FULCRUM 

One does not have to consider this artwork as the rethinking of Zeno’s paradoxes, although such vision is plausible as long as the universe is expanding. 

It seems we moke Achilles. Yes, we moke, and we do it coldly, but at the same time Achilles is regarded as one living person. Thus, it’s apparent that this way we moke ourselves. Achilles has feelings, just as we have. He has common fears and unigue ambitions. He has his personal margin for error. The last is important. Our time is irreversible, so the expiriens has a high price. Mistakes of our predecessors are as a true jewel. We learn from them to win some extra time. 

Our gaze is directed through different overlapping projections. Firstly, we look at Achilles as an abstract figure, the protagonist of Zeno's talea bout a man chasing a tortoise; secondly, a hero of historical myth, that is superimposed on another Zeno’s prank, the dichotomy of an arrow fligt. Our modern knowleges give new sounding to an old sheet music. The sum of these views makes effect of laser excitation and we can burn the large three dimensions pyrography to portray our superstitions.

Here is Achilles, wasting energy, chasing for illusion. He is like a muscle machine, running away from himself and his destiny, and his young body is ostensibly immersed in amber of time. He hangs between two variables. A tortoise, the past of him, is afore. A bow arrow, that is his future, is behind. Sorry, it’s unbecoming easy to hunt for paradoxes! But it’s a story about the maturing. 

METHOD: reductio ad absurdum.  Destruction of the psycho pattern through bringing it to absurdity. By the way Zeno the Great showed us this excellent mode. Let’s be worthy! Let’s be like Zeno!

INSTRUMENT: APORIA. But it isn’t speculative. This is a mechanical device. 

The anti-machine that is made look-like a tower clock movement. It seems, that the mechanism doesn’t perform any useful action. Just some warmth comes out. Believe it or not, this is an illusion...

We see no arrows “behind the clock face glass”. We see no numbers too. The clock doesn’t count time. The solar part has a manual drive that allows an interactive function. We could be complicit with this illuminative mechanism.

A bullet-time video of Achilles looks ghostly, combined with a hard material tower clock movement.

The semi-transparent cracked-ice layer of the dial receives the bullet-time video art with a diamond fog effect.

We play with dopamine to provoke APOPHENIA. The machine looks like a true museum exhibit. Its grainy surface cheekily apes that good old crude iron cast in a sand flask and sodden with grease.

We can see the clock’s heart. It’s arty-crafty intricate. It’s the brilliant black of oil. It fluctuates steadily with the sun in spite of the moon. All the arrows and numbers are left somewhere outside. They aren’t important for the clock movement. In fact, according to Zeno, they should hang in time. That is, a great number of arrow copies should be near every mark on the clock face. Whether it’s so or not, it doesn’t matter. The clock doesn’t count time. Time for machines is only a by-product of thermodynamics. In reality, the clock counts energy. It counts it accumulating and converting and spending.

So, gears of our anti-machine don’t have to touch each other’s teeth. They should be connected with Achilles’s mind. In this way thoughts would spin with a fresh vigor crushing the clay legs of the hypocritical colossus named APOPHENIA. 

Wow, we can dream! As we know, the giant, named APOPHENIA, has two faces. It can be like a lovely cat or a bloody predator. It enriches the strong and kills the weak. But we can’t destroy this giant. It’s impossible. It’s a part of us. That is what makes us, HOMO LUDENS, playful people. Dopamine makes us different from machines. Well, what do we have in sum? What’s useful in this artwork? We can use this machine to explore ourselves at least a little bit better.

TECHNOLOGY

MAIN MATERIAL: steel s235 (сталь Ст3сп), pentafthalene varnish.

DIAL SURFACE RECEIVING A VIDEO PROJECTION: 6mm gauge steel grate on face, 2.5mm gauge cracked ice polystyrene inside and 10mm gauge plywood backside.
VIDEO: The diamond fog effect of the video art will be made on cracked ice polystyrene by a LED-projector equipped with the low-resolution 800x480 pixels TFT-matrix.

WORKING PARTS OF MOVEMENT: threated axles with sealing bushings and wedge keys, radial bearings 8104/6200/180200 (10x30), tapered roller bearings 7203/30203 (17x40) and 7204/30204 (20x47), 8x speeds bicycle chains, gears and tension rollers, springs, an electrical motor.

TOOLS: unique homemade machines and simple tools including shaped hammers and anvils, a screw press, an English wheel, an air hammer, a milling machine, a roller bender and lever benders; also there were used a bead-roller by FBD and a shrinker-stretcher by Holzmann, manual electrical tools by Bosch, Makita, Sparky, TeslaWeld and Yamazaki Mazak CNC laser (outsourcing).

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

Made by DEED’CO

Author: YEVHEN CHESANOV (known as YEVHEN DULYA)

Production period: July 2018 – February 2019

Production location: Ukraine, L’viv

Dimensions of the visible side in assembled form: X=2720mm Y=327mm Z=3355mm
Depth of the invisible part Y≈300mm (this dimension may be larger if a wall has no back room)
Dimensions of the separate unit: the larger are 914x1197x263mm and 1200x1200x6mm (adapted to shipping on standard pallets 1200mm long)