What is it?
This machine features three sliders: “Charismatic Megaprojects,” “Incremental Tedium,” and “Wildcards.”
Each slider adjusts a corresponding video channel; all are blended together.
“Charismatic Megaprojects” (yellow) shows footage taken in the enormous Long Baseline Neutrino Facility caverns at a moment when it was illuminated only by headlamps.
“Incremental Tedium” (magenta) depicts a slow-motion minecart ride along a drift in the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
“Wildcards” (cyan) is a series of surreal two-second clips from inside SURF and nearby natural scenes, such as ducks and fish at the D.C. Booth fish hatchery in Spearfish, SD.
When making this artwork, I was thinking about what it must be like to assign funding to research projects for detecting unknown or hard-to-sense particles. “Hyperkinetic” is a disfavored term for what is now known as “ADHD”; as a resource allocator, this artwork lets you decide which projects are “funded” (really, just which video channels are shown).
Its design was inspired by the original occupant of the cabinet, an Instrolec 101 power supply. I believe this instrument may have been a small batch or prototype device, as its lettering was hand-applied Letraset Microgramma.