Apparatus for Viewing Transdimensional Mechatronic Variants of a Set Cause I–IV
Apparatus · Public Art · Boggo Road Urban Village, Brisbane
In Brisbane today, nothing is known of a Cornelius Dempsey who was born and died in obscurity last century. He did nothing of enough note to warrant a sentence in history. In this universe. But in one of the many alternate Brisbanes in quantum space, another Cornelius Dempsey was sentenced to life in Boggo Road Jail for a crime he did not commit, and his journals show a brilliant mind at work. He built a tunnel, not under the wall to freedom, but through universes and dimensions.
The four machines are the portals he left behind. Each is a pedestrian-scale time machine: wind the handle and a DC generator powers the lights and wakes the hidden automaton inside.
Machine I is the moment of conception, a stereoscopic view of Cornelius in a wooden chair dreaming up the machines. Machine II shows a stereoscopic rotoscope of Brisbane reimagined as a city on the moon. Machine III reveals an underwater Brisbane, viewed by another Cornelius from a submarine. Machine IV holds a sterling silver tunnelling machine, as a parallel Cornelius tries to dig out of his own cell.
This series was my first major steampunk public artwork and the start of the imagined histories that run through my work since. The silver automata were drawn in 3D, cast, and assembled by jeweller Rebecca Ward.
- Client
- Project Services, Queensland Government
- Dimensions
- Each 2220 H × 1000 W × 1600 L mm
- Materials
- Stainless steel, cast bronze, copper, brass, found vintage objects, sterling silver, LEDs, DC generators, super capacitors
- Completed
- 2010
