ALTOGALLERY

Opening reception: April 6 (6 - 10 PM)

First Friday: May 4 (6 - 10 PM)

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ARTIST STATEMENT

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Disappearing Room is a new work by Denver-based artist Peter Yumi, whose recent work explores how we interact on the Internet—and especially on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. Yumi has invented a machine that he calls The Machine: an adaptation, for the internet age, of a Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheel.

 

Traditionally, devotees spin prayer wheels to accumulate merit, with Yumi’s The Machine, end-users can simply spin any of the device’s thirty-six cubes to send out #thoughtsandprayers to the internet or to harvest more “friends, followers and likes” on their favorite social-media platforms. The idea is to save peoples' valuable time. No longer must they spend the precious hours of their lives trying to win friends and influence people online: instead, they can spend their time making actual face-to-face connections in the meat world or just doing their errands.

 

The Machine works in a myriad of other ways as well. Yumi has written a book titled "The Machine and Your Future on Social Media" that gives end-users advice on what, when, and how often to post on social media and when to “un-follow, un-friend and friend and follow” others on social media. The Machine can also be used to give end-users actual lotto numbers.

 

Yumi envisions a world in which millions of these machines have been set up around the globe to help free humanity from the constant desire to share every detail of daily life online. The Machine is the future. The Machine heralds the coming post-internet world.