WIPIN’
WIPIN’
Print, Metal, Mechanical Component, and Cloth
 2025
165 x 100 x 41 cm
A mechanised cleaning arm repeatedly wipes the centre of a printed image of a dirty window, yet the surrounding dust, and bird droppings remain untouched. The work critiques automation’s illusion of progress: appearing productive while achieving nothing. It questions the paradox of labour under capitalism, where cycles of maintenance and automation replace but never truly eliminate human effort.
Where accelerationists like Nick Land envision machinic liberation, WIPIN’ lingers in the grotesque comedy of failure. The machine, blind to its own futility, scrubs at an illusion. A photograph of grime it can never cleanse, enacting capitalism’s blind faith in progress through Sisyphean ritual. Dirt persists, the window remains static, and the cloth’s relentless motion devolves into tragicomedy, underscoring what Amanda Beech terms automation’s “fatal antagonism”: a paradox where promises of liberation collapse into perpetual stasis. The wiping arm’s choreography mirrors late capitalism’s demand for motion without progress, its myopic efficiency exposing automation as a flawed sacrament; labour abstracted into pure, meaningless gesture. Here, humour becomes a subversive tool, estranging the familiar to reveal systemic absurdity. Unlike Land’s fantasies of escape velocity, WIPIN’ traps both machine and viewer in a feedback loop of unfulfilled potential, where transcendence is endlessly deferred.
Automated World