GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction

Artwork

GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction

installation
2010
Mark Leckey – GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction
Mark Leckey – GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction

Video, 16:25 min.
Courtesy: Mark Leckey, Cabinet Gallery, London & Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

In Mark Leckey’s GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction, a monolithic black refrigerator stands in front of a green screen, musing upon its own existence. Its monologue, spoken by the artist with a digitally distorted voice, offers observers insights into its thoughts. The fridge describes its daily tasks, gives explanations of itself and its control panels, its outstanding (freezing) properties, and also its cosmological connectedness with things, with the sun, the moon, and the stars. The monologue is based on passages from the holy Mayan book, Popol Vuh, a treatise on Marcel Duchamp written by Calvin Tomkins, and fragments from the technical description of the refrigerator. Through an image search, the household appliance attempts to find “friends”—objects that look similar to it. Its search leads to images of black limousines, smartphones, game consoles, and computer cases, as well as the Kaaba of Mecca. The more or less intelligent fridge offers an inkling of what awaits us in the Internet of Things.