Pneuma 4

As phone booths in public spaces are becoming a rare sight and private landline telephones are biding their time hidden away in dark corners as obsolescent technology, Daniel Canogar's »Pneuma 4« can be seen as a last breath of this medium before it disappears, and as a memento mori.

A mess of discarded wires, which the artist salvaged from a dumpster, is one of the last remnants of the stellar 130-year success story of wired telephones. The jumble of cables suspended in the air becomes a projection surface for flashes of light. With these vestigial energy currents and information units moving through the wires, interrupted by interference, the installation seems like a modern reliquary.

The Ancient Greek word »pneuma« means “breath,” “soul,” or “wind;” or “spirit of God” in biblical texts. The telephone wire is the secular descendant of mythical ideas of immateriality and the energy responsible for the overall coherence of the world as well as communication with the absent.