Amphibian palm is an installation with aquarium tanks containing “books.” The work explores ideas around books and the activity of reading. What constitutes a book? Does binding together sheets of any material create a book? What constitutes reading? With the aid of electronic wavemakers automated by timers, each of the book’s pages flip from one end to the other: they undulate and behave like books, at other times rest or stutter. Music composed for them plays with them. The automated flipping displaces human agency and asks if, in this environment, reading continues to happen, and if so, who or what is doing the reading.

 

Cao is interested in materials and arrangements that can continue to change while they are being presented and viewed — in works that in some ways can have their own lives, logic, or improvisations, and where the work can shift moment to moment and person to person. In this new iteration, the space is constructed as part of the work. The contents of its three tanks include textiles, film photographs, flora, plastic wrappers, embroidery, retired names of our most destructive typhoons, air, dust, reflections.