Ken Reinhard, Ferrite Core Dreams

I arrived at Conners Conners to see an exhibition of works by Ken Reinhard just after five in the afternoon, less than an hour before closing, right as the gallery sitter was about to punch a dart. They flicked on Georgina Cue’s video work in the front room near the entrance, but I was already following the faint hum of Reinhard’s ARTCOMP (Artificial Computer) Mk 1 (1968) into the main space. The gallery lights were switched off, and the room was lit instead by a sculptural machine standing just over head height on the far wall and a smaller steel-and-Plexiglas lightbox on the floor closer to the entrance (title unknown, c. 1972). The diffuse glow emitted by ARTCOMP illuminated Conners’s corporate blue-grey carpet beneath it like a terminal left running in an empty office.

Rather than a redundant qualifier, the “Artificial Computer” of the title tells us that this is a fake computer — an imitation. The “Mk 1” (short for Mark 1) tells us this is the first version or model in language borrowed from British military and industrial engineering. These signs and symbols are typical of Reinhard’s works, which often treat technical vocabularies as found objects. On the centre right, ten bat-handle toggles are lined up like console switches above a short edge-lit legend strip labelled Q.R.T CR.C, 1–5 B, A, C, UV L, UV R, alongside “Discs,” “Reels,” and a red lit pushbutton marked “ARTCOMP.” The whole middle field reads as a control panel, with unswitched strips of indicator lamps that blink through Q1 to Q7, R21 to R30, CR1 to CR30, and so on. These are standard reference designators for transistor, resistor, and diode/rectifier, which have no place on an operator’s console. A resistor, for instance, has no on-and-off mode, only a fixed opposition to a current that flows. This sense of parts being somewhat out of place is echoed by the appendage perched on the top left, which holds a circular neon tube glowing red and throws the almost-square structure off balance.

Beneath the field of blinking designators are two windows, internally lit by halogen lights and encasing coloured perspex wheels. On the right they are arranged like tape reels, and pinch rollers, but where normally there would be three-dimensional magnetic or punched paper tape between them, the “tape” is painted as one two-dimensional line, directly onto the off-white backdrop. A diagram joins eight vertices labelled “a” to “h” with lines, some solid and some dashed in the manner of a geometry textbook’s hidden edges. But there are no dimensions, angles, marked planes of intersection, or accompanying problem. Measurement, systems, and rationality are signified without producing any meaningful formulae. Reinhard’s borrowed kinematic vocabulary (used to map position, velocity, and acceleration) such as dash-dot centrelines, a radius struck from a centre point to “k,” arcs of rotation, and direction arrows all mimic a sense of scientific authenticity, but on closer inspection mean nothing. In the window to the left, a bold hard-edge “A,” “C,” and “1 2 3” surround a perspex wheel rotating clockwise with three arrows. On the floor of the case, damp has crept in from the left corner, brown and speckled, and reached the first letters of the bold text “ARTCOMP.” Dust so old it’s become a gooey residue encrusts almost every surface of the works in the space.

Above the switchboard is an ultraviolet assemblage of objects (corresponding, I guess, to the toggles labelled UV L, UV R, and “discs”). This panel looks more like a collection of children’s toys you’d find in a family doctor’s waiting room, such as a bead abacus maze and alphabet blocks. The “Discs” are spinning optical illusions that resemble Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs (Disques Optiques) (1935), which were designed to be rotated on a gramophone. Duchamp described the three-dimensional illusion in his discs as something achieved “not with a complicated machine,” but “in the eyes of the spectator, by a psychophysiological process.” Such optical demonstrations exploring the physiology of vision were widely marketed by scientists as educational toys in the nineteenth century (including the athaumatrope, anorthoscope, phenakistoscope, and stereoscope), and Duchamp packaged his Rotoreliefs as toys in much the same way, attempting to sell them in 1935 at an annual fair organised by the Association of French Inventors and Manufacturers. Although the venture was financially unsuccessful, this intentional recontextualisation placed these works within the realm of mass production and industrialisation.

Within Duchamp’s oeuvre, the Rotoreliefs were an extension of a broader project of optical works that included other “machines” developed for non-utilitarian purposes, including Rotating Glass Plates (Precision Optics) (1920) and Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1925). As others have argued, these works considered the role of the body (as a machine made up of part-objects) in forming a (false) impression of external reality. Around the same time, Parisian Dada artist Francis Picabia’s diagrammatic drawings or “mechanomorphs” took their vocabulary from Karl Marx to likewise consider the worker as a split subject, commodity object, and machine-part in the abstract system and circular logic of capitalism. Picabia’s machines were labelled with the flesh and ideology — words like corps humain and sexe féminin idéologique written onto the components of a work titled Prostitution Universelle (Universal Prostitution) (1916–1917).

It is tempting, then, to place Reinhard within the lineage of the interwar avant-garde, which also used the graphic language of science and machinery pushed up against the body. In Reinhard’s mixed media works from the same period not shown here, nude models would often be included as a part of mock circuits, equations, and feedback loops. One particularly fun-sounding assemblage, the Environ Machine (1968, the same year of production as ARTCOMP), purportedly “emitted ‘gay noises,’… projections of nude models, and, with the pull of a lever, sprayed seductive puffs of French perfume.” But this constellation pulls its material from a different commercial and industrial media environment than Duchamp’s and Picabia’s. In the aftermath of World War II (which saw military intelligence applied to the domestic population and the explosion of the pin-up and Hugh Hefner soft porn), it was common to see pin-up figures alongside indications of modernity such as telephones and radios used as props. Beyond the classic advertising transfer by association, these machines carry a voice across great distances without its body so prop and product distinctions begin to blur and desire attaches itself to the apparatus. The dating app has refined this considerably so that desire settles on the notification rather than the person behind it.

