Artificial Utility Box and Artificial Transformer

Modern culture, especially Western culture, is grounded and embedded in a complex system of interlocking grids. These grids are so pervasive they have become virtually invisible. Some grids are literal and observable, such as street, sewer, telephone, and electrical systems: while others are conceptual and largely invisible: information systems, digital code, and even organizations themselves. In an effort to address our passive disconnection from the grid, I created “artificial” or simulations of transformers that symbolically function as signs of the ubiquitous, invisible, interlocking grids in Western culture. My transformers are realistic, but they have a strange, plastic quality, making them simultaneously familiar and foreign. They are complete with artificial vocalized, white noise sounds that mimic those emitted by the vents that surround us everywhere. They are invisible yet critical to modern life.