“This is the Harrow, a torture/execution device conceived by Franza Kafka for In the Penal Colony, 1919. For condemned aren’t told their charges, naturally. They’re strapped into the machine for twelve hours as the needles inscribe their crime, burrowing deeper and deeper into their flesh in indiscernible script. By the time the sixth hours rolls around, the “criminal” reaches “ecstatic epiphany,” intuitively coming to understand their crime. Then, they die. Oh, Kafka.
So here’s the Harrow IRL. It was originally created for an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1975. The exhibition riffed off Michel Carroughe’s essay “The Bachelor Machines,” which tied the torture device to some others by fancied in fiction and art by Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and Marcel Duchamp.”
Text and Image via Animal New York
WANDERLUST 