The working title for Wear XVI was Scratch the Surface. This project was made as a response to the invitation to exhibit in the new premises of Gallery P74. I had two identical rooms at my disposal, and I decided to exhibit two identical machines.

In the first room I exhibited the machine as an object that could be used, while in the second room I exhibited a disassembled machine. Wear XVI is a complexly structured machine (in the core of which are an aluminium plate with a carrier and a nail) and its unassembled copy. The individual parts of both machines are identical and I did not separate them into parts of machine 1 and parts of machine 2. One could say that the pompous structure, which is in the function of the nail carrier, with which the visitor scrapes the metal plate, basically stimulates the idea of a lot of noise for nothing. The intention of the piece Wear XVI is to humiliate the production process and its results. They are identical machines, the only difference being that the second one did not have the energy invested into it to make the machine work. The assembled machine reveals the banality of its function, while the unassembled one addresses the process of its creation.

I have introduced a new interaction challenge into the gallery space. I wished to know whether I could provoke the visitors to the extent where they would dare to assemble the disassembled machine. After scratching the metal surface in the first room, the visitors in the second room should understand the imperative of assembling the second machine so that they continue with the scratching. The experiment attempted to overcome the classic relation artist–artwork–institution–visitor. I failed in this attempt.