Robyn Walton

OTHER THINGS: background noise

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I had, when sent by my Daddy to walk abroad, walked by design beneath the pylon wires and felt all the flesh of me begin to tingle as though some promising feather was being drawn near my skin. My every hair sang, and my teeth sang too, and overhead the wires hung in their swaying loops, heavy with messages.” 


— Nigel Cox, The Cowboy Dog, p69

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Marginalised, dysfunctional, or re-allocated utility is an existential crisis of the object: services that no longer serve, presented in order to be encountered by the viewer in a different way. As has been said regarding the artist Mathieu Mercier, the work oscillates between an art that would like to become utilitarian, and a utilitarian object that dreams of becoming a work of art. The secret life of these objects can be accessed by allowing their participation, or collaboration, as non-human agents.

Strange sentient beings emit a sense of life, occupying a subject/object twilight zone. Steel forms conduct and receive messages, gathering junk signals in the obsolete analogue television spectrum. Invisible activity is made manifest by outmoded technology. Such found background noise mediates an entre into a physical world of objects, via an overheard conversation.


This research attempts to access the subterranean essence of things, and perhaps snatch a furtive glimpse of philosopher Graham Harman’s tool-being in action.

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encounter 1
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bewitched
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wacky racer
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yagi bear
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knight rider

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