Tremor Archive
2023
Kinetic Sculpture
Toner prints on foamcore, metal shelving, vibrating motors, electronics, and programming
5ft x 14ft x 7ft
Presented By
SATELLiTE Project Space. London, Ontario
Tremor Archive draws on the experiments of Ernst Chladni, who used vibration to organize grains of sand into shifting patterns across metal plates. The work applies this principle to contemporary labour, imagining workers as individual particles shaped by larger economic forces.
Photographs of Canadian labour protests from the past century are mounted, cut into fragments, and placed across repurposed industrial shelving. Electric motors vibrate the structure, causing pieces of different images and historical moments to collide and continually rearrange. As bodies, crowds, and landscapes break apart and reform, the archive becomes unstable, reflecting the fragmentation of collective labour under increasingly precarious working conditions.