Meta Grgurevič
Joule Thieves

Exhibition
21 June–14 July 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

In her latest project Joule Thieves, artist Meta Grgurevič combines her interest in the fundamental principles of mechanical systems with years of research into energy production. The installation experiments with basic physical phenomena that can be used to create one of the core units of contemporary society and its products – information. Natural phenomena such as light, time, force and electricity are entangled into a mechanism that functions as a poetic production chain of human and non-human agents.

As part of the project, the artist has developed a completely analogue optical device powered by mice running on a wheel. The mechanism used in the installation takes as its starting point the workings of Théâtre Optique, the predecessor of the cinema projector, and combines the technologies of clockwork and zoetropes with a specially developed unit for generating and storing electricity. The construction, with its completely transparent and cumbersome mechanism for generating projections, lays bare the material (and energy-consuming) basis of electronic media. It ironises the typical connection between input and output, work and effect, extraction and consumption, and departs from the idea of autonomous systems operating in an infinite closed loop. Even when mice that power the mechanism toil for hours, they create little energy, yet the construction nevertheless creates a surplus of voltage by using a joule thief circuit, but this ultimately allows for only a brief projection. 

The project thus speculatively reflects on how energy could be produced, stored and used (differently) and creates a microenvironment that transforms the production loop into a system where man, nature and technology are directly interconnected.