authenticity is a virtual cultural obsession. News is indistinguishable from infotainment, fiction and nonfiction borrow freely from each other, and reporters and memoirists are known to frequently fabricate content.

As accusations of extreme political bias fly around the American political landscape, as post-structuralist and Reader Response theories replaced Formalist interpretations, and wars in the Middle East are waged under misappropriation of language, it is fitting that one of the most urgent questions of our time is this: what is it that makes a fact a fact?  

Enter artist Paul Chambers’ idea of Transorma as a metaphor for this ruthless, relentless, and somewhat hopeless act of truth-sorting. The Transorma was a large-scale mail-sorting machine built by a Dutch industrial company in 1927; five sorters and 300 bins organized a teeming chaotic mass of information. World War II interrupted widespread adoption of Transorma, as did the computer age. Thus, as Chambers conceptualized it, the Transorma functions as a philosophical puzzle — a ‘god function’ — which occurs through the implementation of religious practices and human’s aesthetic impulse to create and divine the sublime.