The House of Dust by Alison Knowles
INHABITED BY BIRDS AND FISH
Tyler Coburn & Byron Peters, Resonator, 2016-17
A poster takeaway measuring 841 by 594mm, featuring drawings by Mummalaneni Bhargavi and designed by Frédérique Gagnon - A diagram on bond paper measuring 304x 61cm,
A .zip file available for download at http://amnudenda.com/3/Da.zip
Tyler Coburn and Byron Peters’s Resonator (2016-17) is multi-part project, exploring the phenomenon of resonant frequency. Supposedly, most things in the world have one or more resonant frequencies; if exposed to these frequencies, they’ll vibrate in sympathy, at greater and greater amplitude, to potentially destructive effect. In a famous demonstration, Nicola Tesla once affixed a pocket oscillator to a building under construction on Wall Street, threatening to bring it down. Tesla’s experiment was cut short, but when viewed allegorically (and somewhat whimsically), it shows the capacity of resonance to destroy capitalism—or at least, to beleaguer its infrastructure. Coburn and Peters’s project departs from this anecdote, imagining resonance as a vibrational and conceptual tool to challenge the power structures of the present day. For this iteration, they present a poster takeaway, a .zip file of schematics and documents, and a diagram. The reference point for these elements is Alexander Geirot’s 1921 Labor Organ, an instrument designed to communicate the conditions of work, powered by the excess energy of factories. Repurposing a 2013 patent for the “High Speed Processing of Financial Information,” Coburn and Peters here imagine a “Financial Organ” of similar capabilities, which can destroy finance capitalism through resonance.