Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It's alright we told you what to dream
(Pink Floyd, »Welcome to the Machine«)



A three-part group of works about the machine as metaphor. Titling and initial sketches date back to a 1988 design that echoes the proportions of the monolith - the intelligence machine - from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Part A (Conversations on Terror) attempts to approach the killing machinery of German concentration camps through fragments of testimony, machine-like devices, movie quotes from the dystopian THX 1138, and extreme cutouts of paintings. The text fragments are presented from top to bottom, always slightly offset, which makes their deciphering much more difficult - a metaphor both for the gradual fading of the testimonies and for the ineffable nature of the documents themselves.

Part B (Masks) consists of a 3x3 matrix of permutating layers of the same pictorial elements from Part A, except that the texts are replaced by the alphabetically sorted numbers 1-9. The logic of one language system superimposes another like a mask, all layers are exchanged respectively, and as in Hesse's »Glass Bead Game« the self-interested formulaic play of machine logic is negotiated.

Part C (The Sexual Space Folded Singular By Its Gravitational Horizon, Virgin) projects a third media sculpture and forms an homage to Duchamp's Grand Verre, about which Calvin Tomkins wrote: "The Large Glass has been called a love machine, but it is actually a machine of suffering." Again, imagery from the previous parts is transformed.









I slid back the lid, and looked inside ...
Horror is relative, and I think I was laughing as I left the room.
(Michael G. Coney , »The Cinderella-Machine«)