This piece was created for the invitational exhibition, BEACONS OF THE FUTURE, at Nancy Sachs Gallery, St. Louis, MO. Curators Boris Bally and Bobby Hansson asked the invited artists to submit an artwork that would serve to guide or warn viewers regarding the new millenium. As the father of a then-16 month old, I had been pulled, trancelike, into the world of the Teletubbies, the UK childrens series. Regardless of the Sid & Marty Krofft echoes, the Teletubbies have begun to seem to me a dreadful beacon of foreboding for our own future.

Tinky Winky, the eldest Teletubbie, was chosen for two reasons: I felt he was the 'persecuted' Tubbie, being the unfair target of right-wing moralists who look rather stupid wasting their brimstone there. Hence it was appropriate that he would be harbinger of Doom. Secondly, and conveniently, I liked his posture and attitude for his place in the sculpture. His slight gaze past the viewer implicates himself in the 'end of information', while at the same time refusing to look you in the eye and admit it.

This is the 'newest' cultural icon / object I have ever used in my work, and it took projecting the whole piece into an imaginary future, where the Teletubbie was a relic itself, to reconcile it.

The rear chamber of the piece is a somber empty gallery of labelled pedestals, viewed through green glass portals. An early nineteenth-century composite doll's head peers across the room from the middle of a clock spring, vibrating in constant agitation. This was my depiction of technology's eventual erasure of the tactile world, of direct experience.