Kingdom of the Emancipated Companion Animal
2007 -- 52" x 74" x 96"
The Kingdom of the Emancipated Albino Companion Animal is a sculptural installation work that can be installed with or without Duke and Battersby's video Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure. The piece is made from a one-ton piece of maple, carved into a throne upon which a fox, a bobcat and an albino buck are mounted. The wood is sanded and waxed to a high gloss and all its natural depressions and dimples are lined with blonde mink. The work inquires into the problems of humanism and our fetishisation of the natural world.
Rest for the Wicked
2006 -- 18' " x 5' " x 2'"
In Duke and Battersby's first significant sculptural work Rest for the Wicked, eighteen feet of a forked maple tree hovers miraculously above the floor, suspended between two walls. Its underside is illuminated with low-wattage rope-lights. The piece, planed flat on the top, sanded to a furniture-grade and finished with tung oil, serves as a bench for viewing their video Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure.
A Year in the Life of the World
Currently under development.
A Year in the Life of the World is an immersive, multi-channel video installation. The work creates a new map of the earth through the arrangement of approximately 200 video landscapes within a domed room. Images from each webcam will be archived for one year, starting in the spring of 2006. The finished work will be a portrait of one year in the life of the world.
The Archiving Process: For this project, we needed to find a way to capture, catalogue and store video data from over 2000 web cams around the world. To that end, we have written a computer program called Plover that can be run in the background on any Macintosh computer. The program links that machine (the client) to a server. The server sends instructions to the client on which cams to capture and receives and holds the data the client collects, as well as reporting any problems encountered to the system administrator. The user interface allows clients to access information about the type and amount of data they’ve provided, as well as information on the status of the projects as a whole. The video data, as well as GPS, time and date information from the cams, will periodically be downloaded by the system administrator and stored on disc.
Download the Plover client to help collect images
Paper Work
Eye Level Gallery 2005