List of Works and Images for Enthalpic Everything
Acknowledgements
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Statement
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Desire is
not satisfied; it’s expelled.
Robert Gluck, Jack the Modernist, 1986. |
The world
uses up its difference as it goes from one conversion to another and
tends toward a final state of thermal equilibrium, heat death.
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of
Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, 1984. |
If Gluck and
Prigogine have anything in common it's the anxiety from the decade
they wrote in, one symptomatic notorious for narcissistic greed. The
merger of a minor queer novelist and major physicist is inappropriate
but my Enthalpic works follow a similar misguided trajectory
– enthalpy being a term borrowed from the science of thermodynamics
that describes change, or rather heat transfer that results in order
out of chaos (entropy). This science is then applied to pipeline mechanics
and further interpreted through business management-speak. |
The Pig Traps
begin as models of sludge collection ducts that are part of the scraping
process of pipeline cleaning and maintenance. As transparent macquettes
separated from their conduits they become something else. They are
machine-made retro plastic shapes, piggy or doggie style receptors
of light, transparent purveyors of light, a collection of orifices
or holes, ultra-submissive machines awaiting desire or penetration,
vacated projectors, a potential threesome, open-ended gas space heaters,
receptacles for expelled semen or cum traps, passive viewers or onlookers,
stylish empty-headed bareback fuck machines. |
There are many
conflicting ideas in the work that come together in the finished works.
There is, however, no resolution attempted, the critical success
factor projected through on of the Pig Traps states that
you need to create relational oscillations, i.e., there are
links here that need to be understood relationally, connections between
conflicting objects, formats and texts which share a common narrative.
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All of the works
are subject to a set of critical success factors - primary
process performance measures in project management. These occur as
text within the works or a vinyl lettering on the walls. Each describe
a factor for achieving enthalpic pleasure which can be understood
as the heat between individuals during social or sexual interaction. |
A large wall
piece acts as the ultimate interpretative aid. Each part of the
enthalpic everything exhibition was discussed with a business
management consultant who recorded the dialogue on flip chart sheets.
This data was then entered into Microsoft Project software
and the resulting GANTT chart graphically breaks down the entire
artistic or aesthetic experience into specific activities of looking,
feeling and thinking. Links were then added between the works to calculate
the elapsed time taken to understand the concepts in the show, as
well as the slacks and delays that occur in the interpretative process.
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Modern techniques
and technology are used throughout but the aim of the work is to blend
formal and interpretative strategies to create a different kind of
visual experience, where language leads the viewer through possible
narratives between the pieces. |
I am working
on some additional pieces at present where I hope to collaborate with
a theoretical physics professor in Dublin who was involved in figuring
out the fractal geometry of bubbles. The works will be illuminated
photographs which used optical fibre technology. |