Churchillian 2
A room-sized installation that allows people to hand-crank the 2002 State of the Union Address. The frame was designed specifically for the large gallery space in order to create a kind of structure-stage-support. It was based on an abstraction of a map of America that was doubled by its own shadow on the wall behind. This was a result of a pale green projection onto the whole structure.
Visitors to the gallery were able to perform the State of the Union by turning a hand-crank, which advanced a closed loop of paper tape, which fed through a reader, which was then interpreted into syllables by an obsolete speech synthesizer.
Churchillian II is a large-scale version of the portable Churchillian I instrument. The cranking mechanism is scaled up so that one revolution of the crank involves the full range of a human arm and moves the papertape approximately one inch. A much longer length of papertape was used.
