D. Machines for Making
These models differ from the pavilions in character and intent. They diverge from the idea of considering place although some are to be found in places with particular characteristics. Each is a mechanism for producing qualities I deem to be necessary in the world. Their mechanical and electronic workings are indicative of the machinic means that can be necessary to produce such qualities.
13 Machine for Making Delicacy
Sitting on a remote butte this Machine for Making Delicacy is typically an autonomous device. Its sprays, robotic arm, heaters, spin cycle, and catapult are computer-controlled to manufacture delicacy in discrete amounts and launch it into the prevailing breeze when the atmospheric conditions are appropriate. Software updates are remotely installed. Climate change means correct conditions now occur with less frequency and there is a commensurate reduction of delicacy in the world. The extensive tanks for the raw ingredients are internally located, and only intermittent visits for replenishment and maintenance are required.
Delicacy as a concept seems mostly extended to the edible – my 283 million Google results for delicacy returned at the time, were reduced to 83 million by the exclusion of some food words (eating, restaurant, menu, recipe, fish, foie-gras, caviar, seafood, cheese, cooking, songbird, meat, flavour, and gourmet). When working on this model, I had in mind a more general array of concepts and qualities. I was embroiled in the very idea of delicacy and envisioned a quality as somehow existing independently of any instantiation of it in an entity – delicacy floating freely. Given the use of the word as documented in the Oxford English Dictionary this freedom of the concept presents difficulties: The more usual uses incorporate ideas such as needing to be treated with care, as something displaying delicacy is of “…graceful slightness, slenderness, or softness” and possesses “…exquisite fineness of texture, substance, finish, etc” and thereby requires careful, precise treatment or use. The quality is extended both to human skills and to measuring devices and other instruments that can respond to very slight changes. One’s health, perceptions or sensitivities can be said to display delicacy and in this sense are deemed to lack robustness and possibly to display refinement. But I find one of the archaic definitions entrancing as it incorporates the idea that delicacy is a quality that induces delight.
The white shaving of delicacy was made around a mould of modelling clay. Initially I intended to conjure billowing fabric using a material with sufficient structural integrity to just maintain self-support. Evoking for me the remembered official video from the song ‘High Hopes’ by Pink Floyd, the idea of a resemblance to fluttering fabric was personally enduring. To conjure the appropriate model-specific ambience, I explicitly forbade myself from seeking the original. I also feared straying too near with a copy. Looking more recently at the original clip, I found much forgotten imagery and reduced billowing fabric – such is memory. A promising experiment with papier mâché with a filigree of holes using very soft paper was pursued instead. The form does not much resemble fabric: to the eye it seems delicate, perhaps somewhat malleable or even brittle – certainly it cannot be imagined draping and falling. It is satisfactorily indeterminate; there is no particular reason that delicacy, as a quality, should be fabric-like. Other characteristics were inherited from other informing sources. In mind were Andrea Mina’s balsa casings in many of his models where he sanded the wood until it began to break and collapse. (See andreamina.com.au.) I likewise sanded until I achieved fragility. Although it was handled carefully, the fragile piece of delicacy creased and semi-collapsed under the strain of public gaze when exhibited at Melbourne Museum. This has been partially recovered.
Machines of various types surround us. We are able to distinguish most of them as machines, including the abstract, conceptual and metaphoric varieties operating in various disciplines as aids to thought. When using machines to make this machine, I was primarily thinking of those machines intended to perform tasks in lieu of activities people might otherwise carry out and/or those that are constructed to do things beyond what is possible for humans. I am entranced by the enigmatic qualities of machines, particularly when they sit just beyond comprehension, can be seen to be doing something, but either the doing or the outcome is a little unfathomable. These characteristics were minimally evoked through sliding elements, springs, a robotic arm, tubes, cables and even a little rust to allude to time.
A Gothic cathedral was a means, a mechanism, even a machine, for producing a conjunction of light and spirit from Abbot Suger’s well-documented Twelfth Century injunctions onwards. As these buildings reached upward toward the presumed location of the god of the worshippers, they achieved, over time, a delicate carved stone architecture of structural audacity. It seemed appropriate, then, for me to evoke faint echoes of the Gothic in the framework of this model. There are also elements of early iPod and a delicate, carved Huon Pine launching deck.
Base: 156mm x 102mm. Model: 211mm x 125mm. Height: 330mm.
Initiated: October 2007. Constructed: October 2007 – 15 July 2008.