On a Universal Serial Bus*
2015
This survey of works by Dexter Sinister at Kunstverein München (2 October – 22 November 2015) followed from three smaller projects the same year in New York, Athens, and Bregenz. Their individual titles combined to form a single looping sentence: I’ll be your Interface / Broadcasting from the Aether / At 1:1 Scale / On a Universal Serial Bus.*
The show was based on a simultaneous publication of audio/visual works released in the form of a USB memory stick. This drive contains four projects, while the exhibition presented those same projects as a series of objects and installations across four self-contained spaces. A speaking asterisk greeted visitors at the entry staircase, programmed to speak the USB stick’s explanatory “readme.txt” file in the synthesized voice of curator Mason Leaver-Yap. This was followed by the three-screen projection “Identity”, collections of physical and digital artefacts from the sprawling “documents opera” True Mirror and the no less sprawling “time machine” The Last ShOt Clock, before concluding with the animated character study Letter & Spirit.
All of this was also compressed into an eponymous book, the third in the Kunstverein’s Companion series, which provides supplementary material written and formatted from within the middle of the production of each piece: the script for Identity, a poem that initiated True Mirror, the complete “incantation” from The Last ShOt Clock (also performed by Dexter Sinister before an audience on the evening of 3 October 2015), and the full-length essay version of Letter & Spirit.
*