The lid lifts revealing a whiteboard covered in neatly handwritten, maniacally complex instructions. After removing and unpacking the oak limbs of the RTK from the box and slotting the intricately carved 'sluice cubes' into the green-baize covered 'portals', the mutated gaming table is ready for use. The instructions allow for all manner of unlikely conceptual inputs (e.g.. the first blue thing you see after turning on the television), and subject them to a series of tangled transformations before producing a design which gallery technicians can then assemble using available materials. The reified outputs of this process are scattered around the box, threatening to infest the gallery with a gaudy swarm of anti-aesthetic misfits.
This is a flat-pack version of the diagrams, flowcharts and processes that Tyson has been using since '95 in the production of an ongoing series of "Art Machine" works.
By using "Art Machine" work in major shows, Tyson is gambling dangerously with his salability. His lack of a recognisable style or media-preference, and the constant deferral of authorship to the anti-biographical processes of computation and randomness, are delicately counterbalanced with sudden, intimate signatures, juicy autobiographical gossip leaked out in the press, and the occasional production of a beauty-fetish object that will obviously sell very expensively and very quickly. Finely balancing the craftsmanship and conceptual narrative of work like the 'Recursive Transition Knot' against the abject anti-narrative of the objects it produces, forces viewers to approach all his work very carefully. No viewer wants to discover they have accidentally ascribed biographical or intellectual depths to a non-authored object, and no collector wants to discover they have bought the result of a random, and often quite silly process.
Although Tyson can program (in Prolog), has used computers in his work, and constantly uses terminology such as algorithm, tolerance, vector, and software to describe his practice, he is not limited by being techno-centric. During an artist's lecture at St. Martin's in 1997, instead of talking about his work literally, he drew a network diagram outlining the hubs and protocols of reputation in the art system and talked for 40 minutes about how to analyse and work that system from leaving college to getting work bought by a national museum. It is this understanding of the networks and systems of art that Tyson uses to manipulate and increase his art-world value. That is the game he enjoys, and within that game, being defined as a 'net artist' is not an advantage.
The Recursive Transition Knot will be part of Keith Tyson's show at the Kunsthalle in Zurich from the 13th April - 2nd June 2002 (http://www.kunsthallezurich.ch)
* "replicators" at adaweb. - http://adaweb.walkerart.org/influx/tyson/