Artist, Jack Whitten: I’m being affected a lot by modern technology and how data flows and operates. Information, codes, coding—the word we use, bits, which is a storage of information.
Narrator: Whitten conceived of this sculpture’s marble base as a “charger,” giving energy to a technological totem pole. The curve of the sculpture retains the shape of the log he carved it from. Whitten studded it with circuit boards, flip phones, and disk drives, devices used to communicate and store information.
Jack Whitten: When I first went to the Brooklyn Museum, when I saw the big totems up there, from Alaska, British Columbia. Later, I understood them as computer banks. Information is stored about the tribe, the history of the people. So when I use modern technology, it’s a way of connecting the present to the past.
Audio files of interpretation from the BMA exhibition, Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture