Max Couper hand built a large metal structure that was a fully functioning conveyor belt for his work The Endless Conveyor. Visitors entered the space and were allowed to step up on the the slowly moving belt. If they did, they rode past a wall which had 486 images projected on it by a computerized programme of slides on six projectors. Couper added to the images a sound space of nearly inaudible whispers. “The Endless Conveyor featured the icon of a model’s face, in a multi-image projection, behind a conveyor that you travel on. It hinted at the railroad of advertising and consumption. Being sold at, and buying as a result of.”
“Technology is something most of us share in common. So what happens to you is also what happens to most other people. I’m very ambivalent to technology. I love it, and then I don’t. I’m even ambivalent about the sorts of technology I like. In my studio-barges I seemed to balance the collection of more and more modern electronic tools at one end, with a growing collection of heavy industrial clutter at the other.”
‘It’s like the exponential gap between technologies opening up in the world outside - utterly different technologies with us caught in the middle and only partly in control. It’s odd really, our fascination with all these electronic gadgets, when for the most part the technology we still rely on is still rooted in the nineteenth century – such as the petroleum combustion engine.” Max Couper.
Max Couper The Endless Conveyor 1990 Motorized human conveyor belt, backed by a computerized, six projector, 486 slide, repeating programme, with composed soundtrack 2.50 x 8 × 2.50 m approx (8 ft 2 in x 26 ft 3 in x 8 ft 2 in)