aluminum gilt over plywood on wood frame
20' dia x 80' long (variable)
University Art Gallery, SUNY Stony Brook
For a short video of the installation, click here
| Home | Historical Abstracts | Long Scroll | alt.projects | 1990's | 1980's | 1970's | Resumé | Links |
|
6,000,000,000 Monkeys, 1999 aluminum gilt over plywood on wood frame 20' dia x 80' long (variable) University Art Gallery, SUNY Stony Brook For a short video of the installation, click here |
|
 |
6,000,000,000 Monkeys digital rendering, 1998 6 Billion Monkeys is a large scale installation whose central element is a vaguely mushroom shape lying on its side and suspended in space. The thin 'stem' of the piece is at the entry to the gallery. Over its length the stem increases in diameter very slightly until, near the far end of the room, it explodes into a circular plate with an outside diameter of 20'. This umbrella element shares the space with a clockwork. The 'clock' is in fact a gravity-driven motor which propels a kinetic element of the installation. The clockwork connects via a driveshaft to a "hopper" containing many small wood balls, each with a different letter printed onto it. From the bottom opening of the hopper runs a wooden trough which accept the balls as they are released from the hopper. As they drop into the trough the balls, aligning themselves randomly, they may or may not spell out words and - over time - sentences. In a brief showing of the piece in NY in 2000 the words "art" and "porn" were spelled out. The intent of the piece is to test the old aphorism that, given a thousand years, a thousand monkeys sitting at typewriters will eventually produce a "Hamlet." It is, in other words, a probability machine in which the central piece - whose shape derives directly from U.N. population statistics (see also U.S. population estimates and the excellent Population Index at Princeton University) beginning in about 10,000 BCE and ending in the year 2,000 CE - represents the pool of available culture producers (i.e., monkeys, of which there are currently six billion), the clockwork represents the driving force of time, the hopper random literary/cultural potential and the trough's contents and its organization the ultimate product. Clockwork birch plywood, misc hardware close-up, gears and pendulum |
|
|
 |
Clockwork, 1999 (left) Clockwork with trough (right) birch ply, mm size variable |