W/HOLE Expansion

The machine of being, or drawing to be looked at sideways

Active Installation by Katerina Undo

2016, production of Overtoon

2019, expansion with Samuel Beckett’s (w)hole

Main Machine Cabinet (dimensions 150x150x25cm) fixed on a metal base,  Index Type Machine, Rods, Step Stools, Episcope Projector, 7 Typewritten Pages, Booklet, 11 Channels Body-Conducted Sound.

Both individuals with normal or impaired hearing (problems of the outer and/or middle ear) can experience the work

I abject all signs. I create only machines of instant utility.

Antonin Artaud

The work circulates around a subjectile idea that will always betray and a bachelor machine. The parts of the installation compose an expanded inner speech around the clash among the self and the Other, capitalism and being, abjections and obsessions with signs, words, vibrations,  and numbers. The main machine cabinet is a functional metamorphosis of Antonin Artaud’s pictogram: The machine of being, or drawing to be looked at sideways (1946). On the backside of the cabinet, a diagram connecting holes filled with sound or stocked with silence indicates the correspondence between 6 characters: Antonin Artaud, Carl Solomon, Allen Ginsberg, Wilhelm Reich, Erik Satie, and Samuel Beckett. The sound/voice inside each hole is speaking inside the head of each visitor when inserting a metal rod and leading the mouth on it. With this physical act, the visitor fills the installation with her/his body and becomes part of the machine or the machine becomes part of the body, conveying their own metonymic status of the human-machine subject (humanizing the machine or mechanizing the human).

The correspondence between the characters and the sound conducted by each hole are decoded in the pages projected. The text, written with the type-machine on both sides of the transparent paper (objective – subjective side) emphasizes the conjunctions (sound-holes on the machine) between life events and work of the characters involved. The reversed writing indicates both completion and split between the sides -the readable side is the trace of the original; each page meant to be looked at sideways. Printed booklets, available for the visitor, include letters written in the first person reflecting the idea behind the work.

There is no specific side for looking or perceiving the work, neither order nor start, middle, endpoint. The whole work and every single part of it can be conceived from a very personal point of viewing or hearing, subjective experience of time or thinking process.

The work had a prominent presence in the exhibition Où sont les sons; Where are sounds? (April – September 2017) curated by Nicole Gingras, CENTRALE for contemporary art, Brussels.