Almost Entirely Sisyphus

Almost Entirely Sisyphus, a Kinetic sculpture, comprises of a re-engineered typewriter presented on a red velvet shelf. A total of twenty-nine servo motors connected separately to each key of the typewriter using nylon wire transforms the typewriter into an autonomous machine. Each servo motor is programmed using an Arduino board to pull the alphabets of the typewriter corresponding to the text data fed into the board. The data is the Archive of the names of people who have disappeared in various conflicts from various times and territories across the world. The typewriter, therefore, types the names of disappeared people but with no paper to record and register. The absence of paper transforms the names into abstract gestures and unregistered marks, problematising the impossibility of registering disappearance and its historical commemoration. By overturning the historical use of the typewriter as the bureaucratic object of recording and registering, the work evokes the disappeared and gathers them across various histories, languages, territories and times signifying an inter-referentiality between the invisible.