Scroll n.2
BYRON GAGO
Bodies Farming · 2017
Scroll n.2 is a treadmill turned against its purpose. The machine is kept almost intact, chassis and engine preserved, but its running surface is rebuilt: aluminium bases and a black PVC panel in place of the platform, and in place of the rubber belt a loop of synthetic fabric, edged at the sides and sewn at the ends. Across that belt the words NO SE, Spanish for I don't know, scroll past on the engine's mechanical turn. The machine that once measured a body's effort now produces, on a loop, the admission that it does not know.
The treadmill has a disciplinary biography. It was invented by William Cubitt in 1818 as a prison device: the tread-wheel, set to grind grain or, as pure punishment, to do no useful work at all. It entered fitness culture a century later as the machine of voluntary self-improvement, the body placing itself into the position the prison once imposed. Scroll n.2 takes that object and swaps its expected output (forward motion, calories, monitored effort) for a single phrase. Effort goes in; not-knowing comes out. The self-improvement machine is reassigned to produce the rhythmic admission of ignorance.
No sé is a thinking-language put on a disciplinary device. It is the phrase the artist grew up using and still uses silently when reasoning through Spanish; to set it scrolling in a European gallery is to place one's own first tongue on the machine of measured effort. The Spanish-speaking visitor reads it at once; the others decode it partway, or not at all. That gap is the work's small political claim, about which languages are allowed to admit ignorance, and in which institutions. No sé in the gallery is also no sé in the immigration office, on the construction site, at the medical appointment where the language of the country is not the language of the patient.
The gesture is subtractive and exact. The treadmill is not destroyed and rebuilt; the chassis and the engine stay, and only the surface is changed, the belt the body would run on swapped for a belt that carries a sentence. The redirection is minimal and complete at once: the apparatus keeps working, only what it carries has changed. The argument is that the disciplinary objects of late modernity do not need to be replaced: they need to be reassigned. Use the machine already in the room; change only what it carries; leave the carrying intact.
"The treadmill doesn't not-know; it produces the phrase endlessly, which is the opposite of uncertainty."
Critical review, 2026
True. And the answer is in the cycling, not the statement. The phrase is not recited like a mantra, with intention and a practitioner; it is forced round on a loop, repetition without a subject. It appears, rotates out of view at the back of the belt, and returns, and the viewer has to wait for it. That waiting, the phrase retreating and coming back, is closer to how no sé actually feels than any single, legible statement of it could be.
Scroll n.2
2017
Final work
- Kinetic installation — redirected treadmill
- Vinyl on canvas · PMDC motor + Arduino · 167 × 67 × 20 cm
01 / 02
The work is a redirected machine. A treadmill stripped to its chassis and engine, the platform rebuilt with aluminium bases and a black PVC panel, the rubber belt replaced by a loop of synthetic fabric sewn and edged to run true, driven by the original PMDC motor under Arduino control. Almost nothing is added; the running surface is simply exchanged. The disciplinary object goes on working: only now it carries a sentence instead of a body.
The title names the second of a series whose first was never made. Scroll n.1 exists only as a note and a sketch, an early proposal for a vertical scrolling text on a similar mechanism, and n.2 is the only one that found its form. The number is the trace of a sequence that stopped being made but that the work keeps inhabiting: an "n.2" holding open a series that never filled.
It is the earliest of the Bodies Farming works and the most formally isolated, a kinetic-text object set apart from the territorial pieces around it. But the line it opens does carry forward: language as graphic text on a moving surface, ignorance admitted in a tongue that is not the room's. The device changes across the later work; the gesture of putting one's thinking-language where it can be only partly read does not.
Scroll n.2
2017
Mechanism / process
- Process documentation
- Treadmill rebuild · scrolling belt
01 / 01