David Jablonowski
Looped Message
2011

The weathered structure on the glass is what remains of an Omnigraph. This device was developed in the early part of the twentieth century to teach officials who worked with radio and telegraph how to work with Morse code. The large coil spring served as the drive. The code was applied to the edge of the disc in the middle where the code would be read by an actuated lever.
The recorder next to it is its counterpart: a modern, digital device, that is nothing more than the housing for the transport and storage of ones and zeros.
The “Zip” or the zipper, serves as the connecting element. It is a reference to both the physical and the digital world. The zipper as a physical instrument and at the same time as a compressed or “packaged” file, of which “zip” is the extension. The correlation comes in the fact that in both cases it employs a mechanism to open and close a cover or a package.
Looped Message (Archive.zip) is the title of the work. With this David Jablonowski examines the relationship between the analog and the digital, the physical and the virtual reality. He makes an attempt to return from digital to analog. To be clear, as a step forward, not as a step back.
How can you connect both of these realities, the physical and the virtual? How do we transmit information, and what role is played by both the content and the carrier? Furthermore: how does our image and communication culture relate with that of the past?


Other works from this artist: