Whole, but Different
2019
sound installation
Ours is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with new
abstractions and complexities. From the loudspeakers to AI, we use technologies (and other bodies)
to augment our motor, sensorial states and capabilities – creating a feedback loop of environmental
affect. Yet some of the oldest technologies are the most enduring; technological development is
uneven and combined – combustion, the wooden spoon, the carrier bag are as central to many lives
as the smartphone. A World in Vertigo invites responses to the worlds first underwater tunnel. In a
prescient act of biomimesis – Brunel was inspired to construct the tunnel by the marine mollusc
Teredo Novalis- commonly known as shipworm. It eats its way through the timbers of ships excreting
the excavated wood out of its body to line and reinforce the tunnel behind them as it burrows
forwards. Marc Brunel devised the tunnelling shield, a rectangular frame with 36 cells, each cell
containing a man with pick and shovel. The clay they cleared before them was made into brick to line
the tunnel behind them as the shield was moved forward under the Thames. (Mel Jackson)
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Brunel Tunnel Entrance, Brunel Museum, Railway Avenue, Rotherhithe, London, SE16 4LF
Tuesday 25 th February 2019 RCA Sculpture Programme in the Thames Tunnel