The Trauma Factory

Jon Kessler was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1957.
The installation "The Trauma Factory" is set in motion by a mechanism that projects images onto four monitors. The televisions are framed by a simple wooden frame covered with mirrors on the inside. The mechanism, the mechanical centrepiece of the work, consists of a chain-link conveyor belt. On it, cut-outs from safety manuals for aeroplanes, illuminated by a light source, move in front of a small surveillance camera.

"This is from a group of works and installations I did between 2004 and 2017 that employed surveillance cameras and monitors. Consistent with all my work this piece started with a found object- the flight safety brochure usually found in the seat pocket of an airplane.
The idea for the piece was to subvert that notion of safety into something quite de-stabilizing by combining the moving image with the motion of the camera. Like most of the works in this series, I think of the pieces as having two components- a spectacle and an event that need each other to be complete. The spectacle is what appears in the mirrored box surrounding the monitors and the event is the mechanism that creates the spectacle in real time.
The title of the work is painted on the wooden enclosure. I replaced the English word THE with the German word DIE as a play on words and to emphasize the impending doom implied in the theme of the piece."