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kottke.org posts about Fabian Oefner

Everyday Objects, Sliced

a sculpture of a shoe sliced apart and put loosely back together

a sculpture of a camera sliced apart and put loosely back together

Fabian Oefner takes physical objects apart and puts them back together into exploded/fragmented sculptures.

The sculptures of the Heisenberg Series are based on Werner Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle. This theory states, that you can not measure two separate parameters of a particle simultaneously. You can either determine one parameter and ignore the other or vice versa, but you can never know everything at once.

Oefner took this idea from the world of physics and created an artistic equivalent of it. The sculptures are made of five different everyday objects: shoes, a clock, a tape recorder and a black box. The artist filled these with resin and carefully sliced them into hundreds of individual parts. He then rearranged the slices into a distorted new version of the object, that lets you see its inner workings.

Through this transformation, the objects have a peculiar effect on their observer: When you look at them from a distance, you can easily identify the object. However, if you start to get closer to observe its inner workings, the shape of the object starts to get distorted and vanishes completely. As an observer you are never able to observe the object as a whole and its inner workings simultaneously. The more accurately we see one view, the less clearly we see the other.

When I first glanced at Oefner’s images, I thought they were uninterestingly digital โ€” 3D-generated images digitally manipulated or some such โ€” but they’re real-world things actually sliced apart. (via colossal)