"Departure"

"Departure" is a proposed installation for the Chinati Foundation for 2006. It resembles an airport destination sign, with rows of changing information about flights soon to take-off. But the first noticeable difference is that, where one would expect to see the names of cities such as "Tokyo" and "London", instead are 100 place-names from utopian and dystopian literature from the 15th century up to the 1970s. These include such fictional locations as "Erewhon" from Samuel Butler's novel of the same name, and "Pala" from Alduos Huxley's book "Island", to Margaret Atwood's dystopic "Gilead" from "The Handmaid's Tale".

Each changing line of text is spelled out using the technology contemporary to the period in which the works were written, from simple clockwork mechanisms for the earliest literature to vacuum display tubes for the latest. The information changes fairly slowly for the earliest utopias, and changes faster, the later its source, with the entire process changing every hour. "Departure" posits questions of why technology--long seen as the facilitator of utopias--has brought us no closer to that desired state and indeed, often brings us closer to dystopia.