Aarau / Connecticut
Oefner builds explosions that never happened. Switzerland around Aarau is full of machines that paint, museums that collect the blast, and a science hall that lets you touch lightning.
What to see
Museums, street, odd rooms, and the work we shot. Picked for the same problem as the episode.
Aargauer Kunsthaus
Aarau. The canton's modern art house. Swiss work, experimental rooms, a five-minute walk from where a kid from Aarau learned that a picture can be an event.
Museum Tinguely
Basel. Jean Tinguely's kinetic junk: wheels, motors, machines that draw. Oefner's cousin. The sculpture does the explosion. You just stand there.
Métamatic
Tinguely built drawing machines so the artist could leave. Oefner builds the opposite: months of labor to fake one second. See both in the same week.
Technorama
Winterthur. Hands-on light, charge, perception. The drill that writes a galaxy in paint is a physics demo that got ideas.
Disintegrating
The Ferrari mid-shatter. You can count the months in the fragments.
If you want the work
fabianoefner.com. TED: Psychedelic Science. The pictures circulate as evidence. They are theater.
The door ↗