Beyond the Screen

With the deadline looming for this semester I have been putting more effort into my practical work.

In keeping with my growing interests of global capitalism and the corruption of the institutions of power, this project is about all about money, gold, speculation, hoarding and empire.

My initial concept was basically a big black pyramid housing an electronic readout which would display the live price of gold. This was all about questioning the authority of gold as an index of value, and revealing the significance of the pyramid as a symbol of corrupt capitalism, or more specifically the unfair distribution of wealth and power that still surrounds us.

For a few reasons I abandoned this plan – one being the cost of constructing this pyramid. Sooo.. I decided to scale the whole thing down to make it more feasible. This lead me in an interesting direction, as rather than using a hacked electronic readout I realised I could use an iPhone, hidden inside a mini-pyramid, to display the gold price.

I commissioned a local plastic merchant to make this for me out of black and smoke perspex, but before Christmas I received a call to say the machine used to make this was broken! This leaves me in a slight jam, as he assures me it can still be done in time, but I would much prefer to not leave things to fate and to have something looking finished for the deadline.