An installation comprised of two hospital ventilators, running on compressed air, installed at Hordaland Kunstsenter, in May 2019. The work requires the presence of the subject’s body in the gallery, to complete it. The ventilators linked to motion sensors and software, respond to the presence and movement of visitors to the gallery space. Their movement within the space causing the ventilators to stop and start unpredictably, based on a set of always changing variables, creating passages of quiet between the machines’ operation.
‘As people enter, the ventilators (machines designed to breath on behalf of another body) begin to “breath”, the translucent “lungs” attached to them, inflating and collapsing rhythmically and the mechanical pumps powering them, sighing and sucking as they drive the machines. As people approach the ventilators, they may cease “breathing”, leaving the visitor - in the absence of the ventilators’ working rhythm - with the sudden intensity of the room’s ambience and an awareness of their own presence in the space. (excerpt from interview with Diku).
As it developed over many months, this work became something of an "outlier" in my practice, which continued to develop simultaneously along other trajectories. However, it's preoccupations with the body and with creating intervals or hiatus' - in this case that experientially manifest within the gaps between the machines' functioning, made it an intriguing complement to my work's other trajectories.
It was also the catalyst for my subsequent exploration of situated writing; that is writing in response to my activities within and around a given site of work-making. In this instance, the gallery installation you can see here, gave rise to a short piece of writing that was somewhat tentatively and hesitantly made available at the gallery alongside the installation: with me remaining unclear whether it represented a part of the work or an adjunct to it.
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