There’s a remarkable photographic
documentation of Production Limits, on which
you can see precisely what we’ve been talking
about: a cube, then a finger pressing a form
into the cube. We see the
Handmates, the shape of the hand again, and
then the instructions, the form as a result of
hand and action.
MW:I named the work Production Limits. If
you magnify the motif until the object is so big
that you could sit in it, you’ll see it’s actually
a chair. That would be the idea for a future
project – making it so big that the thumb
appears huge, as big as the Thumb of God, and
you can sit down in the object.PW:The idea of being able to produce armchairs
with a simple thumbprint with God’s aid
is marvellous!MW:The original idea was for people to be
able to photograph their own thumbprint and
print it as a poster. But unfortunately, insufficient
funding was available.PW:You’ve not yet explained Shrinking Bottles/
Melting Bottles. MW:My starting question was whether
bottles could be produced that shrink oncethey’ve been emptied in order to minimise their return transport. I was very interested
in this question in the early 1990s. Another idea was Melting Bottles – bottles made out of
a wax derivate. After they’d been used, you could place them inside a melting compactor
and watch them be melted by infrared light. I tried to combined recycling with fun because
I said to myself: “If you compress a Tetra Pak and it doesn’t at least squeak like a pig, no one will bother.” Here you can see the melting bottles. But after this material proved impossible to find, I returned to what I first described. The central question behind Shrinking Bottles/ Melting Bottles is: How can I bring something to life if I can’t implement it in real life? In that case I’ll create a fictional story. There’s always a way in which something can be done. That’s the idea behind it.
PW:Extending material to the limit; extending
functions to the limit. We can see how this
logic, consistently applied, led to the production
tables. And Shrinking Bottles / Melting Bottles goes one step further: your work always
addresses materials in various states. In a way,
this also makes up the scientific aspect. After
all, in Hallucigenia you began with a scientific
image. In other words, your source wasn’t
popular culture; it wasn’t fashion or design.
That makes your work more unusual than the
works of sculptors whose sources are found in
culture, fashion and design. Someone’s now
suddenly taking their forms and problems
from science. This is somewhat disconcerting
in a system of art which is more in 
