Arthur C. Clark’s dictum: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” becomes more salient in the early days of the 21st century. I’m here to remind you, the information age rides like a giddy child on the shoulders of the machine.
In a day, industry might stamp out a million new techno-things. Yet, trucks, all iron piston and gear, drag them to dock. Heavy cranes lever loads onto rusty ships. Giant props screw through ancient seas.
Oblivious, shiny thing in hand, we are the pettiest of gods: broadcasting nonsense over great distances, inputting self-absorbed minutia through tiny keypads, replicating image after empty image. Our powers are so amplified the twitch of a finger can access an seemingly infinite pool of data, or with as much effort, put a bullet through someone.
Perhaps this lopsided relationship between the mechanical and the technological is analogous to our body’s reflexive enslavement to a relentless brain. Lately, the brain seems to want to bully the body about; diet, exercise, fear of diseases and distorted self-image push us to be something we are not.
But, just as harnessing all of our mechanical muscle cannot magically place us in some kind holy tech-heaven where our creations are always liberating and benign; our ideas of transcending our physicality contain the inevitable germ of fantasy. We eat, we shit, we sleep, we fuck.
Duchamp said (to Noguchi) “Don’t do anything that pleases you – only do that which you dislike and cannot help but do. This is the way to find yourself.”
He’s suggesting instinct over information. Substance over surface.
A petition for compulsion.
My work is about compulsion; it's about having a body. A wet, messy, cranky, smelly, easily punctured body (something I dislike, but cannot help).
I make objects designed to trap the eye.
The trap inevitably malfunctions. Everything will (and must) go.
