Spin Theory

Spin Theory

Daniel von Sturmer and Andy Thomson’s Spin Theory was commissioned for the exhibition Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye. Curator Tyler Cann invited five contemporary artists to look anew at the interweaving of sound, vision and the verbal Lye’s work, and to consider the artist’s legacy.

Spin Theory responds to Len Lye’s best known films—these dazzling riots of colour, music, and words rendered by startlingly simple means: painting directly on the celluloid. Inspired in part by this relationship, and perhaps manifesting the very idea of ‘a colour box’, Andy Thomson and Daniel von Sturmer created Spin Theory. Here, illusion and reality, the poetic and prosaic, are mirrored like two halves of a palindrome.

A plane of translucent glass bisects the large vitrine; this screen, or membrane, separates two realms of experience. One, the initial appearance of a luminescent and faintly mysterious cabinet of moving colours, shadows and words; the other, a revelation that this phantasm is a construction of wire, mirrors and simple objects that revolve on cheap mechanisms. The work raises the notion that our reality—whether experienced as transcendent or mundane—is ultimately grounded in perception. No matter where we stand, the deeper, truer existence of things might always be found on the other side of the glass.

— Excerpted from Tyler Cann, Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye, 2012. Adapted for Collection Online, 2023.