Biennial Artist: Sam van Aken
Run Time: 8:00
Sam van Aken (United States, born 1972), Thumper, 2007, 80 subwoofer speakers, car stereo amps, 60 x 60 inches x variable. Lent by the artist.
I am in the business of white whales and windmills, a maker of crude stand-ins and magical devices. My practice is of imitation and approximation, allusions to where our sense of the sublime has expanded. These fragments and frames are only a means to make tangible that which has no form. Here, the real is artifice. It is staged in dissonant moments, in verisimilitudes constructed in the gaps between the lived, the fictive, and the desired. My aim is the exstatic, a potential, an experience of being more than alive.
Thumper is a prototype for a four-dimensional object, a form that is dynamic and continuously changing. Drawing together the utopian inventions of Buckminister Fuller and the customizing found in car culture, Thumper houses eighty subwoofer speakers within a six-foot geosphere. Varying in frequency and rate, the bass lines propel the geosphere.
Watch Sam’s artist talk.