Behind the Work: Jack Schulze goes deeper into Nearness
Interview with Jack Schulze that unveils some of the process and thinking behind Nearness.
What inspired you to do this experiment, creating a sort of homage to Fischli and Weiss?
The Fischli and Weiss film is obviously one of the finest instances of the “chain reaction” form. I’m particularly fond of the bumpers in the Japanese kids show Pythagora Switch. RFID is a complex and fairly abstract technology to grasp—Timo describes it as a technology that found its way from the obscure to the mundane without any real fame or apex in the public eye.
We have to be careful in how we communicate with it. There are many leaps of imagination and understanding required to grasp it and hold a useful model of how it works and what is happening, let alone see how it maps usefully and elegantly into the world around us. The familiarity of the chain reaction form, means the audience quickly grasps that the normal kinetic transfer of force in the sequence is replaced by invisible forces that work very closely together. Like invisible digital breaths between objects. Because the form was familiar, our hope was the concept of nearness without touching would be clearly understood, and I think we succeeded.
Full article here (Creativity Online).
via @timoarnall
