Devices for Progress is a series of photographic images of what appear to be makeshift machines, situated within a workshop or design laboratory environment. The photographs offer the viewer ideas of actual potential objects that are visually anything but cutting edge; instead, they are clumsy and awkward. Their mechanical form indexes the body that has produced them. This project was inspired by a number of visits made to science and engineering museums in order to investigate the design of handheld consumer electronic devices. I found that the objects on display and in archives, in most cases, looked exactly like the final product that was presented to market. I had expected to see unfinished hotchpotches of machines, exposed working components and a cacophony of tangled cables. This was disappointing and I decided to create my own inventions to (re)create some of the imagery that existed in my imagination.
Images: Viewer, Sustainer, Communicator, each 70 x 50 cm, lambda print, 2009
A piece of writing about this work is featured in vol.11 of the journal culture machine