Oak is it!
Group show in the exhibition space Pladsen. Somehow the show ended up with two titles. The Danish title of the show was Med tiden bliver det mahogni. (translates as: In time it will turn into mahogany.)
A Unisex Fragrance on a One-Sided Surface
2008
Klein bottle, ck one perfume, fishing line, pushpin
5.5 x 69.5 cm
The Klein bottle is a spatial impossibility, if we lived in a non-Euclidean space, but this version is a model, a piece of scientific glassblowing, which purpose is to illustrate a three-dimensional Möbius band. In an unreal world this plane isn’t supposed to contain anything, but in reality it works fine as a flacon for the perfume ck one, the unisex fragrance from the 90s.
The two elements are tied together by the surname of their originator, Felix and Calvin respectively, but they both imply the possibility of illustrating something that does not unite in practical reality.
Outer is inner and the sexes are merged.
A-ha, Altered Takes On Me-States
2008
DVD, DVD-player, video editing monitor, metronome
45 x 50 x 71 cm
0:19 (loop)
A-ha, Altered Takes on Me-States is spliced together from material from the final scene in the movie Altered States and the end sequence in the music video for a-ha’s Take On Me. The latter inspired by the first.
The movie Altered States is based on John C. Lilly’s experiments with isolation water tanks and psychedelic drugs. In the movie the protagonist, the professor, carries out experiments on himself in the tank, using an ancient drug, and as a result his body regresses, evolves backwards. Ultimately, he turns into a primitive man, escapes the tank and kills a gazette in the ZOO. He turns back into his old self, but cannot stay in this shape, and he ands up in the hallway, banging from side to side, into the walls, trying to regain control of his fluctuating body. The lone battle from the movie is spliced with the inspired version from the music video, where the lead singer is having a similar battle between his cartoon personage and the real him. The two shape-shifting battles multiply by the editing, and the self is even more lost. It is a short clip, but looped into the eternity, the battle continues.
The metronome is the soundtrack of the new movie, sometimes matching the fists banging against the walls, and sometimes out of sync; an irregularity that matches the claustrophobic vacuum of the scene.
Fuck Computers, Industrial Society and Its Future
2008/2009
Transfer print, aluminium plate, crocodile clips, electrical wires, 9V battery
28 x 38.5 cm
The American Theodore Kaczynski, better known as The Unabomber, sent package bombs to universities, airline companies and computer stores over a period of 17 years, from 1978-1995. Kaczynski had a Ph.D. in mathematics and had taught at University of California, Berkeley, before he resided to a remote cabin in Lincoln, Montana, from where he sent his homemade bombs during the next many years. The bombs were primitive, and failing, to begin with, but became more effective later on, and apart from a wooden box, match heads, iron pipes and nails, they all contained a piece of metal with the initials FC. In the beginning investigators imagined that it meant Fuck Computers, because of the hostility towards computer stores. Later, Kaczynski told, that is meant Freedom Club, an organisation he claimed to be the spokesperson of.
In 1995 The New York Times and The Washington Post printed, under pressure from Kaczynski, his manifest Industrial Society and Its Future. The manifest advocates a revolution against technology, to liberate man, and he described how this could be done. Kaczynski’s brother recognised parts of the manifest and told the FBI. Theodore Kaczynski was arrested in 1996, caught red-handed in his cabin with an active bomb, a copy of the manifest and the typewriter it was written on.
Two different German mathematicians at the same time discovered the Möbius band in 1858. By Johann Benedict Listing and August Ferdinand Möbius, who received credit for the discovery. The Möbius band is easy to construct, with a strip of paper and some glue, but the complexity of the figure is far beyond most people’s comprehension.
The movie Tron from 1982 mainly takes place inside a computer program, and shows human beings acting as software against a computerised background, an outlined version of a landscape, the hardware. Images of aerodynamic motorcycles in full speed on a plane and neon-glowing grid are symbolic of the imagery of the movie. The visual effects were groundbreaking in computer animations, even though most of them were created with expensive, optical effects.
The work Fuck Computers, Industrial Society and Its Future takes its name after interpretations of material and the manifest from Theodore Kaczynski’s hand, and deals with different natures of simplicity and complexity on the same plane. The aluminium plate, on which the image of a Tron-inspired Möbius band is transferred, is charged with a 9V battery, mimicking the simple bombs of Kaczynski, creating a crude, but complex mechanism.
