These small light shows have been moved around the city of Denver in temporary installations. The small 3” x 4” boxes are affixed to magnets that allow their easy installation around the urban environment. The work has tested pubic acceptance of these mysterious apparatai which apparently the state has installed for its purposes. In sequence through an environment, the “machines” seem to me small glimpses into the future, anticipations of some next social control: a block chain or materialized cloud; a surveilance device or an intermediary between us and the network.
The display of power trumps any need for an actual function to these machines, where the true purpose might be to mantain a dissonance between citizen and state that results in the abdigation of power to a knowing big brother. They lull the environment into a sleepyness that takes the onlooker into a state of passivity and resignation while creating an aura of subjugation that doesn’t name it’s subject, such that it could only be us. A knowing audience, however, invariably disarms the performance; those witness or otherwise discover the artist are exempt from the power exchange meant by symbolic technology, where an actor is revealed along with his hollow vessels.
