On it (American Voodoo Wish Machine)
The car, a 1989 white Ford Taurus, is on the floor in park. It's surrounded by seven hundred bottles. In the gallery, before the performance, I wrote out a wish for each bottle in one sitting; pen not leaving paper, eight hours, seven legal pads, and one full pen. I drank a bottle of wine down to the label and put the wishes in the bottles. Then I invited a small recording crew and other people who helped with the project into the space. I started the car and put a large block of wood down on the gas pedal. The emissions are siphoned out of the gallery by a hose connected to the exhaust. As the wish machine ran, it built up energy from the gears of the car working against itself and transferred it to the touching bottles, amplifying and changing the pitch of the vibrations. The sound emitted from the bottles are the wishes leaving the room. The function of the wish machine is not to make your wishes come true, but to make you not want them. Then the engine broke down and caught fire. The ritual is my own brand of American Voodoo.