In Ferrite Core Dreams, there are no human figures. Beyond the unnamed lightbox cube on the floor (c. 1972), there are two mixed-media frames hung on the walls, one titled 707B (1972) and another with no title, dated c. 1972. Both include clear tubes that run from the inside to the outside of the frame that, like the imaginary tape reels in ARTCOMP, shift from three- to two-dimensions in a nondescript, self-contained system or model, seeming to literalise a feedback loop. In 707B, we see a high-contrast print of an aeroplane with numbered callouts that imply indexation to an absent parts list. A three-dimensional block with the number “3” on it, a striped circle, and metal panel dotted with rivets like the body of an aircraft. Sitting on top of the frame is a chipped pinkish cylinder. The yellowed paper of the other framed work (title unknown) is cockling and foxing with polkadots of mould and oxidisation from paper to dusty frame. It starts from the same primitives as a geometry textbook (cube, cylinder, pyramid), but they’re shaded, casting shadows, and slightly off kilter, joined by rods into something resembling a drivetrain. Callouts mark A3 and 6, keyed to nothing.

Reinhard marked his machines with inoperable component designators and was less of a diagnostician than some of his artist forebears, writing in his 1984 Masters thesis: “I do not consider the content as a sociological, political or didactic instrument.” This statement is more in line with what you’d expect from someone referred to as an Australian Pop Art pioneer. Reinhard repeated his disavowal to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2005, this time adding: “I did that back in the ’60s.” In Ferrite Core Dreams, all works are dated 1972 with the exception of ARTCOMP (1968), positioning this exhibition at the point where the language of systems stopped promising anything and became available as pure style. This is Pop’s founding ambiguity: Are we looking at criticism of consumer language, consuming consumer language, or consuming critical language as consumer language? This pop problematic was never solved. Where the modernist machine could be an emblem because its work was visible (from flywheels and propellers to the factory), the postmodern machine is circuitry beyond representation.

Reinhard’s exhibition marks the point where machines became reproductive rather than productive and disappeared behind their surfaces; from the smooth outer casing of a television set, through to the Macbookification of tech products and the apparent evaporation performed by the word “cloud.” As the continuous, low-frequency industrial hum of 24/7 data centres has started to encroach on people’s living spaces, a new reckoning with this linguistic sleight of hand has emerged. I saw an Instagram Reel the other day that was explaining how saving something to the cloud is just saving it to “someone else’s computer.” Small-scale protests in recent months have cropped up in response to “hyperscale” data-centre plans in Melbourne. As these buildings are rebuilt for AI, “data centre” is giving way to “AI factory,” a term popularised by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, reimagining them as active intelligence-manufacturing plants.

The now-defunct job title of “prompt engineer” was a particularly pathetic attempt at reclaiming operational agency in the age of AI. A prompt is itself an “instruction,” and “engineer” appropriates the same industrial vocabulary as the physical factory. But where “AI factory” is an accurate update for a production process that sees dead labour eclipse living labour, “prompt engineer” was a blatant job-title inflation. Now that Large Language Models are better at interpreting natural language and intent, other titles have emerged such as “process engineer” and “workflow architect,” which means we’ve been promoted from fake operation to fake design. The reappearance of modernist terminology not only claims inevitability and borrows legitimacy, it supplies an image where there isn’t one. Like ARTCOMP, it is a vaguely recognisable but impenetrable (and inoperable) facade.

The term “ferrite core memory,” from which the exhibition takes its name, refers to an early type of random-access memory (RAM) that used tiny magnetic ceramic rings (cores) to store data. These rings were threaded onto wires, largely by hand, with each bit sitting at a physical position the machine reached by address. Since then, data has become unlocatable, and the structure of memory has given way to the structure of dreams. Memories are addressable and carry metadata about acquisition (when, where, how you came to know it), at least until the technology breaks down. By contrast, dreams use memory’s components — its data — while discarding its indexing. Ferrite core memory becomes ferrite core dreams.

I see Cue’s video playing on my way out. It’s a looped stop-motion animation called Kinematics (2026), which follows a golf ball-sized sphere as it audibly rolls from three dimensions into two and back again. It looks like it could be an educational video about perspective and orthogonals, broadcast between television shows on ABC in the eighties or nineties, except that certain shots reveal the reflection of the artist, filming another screen with her iPhone: 2D, 3D, fourth wall. I watched the only human figure in the gallery on loop twice.

On my second visit the house lights were up, and the carpet lost that empty office glow. Time and damp showed more plainly Reinhard’s works, along with the buildup of dust left intact on every mixed-media surface. Under this light, ARTCOMP looks like an abandoned set piece from the Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic’ (1998) music video. Its campy exterior announced itself as a big cute educational toy, with lots of little nonsensical components that offer no way to act on them. In this sense it’s a faithful dummy of the big black boxes to come.