Hannah Tardie
Enigma is a series of sculptures, poems, and a workshop that explores the enigma of electricity within everyday technical objects.
Description
Enigma explores the concealed, ephemeral, and everyday aspects of electricity and electronics through a series of poetry, sculpture, and workshops. While in some ways Enigma appears to be a manifesto to rethinking electronics and physical computing pedagogy, it was made with the intention to open a dialogue between people who do not have experience building and designing electronics.
The first part of Enigma is a set of poems written within schematic diagrams of electronic circuits. I see the schematic poems as interventions within the practice of diagramming, investigating the textual elements at play within electronics and their representations. The second part is a series of sculptures that contain conductive materials. The sculptures take on figural forms that appear not-quite-human, maybe ghostly or machinic, and could serve as whole circuits themselves or as discrete components. The last part of Enigma is the Pulse-Width modulation workshop, which explores pulse-width modulation as a unique place where the boundary between analog and digital loosens, asks people without experience in electronics to construct an interface by using a mix of household materials that vary in conductivity.
The three parts inform and interrogate each other, and at times it may not be clear where one piece ends and the other begins. The project fixates on language and bodily forms—which at times confuse and create the other–that are embedded and hidden in electronics. Enigma is interested in precisely this language and these bodies that can be found in the shapes of discrete electronic components, the over-determined infrastructures of pcb fabrication and schematic diagramming, liminal signals that can be both digital and analogic, and the looming presence and enigma of electricity itself.
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Presentation Video
http://www.hannahtardie.com/