A tool that has no purpose is a joke-shop absurdity. A game that has no rules of win or lose is boring. It is no fun because it is futile. In certain hands, though, the futility itself becomes perverse fun. Perry Hoberman is a neo-dada nerd, an appliance-of-science artist who invents interactive machines and art games, the rules of which participants have to invent for themselves. Hoberman provides a series of contraptions that have no predictable influence on the work. Yet a steady stream of visitors grab the controls. Most look bemused, but some look half embarrassed and half-captivated.
In a dark, cavernous room at Bradford's National Museum of Photography, Film and Television are two installations, Workaholic and Timetable. Both consist of large circular screens laid out horizontally. The consoles for Timetable comprise a series of dials, variously marked Evolve, Flip, Heat and Bulge, that have some inexplicable influence on a 3D real-time digital screen. Pseudo-scientific concepts of time travel and parallel universes are evoked by mottled sci-fi blobs that warp and mutate to a soundtrack by composer Elliott Sharp.
Workaholic has a scanner pendulum that swings across a carpet of bar codes. Visitors can attempt to direct the erratic movement of the pendulum with hairdryers. Beepers beep and red spots rotate and flash. The piece could be interpreted as a comment on consumer culture, but the amusement-arcade aura militates against such a crass and literal reading.
One streetwise kid asked me, "What do you have to do?" I replied that I didn't think you had to do anything. In an interview in the exhibition catalogue, Hoberman says: "I want to make pieces that invite people to lurk. Lurking carries a pejorative meaning, but in fact it's a large part of experience." I lurked. The kid went bonkers with the hairdryer. It must be said that, of the two of us, he appeared to be having the better time.
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