Adrien Cater

“Bip-Bip”

A 1:1 reproduction of the exhibition space, displaced by a few meters – an unanchored yet mundanely, concretely, uncanny valley.

In the first episode of the Chuck Jones “Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner” series of cartoons which aired in 1949, the hungry Wile E. Coyote, after failing with rocks and rockets, introduces a scheme of visual chicanery by painting a life-sized mural depicting a road and tunnel leading though a solid rock face. The roadrunner fails to notice this trap, and proceeds to run through the illusory tunnel. Such a ruse and consequent chute would fail as a gag in a photographic reality: the Coyote is shown to paint a simple caricature of a tunnel, using only a few colors and quick strokes: the camouflage matches not the environment of the desert, but of the cartoon.

To say nothing of matching perspective made possible only by a fixed “lens“ “filming” the action, the photographic version of this machination would be laborious and the results far too imperfect, as can clearly be seen here.

wallpaper, 587 × 300 cm

Unit

Quantum physics informs us that outcomes are influenced by observation or measurement. A (virtual) object is proposed in this space: 1 cubic meter of Casio F-91W wristwatches – a volume of measurement. Perhaps the premise to a nonsensical physics thought experiment, one can ponder how many watches are in this cube, but can one think about how much time is in there? How many of these black cubes would be necessary to cause a gravitational collapse into a black hole, and what would happen to all that time?

Accuracy vs. Precision

The exact measurement of time is an essential technology for photography. Improvements in one technology (such as the sensitivity of film) require improvements in others (precise exposure times).

There was indisputably an exact moment (1/10’000 of a second) at which a flash exposed this image. Though the precise moment of exposure could be accurately measured by or within the image itself, all things being imperfect, the Casio F91-W is rated at an accuracy of only +/– 1 second per day, and only the precision of whole seconds are displayed and recorded.

While avoiding any questions of authenticity I photography, it can be noted that this image could, for one second, serve as an accurate representation of the current time for the viewer.

digital color print, 58 × 36 cm