The apple of our eyes

Simon Denny, New Zealand’s representative at the Venice Biennale next year, has just opened a terrific show at the Galerie Buchholz in Berlin (you can see the exhibition here). Denny’s works hover uneasily across nostalgia and entropy, intrigue and dismissal. One of them certainly pulled all our nostalgia strings. Disruptive legacy model: Apple IIe presents under a custom made Perspex box the first computer model we owned. Ours is long gone but Denny got his from Christie’s First byte: iconic technology from the twentieth century online auction.

With the Apple IIe we used to compile and print artists' cvs back when otherwise they had to be retyped or suffer the indignity of a cut and paste and photocopy. Back then tractor paper was a sign of up-to-date technology and only added to their lustre.

A little later the fax machine entered our lives. Developing the Pacific Parallels exhibition would hardly have been possible without it as the curator Charles Eldredge was in Kansas City, the organisers in Washington, the art museum in San Diego, the designer in LA, we were in Wellington and no email.

On one memorable occasion Charlie faxed the entire 175 page catalogue proofs to us all overnight and Peter Peryer, who was staying with us and was sleeping next to the fax, woke to find an enormous trail of tractor paper covering his bed. He told us he'd spent the night wondering what the rustling sound was.

Image: Simon Denny’s Disruptive Legacy Model: Apple IIe, 2014 on exhibition at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin