pneumatic dispatch video installation

pneumatic dispatch

Pneumatic tubes systems propel objects through a network of tubes. The force of a vacuum or compressed air juts the object through. When pneumatic tubes first came into use in the 19th century, they symbolized technological progress and it was imagined that they would be common in the future. One can see them as precursors to our subway systems and even the internet.

A network of pneumatic tunnels used to transport letters throughout Manhattan. Above ground no one could see that just below the pavement money and packages were flying from place to place, exchanging hands. Later, because of their use by governments and large businesses, they began to symbolize bureaucracy. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, pneumatic tubes in the Ministry of Truth deliver newspapers to Winston’s desk containing articles to be “rectified”. The movie Brazil, which has similar themes, also used tubes (as well as other by 1985 anachronistic-seeming technologies) to evoke the stagnation of bureaucracy.

I am creating a video sculpture made out of pipes. The pipes are spewing forth economic information from business sections of the leading newspapers. The piece utilizes projections of images from Wall Street and the bailout protests. The result is a chaotic whirlwind of flying papers and video projections jutting out of a pipe, a comment on the misinformation that resulted in our current economic crisis.

The piece will be a pneumatic dispatch about the current state of affairs and economic meltdown. It will be a comment on progress and bureaucracy. It will be timely and relevant but have an absurd quality like a Jules Vernes novel.

video sculpture group piece

Taking as inspiration the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy, we have decided to create a sculpture that instead of being built around natural elements, like stones and branches, uses as the raw material the electronic componenets of discared computers. Just as Andy Goldsworthy creates work out of the natural environment around him we are creating a structure out of elements from our electronic environment, as a coment on the detritus of modern life. This will be a multi-channel video installation with electronic parts, projection and a flat LED screen.

i ching lights

the i ching – or the book of changes – is a classical Chinese text that reflects on the evolution of events. i have tried to abstract the hexagrams of the i ching and imagine them as a moving light sculpture. cold cathode tubes are programmed by an atmel chip. a darling array allows the lights to PWM. the effect is a random cycling through the 64 possible manifestations of the i ching hexagrams.

light penetrates darkness

“On My Work with Zdenek Pesanek” is the memoir of Jaromir Fiala, Pesanek’s apprentice and aide who helped the artist build illuminated sculptures and light displays in Prague after WWI.

kinetic electric light art

Fiala says of Pesanek: “I soon noticed that he spent little time in his workshop, because he travelled so much in search of technical infromation and of new contacts in order to finance his enterprise and support himself.”

of the many projects they build together none have survived – i am fascinated by the idea of the “kinetic light piano” – a piano for synesthetes to hear the color.

the old and worm eaten

“indeed all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly chaning”

the “technical manifesto of futurist painting” seeks to re-examine the gesture of painting as “dynamic sensation” – something unfixed in space and time, something ever changing and un-absolute. in doing so it aims to break the “fanatical worship of all that is old and worm eaten.”

“In order to conceive and understand the novel beauties of a Futurist picture, the soul must be purified; the eye must be freed from its veil of atavism and culture, so that it may at last look upon Nature and not upon the museum as the one and only standard.”

“movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies” – the canvas is dynamic and nothing is static – things shift and move as if they breathe life.