My installation entitled SLOW is an imitation of a medieval writing desk. Its paper scroll displays millions of tiny, monochrome dots, sorted in 153 stripes. Each stripe is the equivalent of one day’s work under a magnifying glass, and each day means almost one hour of work – 123 hours altogether. This is my first project where provocative slowness emerges as a paradigm, which will serve as the working practice for my later pieces. This project does not end with the finished product. It is the witness of almost six months’ worth of work, and the aim of the process was not the creation of a tangible object but progression and permanent repetition, in the Kierkegaardian sense. The rotating mechanism turns the scroll around in 12.3 minutes, forcing the spectator to experience the slowness that characterized the working process. Each stripe consists of tiny dots, and the formation of each dot was accompanied by a rapping sound on the paper. I have recorded these sounds and they are played as the scroll keeps turning.
The arrangement of the millions of dots is, of course, completely random. The infinite number of possible permutations means the finished work is just one version out of all the potential end products. This is the first time I have left my work open in this sense, which, nonetheless, does not equate an unfinished piece.
This installation will become the cornerstone of the working method that characterizes my later pieces, even though the process here fell closer to automation than it does in my future pictures. I had to work with a set space, over a given period of time. While I have established a rigid and strict frame for this project, I welcomed the least amount of self-conscious moments into the workflow, striving for automation wherever possible.
