Matthew Tickle: What I Thought at The Time

25 Sep-10 Oct 2010

Overview

Matthew Tickle uses the Geiger counter as an automatist device. The same radiant particles that pass invisibly, seemingly passively, through the walls of the gallery [and through you too] do in fact have an agency: they can turn zeros to ones. The sensitive system of a Geiger counter detects the ambiguous presence of these particles in their trajectory through our material world. The output pulse registers a click, just as the sound of a camera shutter indexes the capture of an image. The interval between these events is indefinable. In the case of this exhibition the gallery will be lit in response to the local background radiation. Three Geiger counters will control the permutations of up to six differently colored sets of lights. These will, in turn, produce complex interactions in the space; shading the images in a group of fifty photographs by casting light on them, tinting them, making connections unpredictable.