David Rueter

Thermal receipt printer; 10-year thermal receipt paper; WiFi router; circuit-breaker box with outlets; desk lamp; building management system (BMS) lighting controls; custom BMS software with AI text analysis and synthesis; Lithuanian Metrika vols. 1 (1380-1584) and 25 (1387-1546); texts of Lithuanian legislation concerning post-soviet privatization and land reform (1991-1997).

Dipping into a pool of text sourced from Lithuanian state archives, records and bureaucratic documents of property from the 14th-17th centuries and 1990s post-Soviet land reform, "Metrica" (2023) revolves around the psychic malfunctioning of a building management system. Flicking the lights on and off at random, the system (controlled by a large language model) obsessively sorts through these historical texts – which it seems to have mistaken for its own memories – producing an endless cascade of receipts in the process. The receipts document the system’s attempts to self-describe its fragmented memories. Rippling outward from the receipt printer, the reading room itself become an extension of the building’s psychic, literary struggle: the library falls into a liminal state of transition, either going into or coming out of a state of deep storage; certain books seem to have lost their sense of stability, as text and images slide off dust jackets at oblique angles; a strange photograph of an excavated cellar floats on the wall; and the video on the monitor is stuck in a loop of perpetual dawn or twilight; all drenched in a day-for-night effect.

Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter