VOLKSEMPFÄNGER: ARTWORKS BY dAVID K.: ELI WHITNEY MUSEUM LEONARDO CHALLENGE

20130421

ELI WHITNEY MUSEUM LEONARDO CHALLENGE

Annually the Eli Whitney Museum celebrates invention and innovation with a fundraiser named for Leonardo da Vinci.

This year, the theme of 'the brush' inspired this entry - noting the role of the brush in the work of another great inventor of all time, Nikola Tesla. Here, Tesla is immortalized in Byzantium Icon style with a halo engineered from a brushless polyphase AC induction motor armature:

david K

Brushless Byzantium: Nikola Tesla Icon

Mixed media: mylar, paper and rubber stamp

11 x 8 1/2 inches

2013

The Volksempfänger ("people's receiver") was a radio receiver developed in 1933 to make radio technology affordable to the general public for propagandistic reasons. Despite the nature of the broadcasts the radio was intended to receive, the evil genius of the device was the efficient nature in which messages could be directly disseminated to the masses. The internet is the modern equivalent of the Volksempfänger - it costs little, it reaches millions of people, and one should be very, very critical of the rubbish emanating from it.