A Unisex Fragrance on a One-Sided Surface
2008
Klein bottle, ck one perfume, fishing line, pushpin
5.5 x 69.5 cm
The Klein bottle is a spatial impossibility, if we lived in a non-Euclidean space, but this version is a model, a piece of scientific glassblowing, which purpose is to illustrate a three-dimensional Möbius band. In an unreal world this plane isn’t supposed to contain anything, but in reality it works fine as a flacon for the perfume ck one, the unisex fragrance from the 90s.
The two elements are tied together by the surname of their originator, Felix and Calvin respectively, but they both imply the possibility of illustrating something that does not unite in practical reality.
Outer is inner and the sexes are merged.
A-ha, Altered Takes On Me-States
2008
DVD, DVD-player, video editing monitor, metronome
45 x 50 x 71 cm
0:19 (loop)
A-ha, Altered Takes on Me-States is spliced together from material from the final scene in the movie Altered States and the end sequence in the music video for a-ha’s Take On Me. The latter inspired by the first.
The movie Altered States is based on John C. Lilly’s experiments with isolation water tanks and psychedelic drugs. In the movie the protagonist, the professor, carries out experiments on himself in the tank, using an ancient drug, and as a result his body regresses, evolves backwards. Ultimately, he turns into a primitive man, escapes the tank and kills a gazette in the ZOO. He turns back into his old self, but cannot stay in this shape, and he ands up in the hallway, banging from side to side, into the walls, trying to regain control of his fluctuating body. The lone battle from the movie is spliced with the inspired version from the music video, where the lead singer is having a similar battle between his cartoon personage and the real him. The two shape-shifting battles multiply by the editing, and the self is even more lost. It is a short clip, but looped into the eternity, the battle continues.
The metronome is the soundtrack of the new movie, sometimes matching the fists banging against the walls, and sometimes out of sync; an irregularity that matches the claustrophobic vacuum of the scene.
Fuck Computers, Industrial Society and Its Future
2008/2009
Transfer print, aluminium plate, crocodile clips, electrical wires, 9V battery
28 x 38.5 cm
The American Theodore Kaczynski, better known as The Unabomber, sent package bombs to universities, airline companies and computer stores over a period of 17 years, from 1978-1995. Kaczynski had a Ph.D. in mathematics and had taught at University of California, Berkeley, before he resided to a remote cabin in Lincoln, Montana, from where he sent his homemade bombs during the next many years. The bombs were primitive, and failing, to begin with, but became more effective later on, and apart from a wooden box, match heads, iron pipes and nails, they all contained a piece of metal with the initials FC. In the beginning investigators imagined that it meant Fuck Computers, because of the hostility towards computer stores. Later, Kaczynski told, that is meant Freedom Club, an organisation he claimed to be the spokesperson of.
In 1995 The New York Times and The Washington Post printed, under pressure from Kaczynski, his manifest Industrial Society and Its Future. The manifest advocates a revolution against technology, to liberate man, and he described how this could be done. Kaczynski’s brother recognised parts of the manifest and told the FBI. Theodore Kaczynski was arrested in 1996, caught red-handed in his cabin with an active bomb, a copy of the manifest and the typewriter it was written on.
Two different German mathematicians at the same time discovered the Möbius band in 1858. By Johann Benedict Listing and August Ferdinand Möbius, who received credit for the discovery. The Möbius band is easy to construct, with a strip of paper and some glue, but the complexity of the figure is far beyond most people’s comprehension.
The movie Tron from 1982 mainly takes place inside a computer program, and shows human beings acting as software against a computerised background, an outlined version of a landscape, the hardware. Images of aerodynamic motorcycles in full speed on a plane and neon-glowing grid are symbolic of the imagery of the movie. The visual effects were groundbreaking in computer animations, even though most of them were created with expensive, optical effects.
The work Fuck Computers, Industrial Society and Its Future takes its name after interpretations of material and the manifest from Theodore Kaczynski’s hand, and deals with different natures of simplicity and complexity on the same plane. The aluminium plate, on which the image of a Tron-inspired Möbius band is transferred, is charged with a 9V battery, mimicking the simple bombs of Kaczynski, creating a crude, but complex mechanism.