about_proj

About the project:

The habit of expressing one thing in terms of another permeates our lives. We exchange dollars for euros, translate Spanish to English, convert gallons to liters, trade our labor for currency and our currency for food, clothing and a place to sleep. We imagine a logic drives these processes: that whatever it is causing a share of General Motors to equal three shares of General Electric one week and inverting that relationship the next week, is ultimately rational, predictable, and knowable. We imagine that our world is one of sense, and our role is to learn its sense.

This project is an experiment: an exploration of the moment or moments when the rationality of translation breaks down. I’ve constructed a set of fifty statements, each pairing two objects with energy content somehow equivalent. One object is definitively quantified: the caloric energy of an olive for example, or the radiation exposure from a chest x-ray. The quantity of the other object is indefinite and dependent on its partner.

I’m interested in the meanings that emerge when an objective measurement of a system’s capacity for work (its energy) is conflated with the subjective and cultural meanings attached to objects within the system.

For my engagement with the project, it’s important to do the calculations implied by each statement. This part of the project is ongoing: where I have done a calculation on a statement, an equals sign (=) beneath the statement links to the calculation. Eventually, some of these statements will be physically realized, and a pair of brackets ([ ]) will link to an image of the realization.

Email regarding this project may be sent to: 100.erg.eq@gmail.com.