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?

The title is the only text panel.  B minus maybe for the 2005-y technology.  But it redeems itself with production values.  The first time you speed up and the panic button-less motor-driven conveyor speeds up to meet you is a genuine, primal “Oh sh*t, what now?” moment.  And how many of your exhibits can do that?  Hat tip to any interactive that requires a waiver.  Yeah, the name isn’t why your museum can’t have it.  Watch until the end of the video.

(It is actually an interesting question to me, though.  Run Motherfucker Run was the audience darling of the festival circuit.  Why can’t your museum have it?  I mean that as, you know, a thought experiment.  What, if anything, about it would need to change?  What, if anything, about your museum would need to change?)

I know there’s lots of strong opinions about the new BMW Muesum in Munich (although I can’t be bothered to remember what any of them are) but this is undebatably clever.  714 metal spheres hanging from thin steel wire winches powered by individual high-precision stepper motors.

Today I made a snazzy Flash interface for a digital photography archive.  What did you make?

In our defense Richard Wilson spent about $900,000 doing this installation for the Liverpool Biennial.  I got a chance to see his Slice of Reality installation when I was at Millennium Dome.  Yeah, but I bet he doesn’t know Flash.

Um, am I at Cambridge or Burning Man?  Who says steampunk is just for thirty-six year-old Linux admins with male-pattern receding dreadlocks?  (Oh.  That was me.  But this clock is cool. Was the point I started to make.)  This design is ingenious in more ways than I can blog about without wanting to retire in deference.

The functioning Chronophage clock was designed, built and funded (to the tune of $1.83 million) by philanthropist/inventor/Cambridge alum John Taylor and is currently hanging at the (not-coincidentally named) Taylor Library at Corpus Christi College Cambridge.  The face is a single five-foot sheet of gold-plated stainless steel shaped in part by controlled explosions.  There are 2,736 LEDs that are always on and revealed by three idependently-rotating perforated steel rings.

The project website is here: www.chronophage.co.uk but you can actually get more design details by googling for wowed geeks.

Flooded McDonald’s is a film work by Superflex.  Produced by Propeller Group (Ho Chi Minh City) in association with Matching Studio (Bangkok - super-talented and kind folks with the cringingly-lamest “Creative Firm #7″ $29.95 Flash template-looking website ever) and co-produced by the South London Gallery, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark) and Oriel Mostyn Gallery (Wales) with bucks from the Danish Film Institute.

Next time you and your mates have a great idea over pints, remember that Superflex built a fucking McDonald’s and flooded it.  For, like, art. There’s an important life lesson for us all in there somewhere.