8,000 Breakfasts
Audio installation with found stove-pipe and chair
2006



Listen to a three-minute excerpt of the audio for this piece.


8,000 Breakfasts was created during a residency at Elsewhere Artist Collaborative, a former thrift store turned experimental musuem. The second floor of the building, before becoming part of the store, was a boarding house. The rooms that were once occupied by tenants are now are being used for artists' installations.




View from the hallway.


The building existed before and outlived the boarding house and thrift store that were in it. The building has seen its own history - an idea that I wanted to somehow access. Some suggest that rocks are alive, but show signs of life at a rate so much slower than ours that we can't recognize them. Perhaps a building lives in a similar way. If a building lives, however, it does not do so in an anthropomorphized way. Rather, it lives through its function and history, an accumulation of the past over time. This is retained by the building, whether through layers of paint on the wall, scuff-marks on and dents in the floor, or the supernatural inhabiting the space.




The room was filled with probably 2,000 pounds of glass
and mirror when I arrived.


Based on the number of years that the room existed as a boarding house, I determined approximately how many breakfasts were prepared and eaten in the room - 8,000. I then recorded the sound of me making a breakfast and compressed it so that, when it was looped 8,000 times, the recording would last one hour.