Artifact of a machine with no history
With no evidence of its purpose
Waiting for a world that
needs it
or wants it
No. 01
No longer requir’d machine 4 sale
res conexa
Advertisements for Sale
The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1776
No longer requir’d machine 4 sale
Must be remov’d on or after 3d August from the Pennsylvania State-House. Interested Purchasers will know its use and means of removal. For particulars, enquire of W. Hooper.
No. 02
Prudent Urban Self-Defense
res conexa
No. 03
Vintage Wine Accelerager
res conexa
Rich volcanic terroirs, layered complexity, memorable finishes — only a turn of the dial away.
No. 04
Beaten by a Seahorse Diorama
Archive Note
Results of the Cross County School District Third-Grade Science Fair, 2005
Entry:
A Proposed Solution to Current Problems in Inertial Confinement / Electrostatic Repulsion Research
Submitted by:
Timmy Burns, age 8
Englewood Elementary School
Mrs. Gladiolas, science teacher
Award:
Participation trophy in the accelerated nuclear fusion ignition subcategory
Supplemental Note:
First prize overall at the fair was awarded to a seahorse diorama in papier-mâché by a nine-year-old in Collier Township Academy’s gifted student program.
No. 05
Sphericalia
No. 06
The New Electra Lovely® Pressurized Makeup Remover
On loan from The William John Aloysius Bailey Collection.
res conexa
No. 07
Three Stages of Looking Up
No. 08
eppur si muove
And yet it moves
Archive Note
From a private collection, this artifact arrived without information as to its maker or other particulars. The only accompanying document was an unsigned note of considerable age:
Dearest Ann,
The Ambuscade unfolded quickly, with angry Words and infinite Mischief. The worst of the Events otherwise destin’d to unfold a Week hence were averted but narrowly. In the aftermath, however, his health, which you have describ’d so often as frail, has given in to light fever. We are obliged thus to postpone the Journey’s Continuance until, by every Measure of a stout Bostonite, he believes himself kedge.
Once he is again fit, we will provide for no less than a Fortnight to his Arrival by the 2d of August.
To the other matter, I must confess our Minds are not yet quiet’d respecting the second Machine. We know where it is, but alas! not when.
I am, my dear Friend, ever yours, with sincere Esteem and Affection.
No. 09
Yellow Submarine Hunter
No. 10
Unabomber Martini
Best served neither shaken nor stirred.
No. 11
One for the Road
Unabomber to-go.
No. 12
Edison Radiostatic Projector
Archive Note
United States Patent No. 1,908,829, High-Decibel Radiostatic Sound Projector for Therapeutic Healing. Filed by T. A. Edison, January 7, 1931; issued posthumously, May 11, 1933.
Edison’s penultimate invention. Original patent model not found.
Replica shown constructed from surviving patent disclosures and a late interview with Thomas Edison concerning experimental approaches to therapeutic pain relief. The interview did not address auditory risk or other secondary effects, nor did it reveal whether the device had ever been used.
No. 13
The Hydroelectric Houseplant
Renewable, economical green light on demand.
No. 14
The Mercury Density Sextant
Archive Note
An outlier solution, c. 1744, to the historical problem of finding longitude.
In 1714, Parliament offered a reward of £20,000 for a practicable method of determining longitude at sea. Among the requirements for claiming the prize was that the proposed method be capable of proof by shipboard demonstration under maritime conditions. Before a reliable timekeeping-based solution became accepted, the Commissioners of Longitude received proposals ranging from the ingenious to the unsound.
This apparatus is believed to derive from an undated drawing found among papers once kept by Daniel Finch, 8th Earl of Winchilsea and First Lord of the Admiralty.
The drawing was attached to confidential correspondence concerning one D. S. Beavery, a farrier’s apprentice lately of Spitalfields, who represented the mechanism as a “mercury density sextant,” claiming that longitude could be ascertained by observing, at midnight, the behavior of a column of mercury sealed under glass.
