Step 1. Acquiring Iron Ore from Thomas Thwaites on Vimeo.

Thomas Thwaites is making a toaster.  That’s it.  He’s been doing it for months.  Yes, the thing you heat bread with.  If you’re uninspired then you probably don’t yet get what I mean by making a toaster.  Thomas Thwaites is making a toaster from, well, planet earth.  As though he were the sole survivor in an 80’s nuclear apocalypse flick who really, really wanted toast.

He’s mining iron ore for the heating elements and drilling oil for the plastic.  I guess it’s to do with the complete and irreversible disconnect between our individual lives and the things that fill it.  Or whatever.  Most of the reviews I’ve read wax all dystopian-like.  I find myself inspired by what a powerful and complicated machine we, all of us together, are.  A buggy machine to be certain, but an undesigned machine that undeniably works.  The toaster you get for $12 at Target was probably assembled by teenagers in some quite small fraction of an hour.  It also came from iron ore.  Thomas Thwaites’ toaster, if it ever months from now exists, will probably cost several thousand dollars and not be especially good at making toast.  That’s a lot of power coming from… somewhere.  Because it isn’t just that Thomas Thwaites doesn’t know how to make a toaster.  Literally nobody, not a single one of us, even toaster factory employees, really knows how to make a toaster entirely on her own.  I like that somehow.

Like Run Motherfucker Run but in a very different way, I think The Toaster Project is a piece that provokes in a way that doesn’t fit neatly into museum formulas.  And I think I’m inclined to blame museum formulas.  The Toaster Project belongs in somebody’s museum somehow, doesn’t it?