“Spacelength Thought is a machine performing an activity: you can see how one thing leads to another and everything can be examined.”

In Spacelength Thought a typewriter is typing a monologue onto 16mm blank film projecting one letter at a time against the wall. Like in a Turing machine, a code is being recited mechanically and unveiled through its projection. Creating an imagistic form of language, the sculpture is an enigmatic machine performing an openly spread process. The typing machine acts as an author, but the text production does not adapt to a human reading routine; it extends the production time of a single word or even a single letter and moves at the pace of the celluloid: a manically prolific writer, endlessly inscribing text onto film. The process of writing is highlighted and staged, while its outcome piles up on the floor in a tangle.

 

Spacelength Thought, 2012

16mm film, projector, typewriter Images 1, 2: Installation view, Kunsthaus Zürich, 2012. Photo: Jenny Ekholm © Rosa Barba Image 3: Installation view at Parra&Romero, Madrid, Spain, 2016. Photo: Roberto Ruiz © Rosa Barba

Spacelength Thought has been on display at the following locations:

Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2021