The same papers refer, without comment, to Beavery’s presence as an unlisted civilian supernumerary aboard HMS Victory shortly before the 100-gun first-rate was lost at sea in 1744 with all hands. No public record of Beavery, or of the invention attributed to him, has been identified.
No. 15
MGM Resorts’ Event Horizon Hotel and Casino at SPT-CL J2344-4243
res conexa
Your exclusive, front-row invitation to the Singularity. You’ll find it difficult to leave.
A limited number of Ultra Surroundview Duplex Suites are now available for a holiday dining, gaming, theater, and sport package experience unlike any other in the galaxy. Enjoy a round on one of MGM’s vacuum-rated PGA Championship courses, before sampling the fine cuisines offered by your favorite Michelin-starred restaurant and capping the evening with a cocktail and trying your luck at the tables.
No minimum stay. Taxes and facility fees apply.
No. 16
Experiment in Stress-Energy Tensor Physics Gone Sideways
Archive Note
From a disputed university study applying theories of pressure-induced time dilation to the extension of weekends.
Source: National Science Foundation Annual Audit Review of Research Grants, June 2018.
Artist
Ian Jeinforte creates small-to-medium-scale sculptural objects and speculative mechanical works.
Before anything else, Ian Jeinforte builds an object to completion in his mind. The process often begins with a question: Why? Why not? What if? From there, the work becomes a search for the physical evidence of the imagined thing — a device, instrument, consumer object, weapon, toy, luxury apparatus, or failed invention that seems as though it might have existed somewhere, in another time, another history, or another version of the present.
Jeinforte does not look for interesting objects. He searches for evidence. The materials he uses — reclaimed metals, glass, lights, gauges, housings, fittings, and fragments of earlier machines — are not decorative additions. They are the means by which the imagined object begins to argue for its own possible existence.
Much of the artist’s work begins with physical salvage: machine parts made in other times, for other purposes, and under assumptions that may no longer be recoverable. These remnants of past invention breathe a curious life into the speculative objects at the center of Jeinforte’s work. Occasionally, they seem to speak through their weight, surface, structure, or former utility. They do it silently, but they ask provoking questions.
Technical plausibility matters even when the premise is absurd. A mechanism Jeinforte creates does not have to function in this world, but in order to say anything, it must persuade us that it might have functioned in its own. Its conduits, balances, and pressures must suggest a consistent internal logic. Without that discipline, the work risks becoming ornamental. With it, the finished sculpture can begin to feel like a serious response to an incomplete, misplaced, or impossible record.
Jeinforte did not come to sculpture through conventional art training. His background is in law and international jurisprudence, including decades of work involving intellectual property, engineering, aerospace, heavy industry, product design, phytochemical technologies, and manufacturing risk assessment. Those fields may seem distant from art, but they trained the habits that shape Jeinforte’s work: attention to evidence, function, contradiction, failure, and the consequences of invention.
Significantly, the international scope of the artist’s prior legal and industry experience also exposed him to the cultural assumptions built into technology itself. Machines are not designed by physics and logic alone. They also conform to social beliefs and assumptions about how people should behave, what anticipated users of certain technologies should be presumed to know, what risks are foreseeable, and who bears responsibility when a system is misused. Across legal and engineering cultures, those assumptions can differ sharply. That tension — between what a machine can do, what its maker assumes it will be asked to do, and what human beings actually do with it — runs through much of the artist’s work.
The sculptural objects Jeinforte builds are not meant to solve practical problems. They are meant to expose gaps — between intention and outcome, technical promise and human desire, proof and belief, history and the histories that might have happened instead. The questions behind the work are often simple ones: What is the proof? What assumption is being made? What would change if the premise were different?
While the artist’s sculptures deal with solutions, they do their best work by offering none. Jeinforte’s works are not answers to anything. Rather, they are arguments posed by metal, glass, and light. They ask viewers to consider not only whether the contrivances they see ever could have existed, but what kind of world might have needed, or wanted, them.
Exhibitions and Collections
Selected public exhibitions include local exhibitions in Florida, where the artist practices and resides.
Works are held in private collections in the United States, South America, the United Kingdom, and the Korean Peninsula.