Michael Stevenson begins each of his projects by conducting in-depth research into specific improbable phenomena that contain not only complex narrative qualities but formal ones as well.
Michael borrowed doors from the offices of Liverpool John Moore’s University School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences for Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare, (2014). Local mathematicians passed through them thousands of times. The piece was dedicated to another mathematician, José de Jesús Martínez (1929–91), who founded the maths department at the University in Panama City, and who believed that the devil resided in the swing of a hinged door. The artist has taken this curious anecdote, and applied it as universal truth.
The doors were controlled in such a way as to reproduce and mimic this original proof. Michael, working with John Moores University’s mathematicians and computer engineers, paired each door swing with a computer game. The games engaged in a form of spiritual warfare, competing against each other to win the swing of the door. Embodied by an ordinary door, a moment of irrationality was inserted into the hallways of rational thought.
Michael Stevenson’s (b. 1964, New Zealand) lives in Berlin. Selected solo exhibitions include A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, 2012; Nueva Matemática, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2012; and A Question of How Things Behave, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, 2010, among others. In 2003 Stevenson represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale. He currently holds a full-time teaching professorship at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg.
Liverpool Biennial
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Liverpool L1 0BW
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James Moores