Exhibition

Michael Stevenson - Answers to some Questions about Bananas

13 Jul 2007 – 12 Aug 2007

Event times

Wednesday - Sunday 11.00 - 18.00

Cost of entry

Free Admission

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Vilma Gold

London, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • 48, 26, 55, 106
  • Bethnal Green
  • Cambridge Heath
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About

“Answers To Some Questions About Bananas“ is a re-telling of Michael Stevenson's recent encounters with the first economic computer ' a dedicated hydro-mechanical analog from the 1950's, and the story of how this machine became embroiled in the politics of the tropical world.

Stevenson's recent practice has been to recover, rehabilitate or reconstruct objects (obsolete instruments of state or commerce) that allude to particular outmoded political economies. Often these objects can be so historically embedded and conceptually complete that, merely through reconstruction and relocation new constellations are brought to bear.

Known as the Phillips Machine or Moniac, the hydraulic computer was developed at the London School of Economics by the New Zealand economist Bill Phillips who was at the time enrolled as a student. The Moniac, standing almost 2m high, is a representation of the monetary flow in a national economy.

The machine was first used at the London School of Economics as a pedagogical aid and, in contrast to electronic computers of the day was extremely visual: a fixed volume of water - dyed red to represent money - is pumped like blood through a circulatory system of transparent pipes and sluices. The fluid accumulations in the various holding tanks become the measure for the economic data. One of the original machines from the LSE forms part of the static display at the Science Museum London.

In total maybe 15 Moniacs were produced, marketed and shipped to cities world wide including Boston, Istanbul, Melbourne and Guatemala City.

Charting a peculiar export of the time - Western economics and its quixotic quest in the tropical world - Stevenson's unfulfilled search for the lost Moniac purchased by the Central Bank of Guatemala led to his facsimile of that model. This replica will be the centrepiece of the installation at Vilma Gold. Together with film footage and other material, the installation alludes to an economy based on the banana and the thwarted search for national prosperity.

This project began in San Francisco in 2006 as the Capp St. project at the CCA Wattis Institute where his working replica Moniac was left unattended for the duration of the exhibition reducing it to a ruinous economic state.

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