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Metrica
2023
Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter


THERMAL RECEIPT PRINTER; 10-YEAR THERMAL RECEIPT PAPER; WIFI ROUTER; CIRCUIT-BREAKER BOX WITH OUTLETS; DESK LAMP; BUILDING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (BMS) LIGHTING CONTROLS; CUSTOM BMS SOFTWARE WITH LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL TEXT ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS; LITHUANIAN METRIKA VOLS. 1 (1380-1584) AND 25 (1387-1546); TEXTS OF LITHUANIAN LEGISLATION CONCERNING POST-SOVIET PRIVATIZATION AND LAND REFORM (1991-1997).

SINGLE CHANNEL VIDEO WITH SOUND (5 MIN), LOOPING.

RUPERT’S LIBRARY (FOUND BOOKS), DUST JACKETS, PACKING MATERIALS (PALLET WRAP, DOCUMENT POUCHES, AIR BAGS, CARDBOARD).

MOUNTED LASER PRINT (35 X 27 CM), METAL FRAME (FOUND, RUPERT’S LIBRARY).

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Dipping into a pool of text sourced from Lithuanian state archives, records and bureaucratic documents of property from the 14th-17th centuries and 1990s post-Soviet land reform, Metrica (2023) revolves around the psychic malfunctioning of a building management system. Flicking the lights on and off at random, the system (controlled by a large language model) obsessively sorts through these historical texts – which it seems to have mistaken for its own memories – producing an endless cascade of receipts in the process. The receipts document the system’s attempts to self-describe its fragmented memories. Rippling outward from the receipt printer, the reading room itself become an extension of the building’s psychic, literary struggle: the library falls into a liminal state of transition, either going into or coming out of a state of deep storage; certain books seem to have lost their sense of stability, as text and images slide off dust jackets at oblique angles; a strange photograph of an excavated cellar floats on the wall; and the video on the monitor is stuck in a loop of perpetual dawn or twilight; all drenched in a day to night effect.


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Presented for Rupert’s ︎︎︎Earth Bonds (Rupert, LT), curated by Tautvydas Urbelis