Nick Herman & Anna Wittenberg
Seasonal Appliance v.1
Mixed-media, timer, amplifier, sound, pump. 2024


A collaboration between the organizers of GODMODADOGGEREL, Seasonal Appliance v.1 is loosely inspired by a water clock or clepsydra. Using the regulated flow of liquid through a set aperture to measure discreet units, the water clock is one of the oldest known instruments for measuring and communicating time and therefore functions something like a “time-machine” blurring the distinctions between contemporary orthodoxies of science / art / religion.

A mixed media sculptural object Seasonal Appliance v.1 combines both a functional system for storing and recycling a volume of water with a totemic allusion to a metaphoric body. The drip emerges from within a hairy rooty tangle at the base of the vessel and its fall is accentuated by an aluminum plate amplified by a contact mic. At regular intervals a pump returns the water to the head of the clock thereby perpetuating the process in perpetuity.

This emphasis on rhythmic measure allows the abstraction of time to be embodied thereby evoking the way the calendar and holidays have for millennia allowed people to orient and renew using the predictable cycle of the seasons. Inspired also by the tradition of carnival, the madcap theater embodied by the clock’s construction is further underlined by a second soundtrack (timed at five minute increments) consisting of animal sounds and other doggerel utterances that emerges from the base of the object. The braying of a donkey, the ringing of a bell during a religious ceremony, the call of geese, amongst other prosaic sounds, combined with the tick tick tick of the falling water, mix in a ceremonial evocation of life that reasserts the shared origins of science / art / religion as located in the apparatus.



@qualitycorn

@sincerelyhide