Pressure Cooker

About

The history of art runs parallel to the history of technology. Artists seeking novel forms use novel tools, and today’s technologies are no different – except that the sublime, or unknowable subject, has paradoxically become the very tool used to seek its understanding. 

Pressure Cooker is an assemblage of work meditating on both the natural and artificial sublime. 

Throughout history, Nature was the indifferent source of entropy that most threatened the fragile order of humankind. Faced with this existential threat, humans created technologies to understand, predict, manipulate and master the natural world: Technology such as the the clock tower, which standardized time and detached it from the sun in a public setting;  photography, which rendered motion previously imperceivable to the human eye; the locomotive, which collapsed geographic distance; and telecommunication, which enabled the instantaneous transfer of information. 

The tipping point was the advent of the atomic bomb, by which we weaponized the primordial building blocks of the natural universe. We had simultaneously created something the workings and scale of which the human mind could not grasp, but the proliferation of which represented the end of every individual life. Seven decades later, technology has outgrown us, and has replaced nature as our collective sword of Damocles. 

In conclusion, we ought to appreciate living in the time that we do. For example, our world, or at least shrinking portions of it, can accomodate the occiasional rogue act of god. That’s good! And it’s a shame, an honest shame, that our forefather’s worked so hard to climb up the food chain, only for us to sit atop our perch and scribble- struck dumb by our own shadow cast over the rest of the world.