This piece of ‘electronic sculpture’ re-purposes common, household clock radios to perform John Cage’s “Lecture On Nothing”. The clock radios have been hacked, (significantly modified electronically), to display alphabetical text. I call them ‘Type Radios’. There are four measures in each line of the printed lecture, displayed by four Type Radios sitting on a shelf in the gallery. Each Type Radio displays one measure’s text and the rhythmic structure of the lecture is experienced as a composition of the four. There are twelve lines of four measures per movement in the lecture, and the total piece consists of forty eight movements.

View of piece in action, showing electronics mounted under shelf, installed in the 2009 “Visual Fringe” exhibition in Wilmington, DE.

Scan of the first two movements, (shown above in video), of John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing”, originally printed in Incontri Musicali in 1959 and published in his book Silence by Wesleyan University Press in 1961

John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing”, is a quintessential text on existentialism. When this text is performed, (displayed), by clock radios, (one of the most common technologies used by people everyday), audiences are challenged not only by the question of functionality, (i.e. “How does that work?”), but they are confronted to question the value, materiality and purpose of technological development in our society.

Another View of piece in action, showing electronics mounted under shelf, installed in the 2009 “Visual Fringe” exhibition in Wilmington, DE.

View of piece from above, installed in the 2009 “Visual Fringe” exhibition in Wilmington, DE.

Close up view of 3 of the 4 Type Radios, installed in the 2009 “Visual Fringe” exhibition in Wilmington, DE.

This piece is a significant revision of the Type Radios technology which I first used in “If I Was an Activist“.