What is it?
Interactive: You may turn the knob to clarify one of the gauges—but only one.
“Ungenauigkeit” was the term used by Werner Heisenberg when describing his “uncertainty principle,” although I’ve been told that “imprecision” or “unknowability” might be a better translation. The math is quite certain.
The “uncertainty principle” stipulates that for a given particle, you can know its momentum or its position—but never both. (There are other correlating pairs of variables like this too.)
For this artwork, I imagined a “Heisenberg Machine Works” in Copenhagen, in reference to Heisenberg’s home base, although—erratum—I have erroneously placed it in the Netherlands instead of Denmark. (Perhaps it exists there too in a state of superposition?)
