Sculpture is most often a story based on mass. Artists dealing with dimensionality generally understand things in terms of space, form, and density. By historical definition, most sculptors attempt to establish their work through physical material. I am interested in a more subtle poetic. Charles Olson: "I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America..." is transmuted into: "I take space to be the central fact of art." The computer changes the way we view space, it eliminates weight. Physicality is not lost, but becomes data. The fundamental tenants of art in the computer age attempt to redefine mass as a substantial property of 3(+)-dimensional artwork. The substance of a work need not be substantial.

The artometer is an computer visualization, a schematic for a machine that weighs the total amount (in pounds) of public sculpture completed for the university city public sculpture project, 2002. It is a perpetual motion machine. It is physically impossible.

The machine exists on the internet. It is a program based on a digital substance which emulates the properties of water. Archimedes first determined a method for divining density as he stepped into the bathtub. The data is entered into the system as it is collected by periodically weighing the completed students' sculpture. The input weight is displayed in a hypertext form.

A machine takes as input the total amount of sculpture created (in pounds) and fills itself with as many gills (4 fluid oz) of a digital substance that assumes the properties of water as there are pounds of sculpture created. As it itself begins to weigh more, this must be taken into account. The object must be continually filled, as every drop of water that is added to the machine adds weight to the total amount of sculpture (as it itself will be considered one of the sculptures). The amount of water thus can never be enough, and the hose must continually fill the pipeline in order to keep up with the weight of its continual filling. The machine is thus constantly updating the measure estatic. The measure estatic is an ironic refiguration of weight data, a representation of a necessarily significant physicality in a very low-cost data space.

"It's piled-up with boxes, outlined with shoddy fret-work, half-fallen off, cracked and unpainted. It looks old." - E. Bishop, The Monument.

The community is alerted to the presence of the machine by a monument placed at Delmar and Kinglsand Blvd. adjacent to where the University City Post Office. The monument is a rebuilding of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, The Monument. It is an homage to the new anti-monumental nature of digital sculpture. It is a poetics of data.