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This is 24 hours scaled to 1 minute. No two days are the same, but they kind of are: fleeting and eternal. Time at a scale of 1:1440.
At the familiar size of an NFT market place thumbnail, this is an arrangement of 21 rooms scaled from the (also familiar) apartment bedroom. Space at a scale of 1:1440.
Rooms like compartments of jewellery boxes; containers of the minutiae of everyday life, over and over and over, dawn to dusk to dawn.
Scale 1440 continues my exploration of code art as responsive and interactive toys. As I have written previously:
those little toys from the museum gift-shop, hand-held models of big ideas. Like mini zen sandpits, machines with a déjà vu of function, big things made small and simple, an easy puzzle performed absent-mindedly in the palm of your hand. Toys toys toys, rules rules rules: substrates of generative NFTs.
In this piece the ‘rooms’ are generated in sequence across the canvas, clicking into place like a thin facade on a scaffold, before folding up again, concertina style, into a single room. And back again with a new array of busy private spaces. The viewer can watch a cycle passively and meditate on the passing of time, or they can get involved with a screen touch / mouse drag to move the perpetual motion along, or hold it still for a moment of banal everyday voyeurism.
The piece also refers to architectural processes. An apartment and its constituent rooms is the base module that generates the financial equation that births a building that over time redraws the form of the city. Deviation from the rules of the module is a financial impossibility, so architects get loose with facades instead. The facades roll out and wrap up, panels clicking and sliding into place. No two are the same, but they kind of are.
Callum Morton’s installation Habitat (2003) is a large scale-model of a Montreal housing project, activated by dawn-to-dawn lighting and sped-up sounds of a 24 hour cycle - alarm clocks, toilets flushing, kettles whistling, doors slamming, cars starting, radios blaring, conversations and arguments. Experiencing a 28-minute cycle is experiencing the absurdity of daily life.
Two decades later I still often think about this installation. In Scale 1440 I’m homaging Habitat’s system, now in a technological and cultural context of phone screen touching, and the high density solitude of being online in your room at 4am.
Scale 1440 will mint as an open edition, free for holders of previous projects in early January. Happy new year.
