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PASSAGE OF THE RED QUEEN

2016

Sound sculpture

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Electromagnetic coils, frequency converter, Hp motor, battery, wood, stainless and austenitic steel

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Developed with the support of the City of Bergen and the Arts Council Norway, in cooperation with SEKO Elektroteknikk AS.

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." 

– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

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From Nikola Tesla’s industrial discovery of rotating magnetic fields and his 'Egg of Columbus', the balancing copper egg spinning at tremendous speed, parallels are drawn to the Red Queen and Alices conversation in the book 'The Looking-Glass Land.' Which later came to give name to the hypothesis 'The Red Queen's Race', under the interpretation that organisms constantly must adapt, evolve and proliferate, in order to stay at the same place, or else they go extinct.

 

'Passage of the Red Queen' consists of a steel egg, expanded into a self-supporting spherical shape. The applied electromagnets' periodic shift of power fields attracts the steel, causing the sphere to a slow hesitant rotation on the platform it balances and reflects.

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Phone: 0047 96876384, Email: cecilia.mb.jonsson(at)gmail.com

© Cecilia Jonsson

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