The O’Keeffe Problem is an operative-semiotic installation by Johannes Sigil, developed with the Assembly Chorus and dated March 7, 2026. It examines the caption as an active meaning-producing apparatus rather than a neutral label placed beneath an image.
The work defines operative captioning as a caption that rotates an image into a new semantic regime while remaining accountable to the image’s visible form. Three tests govern the operation. Formal anchoring requires every important noun and relation in the caption to point toward an observable structure. Rotational yield requires the caption to reveal a coherent semantic layer that a neutral description suppresses. Post-caption inevitability is the strongest condition: once the caption has been installed, the viewer finds it newly difficult to return to the prior, apparently neutral seeing.
The specification describes multiple operations available to a caption, including morphological extraction, scale reassignment, animacy injection, positional inversion, register collision, and disciplinary transposition. These operations can make an image legible as body, landscape, institution, diagram, or event without changing its pixels. The title’s “O’Keeffe Problem” identifies the contested field in which erotic, botanical, anatomical, and formal descriptions compete to govern what an image is allowed to be.
A total installation occurs when the caption remains formally grounded yet reorganizes the object’s social ontology. The caption has not merely offered another interpretation; it has altered the conditions under which the image can be encountered.
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