IMMANENT CAUSES
Harris Rosenblum and Peter Fischli & David Weiss
October 18 - November 15, 2025
In any meaningful sense, the technology that has built contemporary reality is precision. Precision is the ability to do things repeatably and exactly. When precision is paired with some set of socially agreed upon standards of measurement, it allows us to create accuracy and systems for holding to that standard. Precision is the social technology that allows the engine to function. It is how we determine mineralogical content in soils and blood, make extrusion dies, fabricate optics for silicon chip manufacturing, ad nauseum. Everything made industrially, everything made using an industrially manufactured tool, and every social system that runs upon that hardware, leverages the precision of the machines it was made with to fabricate the world.
Often when people confront this for the first time, it feels more like magic than the outcome of a set of simple technologies that make the world the way it is. Drywall appears to be born on the distributor’s floor. A light bulb feels like primary material. My phone is more primordial than raw pine at times. Understanding the world first as made and second as a perpetually changing outcome of a process of precision, are two fundamental realizations that double back on themselves, first of alienation and then of a feeling of connection to the essence of reality. As if God’s, or the Absolute’s, essence is held within the material of the world itself in the space between being and becoming.
In brute technical terms, modern precision is based on humanity’s ability to make an evenly pitched machine screw. For the uninitiated, the pitch of the screw is the rate of revolution of the thread around the column of the screw’s body. A M10-1.0 machine screw has an outer diameter of 10mm and the thread makes a full revolution around the screw every 1.0mms along its length. The micrometer is a tool which leverages the machine screws translation of linear motion into rotational motion. If I rotate the screw one full turn, I know it has moved exactly 1mm forward. If I rotate it a half turn, exactly 0.5mm. If I rotate it exactly one degree, I can measure distances repeatably and accurately to roughly 1/40th the thickness of a human hair.
Making a machine screw from scratch is not that complicated. From stone and bloomed iron we can leverage 6 or 7 clever ideas into precision. A flat reference surface can be made by rubbing 3 plates of stone together in succession. Harder materials can cut and deform softer materials given specific angles of attack. Concentric stock can be made by fixing a cutting tool in place around a rotating axis. A thread can be scored by calculating a tangent angle and rotating a rod through a block. Concentric axes can be coupled mechanically to transfer hand made threads to a machine cut thread. The machine cut thread can be used to cut threads in other materials. These exact steps are what are replicated in this body of work. No existing tools were used, just abrasive stones, raw metal stock, wood, and some errata.
Because all of these ideas seemed intuitive, I assumed making the work for this show was going to be easy. I assumed that if I could just show the steps between the natural world and the reality we confront daily, it would blur the alienation of the built world as I have had it blurred for me. Because the world is already built into God, it would not be difficult to evince It from a stone.
What I found was that each of these steps is entirely unforgiving. Instead of being built on a set of accidental inventions and reflection, precision is built into the world in the same way that God is built into the world. Immanence is in the stone, but the mind of God also allows it to bring forth pain and suffering and failure. God allows that it is just pain and suffering and failure until the stone and the toolmaker reach a moment of effacement in the other. Until both become channels for the underlying thing in unity. Of flatness, as a thing that bridges a subjective segmentation and the Absolute. Until I see the world and its rules and pain in me and God sees me and my pain and structures within Itself. Such that the boundaries between us soften and we blur into something.
There are probably infinite different ways to create this same precision that have sprouted up and been lost to time or history or modal possibility. I look at my many failed attempts to create tool steel from iron or to achieve the proper angle for a thread from some assumptions and a bunch of raw lumber and metal, and I am humbled that not only is our world this way regardless, but that the organization of reality is a miracle of that same immanence, of the constant self effacement between the mind of God and the spirit of the machine of humanity. Precision is just an interface for this pain. Reality’s reproduction is just a lens to understand the fundamentals of the other end of the Absolute better. To peer deeper into it with optics and nanoscale engineered elements and see in them the raw pine and earth, and in the earth and pine to see the potential for all possible worlds where we suffer and transcend.
Special thanks to my beautiful wife Bridget, Nate, Fil, Andy and Colleen and everyone else who helps me ascend.
ARTIST BIOS
HARRIS ROSENBLUM
Harris Rosenblum (b. 1994) is an artist living in New York City. His phone number is 303-406-3038.
FISCHLI & WEISS
Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) have been the subject of large-scale surveys at numerous museums across Europe and North America, most recently in 2016 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Their work has been featured in Documenta, Skulptur Projekte Münster, and six Venice Biennales, where they represented Switzerland in 1995 and were awarded the Golden Lion in 2003. Peter Fischli lives and works in Zurich.
Exhibition curated by Colleen Hargaden and Andy Bennett