A Moment in Time

2021

bespoke object of kinetic potential, 500 battery operated wall clocks, copper coated BB's, ink, pen, paper, AA batteries, chair, table, digital audio recorder, disposable camera, folding table, chairs, art gallery with landline telephone else white box pop-up with dual burner phone & calling cards

Just as four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence may constitute music, any distinction of scarcity may materialize as value. This proposal was developed by Campbell Carolan in response to an offer to perform at Lubov gallery for a 2 week "residency" that asked us to implement a landline telephone.

Post-COVID, the idea of using the .jpeg as a unit of currency struck me as slightly less primitive than using a rat. This despite gymnastic descriptions of decentralized exchange made possible by crypto. As the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) peaked, I entertained the question of whether or not "Bored Ape Yacht Club" (a line of NFTs traded for millions, ft. a line of pixelated monkeys) was explicitly racist with speculations on whether or not 99 bottles of beer on the wall promoted underage drinking.

The kids travel song about sharing beer never spills the secret of how you get that many beers on the wall. Enthusiasts of NFTs as art never provide a sufficient answer to the question of what the work of art is strategic to in Silicon Valley. To me, both seemed rich with cryptographic subtlety.

When Lubov gallery solicited Campbell Carolan for ideas of how to implement a 2 week chunk of dead time between exhibitions, a landline telephone and a white box room, I had already spent a lot of time thinking about space complexity. In a 1977 whitepaper, Donald Knuth observes that "the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory"—leads to the ultimate improvement in pop music: "Arbitrarily long songs with space complexity O(1) exist, e.g. a song defined by the recurrence relation".

What I like about Don Knuth is that he asks the same questions of computing as Guyatri Spivak asks of deconstruction. According to Spivak, narrative occurs as a condition of sequence but the oral formulaic demonstrates a mastery of equivalence. By contrast, Knuth creates a math formula for "Old Mac Donald had a farm" and compares it to the rhythmic allegory of "99 bottles of beer on the wall". But both point out the pre-modern concept of the refrain using the language of journey and containment-- time complexity -- understood or reinterpreted in Modern art through the heuristics of breadth and depth in painting.

Micaela and I tossed around a few ideas but eventually arrived at the conclusion that standing 6ft back from the wall and pitching beers at it sounded something like "a guy would do to prove something different", which is Campbell Carolan's code for this doesn't scale.

In 1848 killing time was a revolutionary act. Bejamin