Pendulum is a mechanical installation producing an illusion of the image as well as giving a contemporary interpretation of kinetic-art sculpture − specifically, the latter refers to Duchamp's Rotorelief. The machine is constructed according to a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum (1842). The beginning of the story is portrayed in the movement of the Pendulum swaying from side to side; in this work, the image is produced not by a swinging motion but by the powerful circular rotation of LED diodes. The algorithm  for calculating the distance in relation to speed in a circular movement is more complex than the one Jahić used for her previous machine Scanner III where the movement is vertical. The image simultaneously appears and disappears. Another literary reference behind the work is the brutal machine in Franz Kafka's The Penal Colony (1914). It shows the artist's back scarred with the Harrow in the same way as The Officer in The Penal Colony inscribes the  laws into the bodies of The Condemned, as society inscribes its rules onto our identities.

Excerpt from the text “Sanela Jahić: Cerebral Values of Mechanical Beauty” by Ida Hiršenfelder, published in Passengers from the Absolute to the Relative (Publication Studio), 2011.

technical support: Andrej Primožič, Janez Zupan