Do you know where you are?
Have you ever been in a place like this?"
WD40 is about listening out and letting things be, noticing them, hearing and seeing. It's also about many other things, but you have to figure those ones out by yourself.
The wardrobe is to be experienced by sitting by it for a while. Maybe you are lucky and the hostess (Cym) will let you see and hear how the wardrobe is opened and the machines turned on. Listen to the sound of harddisks going through a boot sequence, starting up. The noise from the fans and power supplies. Feel the wind (if there is any), or any other environmental noise. Maybe you come in the evening and feel the dusk in your eyes or skin. Do you hear any animals? An aeroplane high above, or car passing from the road? Listen closely to the sounds from the wardrobe and how they go with the sounds from surroundings. Sit and relax and feel the very slow rhythm of the installation that gives space to to everything else.
Wd-40 is a liquid that makes rusty machines move again. It makes things running smoothly. And being in life should be smooth, full of wonder and play. Unusal and complex events and people and animals and thoughts and feelings.
The moment we listen to the outside we hear the inside.
"The machines are everywhere [...], every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time it is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it [... The schizophrenic] does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer having any meaning whatsoever."[1]
The installation was realised only with free software: Debian GNU/Linux and Pure Data. The patches are available under GNU GPL at http://deviator.si/www/wd8/ and use just simple oscilators, noise generators, phasor~ and lowpass filters + a lot of random and metro objects. The hardware is recycled: a 166mhz and 200mhz pc machines. This couldn't be possible without cym's hospitality, wd8, many discussions and ideas, fruitful feedback and coffee.
[1] Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze+Guattari
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Documentation
Turn the installation on by turning on the power cord behind the bottom speakers.
Shark 4 has problems starting up if it was off the power for a while (half a day is enough). If it doesn't start reading the disks (hard to say), press DEL, F10, Y, ENTER.
Shark 4 has fixed IP 192.168.2.124, shark5 192.168.2.125, no gateway. It takes a bit to login through ssh cause there is no dns and it takes sometime to timeout. Login as root. The startup scripts are in /etc/init.d/ and links in /etc/rc2.d/