The Air Loom
2022 by Peder Bjurman (SE) and Mark Holthusen (US) Voice: Blixa Bargeld Music: David Coulter
Duration: 30 min. running as a loop over several hours.
Venue size: 18x12 m black box or dark gallery space. Height: min 3,50m Tech: 4 x 10K video projectors, and a 5.1 surround sound system + 12 small speakers.
THE AIR LOOM PROJECT explores the new technologies defining our future, as we are letting them trace, track and collect our identity. Transgressing into the personal realm of our inner thoughts, doubts and demons, the installation piece examines the relationship between perception and paranoia, the self and its mirror image, exhibition and voyeurism.
Inspired by a true story, The AIR LOOM is a largescale sound and video- installation consisting of a box screen, directional speakers and the voice of Blixa Bargeld, in the role of the Influence Machine itself. Video artist Mark Holthusen has designed the system of see-through screens, as a box maze for the audience to walk around or enter, and the hauntingly beautiful flow of imagery, that along with David Coulter’s eerie score creates a slightly hypnotic ambiance. Artist Peder Bjurman, who’s behind the concept, has written a text evolving around the self as illusion, the sense of selling your soul and the new abstract and fictional world deeply affecting our perception of reality.
“The only way out is in”, as the Influence Machine tells us.
Concept, text, direction: Peder Bjurman
Voice over: Blixa Bargeld
Visuals: Mark Holthusen
Music: David Coulter
Technical Director: Daniel Ohlsson/UKK
Sound design: Johan Adling
Welding: Anders Klingmark
With thanks to James Blackshaw, Thomas Bloch, Jean-Jacques Palix, Sebastian Rochford, Jake Rodriguez, contributing to the sound track. Fabrics from Showtex/ Charlie Andersson.
Supported by the Swedish Art Grants committee, Kulturbryggan. Thanks to Stefan Karsberg, Riksteatern.
BACK STORY OF JAMES TILLY MATTHEWS (1770-1815)
Considered a lunatic in his own time, tea merchant James Tilly Matthews unknowingly foresaw the future surveillance technologies when hallucinating and dreaming up the AIR LOOM, a mind reading machine capable of inducing, monitoring and affecting his inner world and ideas. He is the first documented case of paranoid schizophrenia in medicinal literature and perhaps the first known tinfoil hat. Upon his return from revolutionary Paris in 1797, he was suspected of being a double agent, both in France and England, and was thrown into the notorious Bedlam’s Hospital. There he soon developed a severe paranoia and thought an Influence Machine called The Air Loom, operated by a gang of foreigners, slowly was taking over the world. Bedlam’s chief apothecary John Haslam’s record of their sessions, “Illustrations of Madness”, became a bestseller of its time. The inmate J.T. Matthews answered by writing a record of his own about his doctor, mirroring him. While imprisoned he also designed and drew a concept for a new healthier and modern asylum, that after his death was to be built according to his ideas.