January 24, 2009 - March 28, 2009 // OTIS Ben Maltz Gallery, Los Angeles
The Future Imaginary
Ed Osborn
project  |  about the artist

In Night-Sea Music, many small music boxes are driven by slow electric motors attached to them via rubber cables which curl and release intermittently.  The piece is titled after a John Barth story, Night-Sea Journey, which is narrated by a confused and not altogether enthusiastic single spermatozoa on its brief journey towards an unknown destination.  With its sperm-like movements and bright sound, the piece appears as cheerful as it is creepy. 

Its exposed wiring and mechanically organic actions refer visually to an earlier stage of technological development, one in which the system's inner workings are accessible — not reduced to a microscale and hidden inside layers of silicon.  Here framed by Norman Klein's work which often focuses on the space between the possible and the actual, Night-Sea Music suggests one trajectory of technology that perhaps had a vivid debut and a short existence.