Acupuncture For Temporal Fruit
Interactive Sculpture, March 27, 1999 - May 31, 1999

Installed as part of Make Your Move at the Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery, Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park

Jennifer Hall: Artist, Project Lead
Marc LoCascio: Engineer
Blyth Hazen: Artist, Fabrication
Kyle Jarger : Kyleboard Design


Photo Credit: Sam Ogden




"One thing the [first Boston Cyberarts] festival made clear is that in a time of accelerating digitalization, a little analog goes a long way. That's so, for example, in Jen Hall's Acupuncture for Temporal Fruit (at the DeCordova Museum), a piece that consists of a series of tomatoes being pierced by acupuncture needles sensitized to activity around them; the more motion they detect, the more they jab. Yet it's the tomatoes that steal the show. Each of them leaks, caves in, and grows moldy around its wounds at its own rate and in its own fashion. The needles, by comparison, lack personality; they are slaves to a repetition compulsion. "
    Atlantic Online
    Bits of Beauty
    By Harvey Blume
    June 1999








Photo Credit: Sam Ogden


"Acupuncture for Temporal Fruit is comprised of twelve identical units, suspended from the gallery ceiling. Each computer-assisted unit contains a tomato (or tomatoes), electric motors, acupuncture needles, and sonar devices. The sonar devices detect your presence at various locations in the gallery. When you trigger the sonar, the electric motors activate the needles which pierce the ripe flesh of the fruit."

"The content of this artwork primarily involves issues surrounding the intersections of modern medicine, technology, and ethics. Here, an instrument of healing (acupuncture) is rendered as something sinister, and this calls to mind many of the ironies of contemporary health care. These machines have the look of rational science about them, but also bear a great deal of emotional content surrounding torture, pain, death, and sex. The tomatoes seem like passive objects of research, but they are also metaphors for the body, and seem to bleed as they disintegrate. These conflicting notions are further complicated by the direct complicity of museum visitors, whose presence and choice of locations within the gallery activate a process fraught with technological anxiety."

Excerpt from Make Your Move, an exhibition organized in conjunction with the Boston Cyber Arts Festival
Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery, March 27, 1999 - May 31, 1999
Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park



Preparing the Pods - Work in Progress
Do While Studio Basement


Mark and Blyth tweak the system


Mark checks Control-Voltage-to-MIDI Interface


Building the Kyleboards


Blyth connects senor controllers to Kyleboards


Blyth sews bags


Sue attaches clips to bags


Keith stretches


Blyth backs into pods


Jen is overwhelmed


Finally, The Night the Pods Ran


The artists and engineers would like to thank The Decordova Museum with special thanks to Nick Capasso, Curator and Brad Gonyer, Preparitor.

Additional thanks to: Ellen Abdow, Sue Bennett, Ethan Berry, Cindy Brown, Linda Bourke, Kathy Desmond, Keith Donaldson, George Fifield, Gabrielle Keller, Laurie Lindop, Anne Loyer, John McCormack, Sue Oppie, George Peet, Lynda Shift, Bethany Shorb, and Doug Sweeter.

In-kind donations provided by Polaroid Corporation and Do While Studio.