Between the Bells
Paper, ink, and audio
25' x 5'
2018
Strips of paper are attached to the wall. Audio plays in the room. The audio is a recording of a 6 hour 25 minute performance of one person clapping.

“The complicted state machinery… with it’s ubiquitious and complicated, military, bureaucratic, clerical, and judiciary organs, encoils the living society like a boa constrictor...” -Karl Marx

Transformation from one form to another: concrete labor, surplus labor, commodity, money capital, financial capital.

Mysticism is created as commodities turn into money.

Between the Bells thinks about the way the market links together concrete acts of labor between different individuals. Through this linkage a transformation happens where commodities turn into money. Labor is turned into statistics, charts, data.

Decissions are made from this detachment. $169 billion is traded every day on the New York Stock Exchange. During this trading lives are affected. Even the lives that are affected view the market as mystical. Where the trading that occurs is done by those people and out of control. For example, the New York Stock Exchange has an Opening and Closing ceremony that celebrates the beginning and end of the trading day by clapping and ringing a bell.

I mimicked and expanded upon this regimented schedule by clapping from the time the opening bell ended until the time the closing bell started. This six and half hour performance provided information that was interpreted into visual data. The visual graphs that abstract my physical labor parallels the idea of the stock market where systems of labor are abstracted and arranged into data that can be manipulated and traded. The abstraction of information detaches them from the lives that are being affected by their decisions. This example highlights the power that the transformation of information has. There is transformation occuring in the radical detachment from the real.