Guillotine 2013

A prototype for a machine guillotine. 2013. Helsinki

I cannot be entirely sure where the idea for a motorized quillotine originally came from and allthough at the time of it's conception I had been occupied for a while with thoughts about politics in general, I can assure that it wasn't a desire to chop of heads that gave seed to this monstrosity.

Firstly, I had been interested in mechanics and motion for a while when I started to think about constructing some form of a kinetic sculpture. Having been working with fire before a motorized instrument running on nothing less grandiose than a steam engine would have been the ultimate achievement in my mind at the time. Coming to grips with reality however forced me to scale down a bit but I never let go of the part about the mechanics with a motor as an option.

Now, it's quite hard to justify building such a conceptually hellish device that I did. A fact which in hindsight served as the driving force behind the project for me at the time. It was yet again not the actual outcome, which I endeavored to be complete as functional as possible with the resources at hand, but the process of making the thing that served me as an artist. During the manufactoring period I got to meditate on thoughts about the history of western democracy in light of the current global political turmoils of the world. Namely, the quillotine served to me as a symbol fro the french revolution and the rise of modern political movements and their gruesome origins. It'd be easy to dismiss all warring factions around the world as barbaric by nature but I would suggest that it's more productive in the long run that in someways we all have blood on our hands.

On a lighter note, I did enjoy coaxing a reaction out of the audience in our final exhibition. And I did enjoy the conversations that rose out of it which would be in my opinion be the point of this kind of artworks post their completion. It is fascinating how surprisingly strongly we react to such symbols that remind us of how brutal our human existance can sometimes be. And while I in these conversations insisted on the symbolic nature of this very real object and its sibling work Improvised Weaponry for the Ongoing Struggle for Our Daily Bread, it took quite abit of convincing on my part to assure people that I personally am practically a pacifist. 

The technical side of this project was yet again a bit of an adventure for me. I had very little experience in working with mechanics and due to my budget an early decision had to be made to construct the whole thing mostly out of recycled parts. All the wood parts were painstakingly dug up from construction yard trash piles. A discarded bicycle was dismantled so I could use it's gears for the mechanics and some additional cogs and chains were aquired from a recycling centre. After what was a very painstaking process of endless trial and error I got the machine to actually run with a power drill as it's powersource. However for the exhibition purpouses we had to make a collective decision to leave it as a stationary piece just for the safety of our audience. You could run the machine by rotating an atteched bicycle pedal and it ran fine but the continuous use of power tools that ran with 240 volts straight from the wall seemed for some people to be a bit risky. Go figure.