Sliding canvas across angled razors would be cleaner if precuts were made.
This also explains the angle of the razors. It is way easier to continue a cut than make a fresh one. the blades were already embedded in the canvas. then using the same principle as scissors through wrapping canvas, it dragged the remainder through. The section was already shredded and behind the frame. If you look there's a good six inches of white canvas below the image. The remaining painting was simply dragged further across the blades. More likely is that the first six inches of canvas was pre-shredded and then spooled onto the roller. I came to the conclusion that calling these X-Acto ® knives a “shredder” is somewhat generous. This seems unlikely to me, as one would only need to open up the frame to be rewarded with a second artwork. Some have suggested that a second shredded painting was spooled out and the first one is still intact in the frame. The curl would suggest it had been spooled up on a roller for quite some time. So how did these static blades make such a clean cut? I think the curl at the bottom of the painting explains this. #2 IS THERE A FUNCTIONAL SHREDDER IN THE FRAME OR JUST A SPOOL? Second, they could have hidden a manual switch in the frame to activate the battery (unused up to that point) at the auction. First, Banksy’s authentication board ” Pest Control” reportedly had access to the frame ahead of the auction and could have swapped out the batteries. I think we can say the myth of a battery not being able to last long enough is BUSTED.įor the sake of argument, here are two other plausible theories that have also surfaced that also seem like reasonable ways to do this without alerting Sotheby’s. I'm amazed at how little power is used by the wireless processors I'm working on now.īrian also pointed me to an article on Hackaday which agrees with us that a “‘prime’ battery (that is, a non-rechargeable battery) could last long enough to be able to trigger and shred the painting. They are contacting a base station for instructions a couple times a second and will run for 10 years if no video is taken. We're getting 10 years of standby life from our cameras on 2 AA batteries. The question that came up the most often is, “How could the battery stay charged in the frame long enough?” This question applies both to the shredder and for the the remote triggering device.Īccording to my older brother Brian, this one is easy: What does it say about Sotheby’s if they did not know ahead of time? What does it say about Banksy if he colluded with Sotheby’s? Was Sotheby’s aware of the prank, and perhaps complicit? We will then follow up with questions around the potential for collusion between Sotheby’s and Banksy and what each scenario implies. Was the shredder shown in Banksy’s video the device used to shred the painting? Was there a functional shredder in the frame or was a pre-shredded work spooled out? We will start by looking at the key engineering questions:Ĭould a device that had been in the frame for up to 10 years have the battery life to listen for a remote trigger? I also evaluate what this event says about Banksy and Sotheby’s moving forward. In this post, we look at the key questions and offer up some likely answers (from an art nerd perspective).
I reached out to them for some assistance. Additionally, I come from a family with varied engineering and science backgrounds: my younger brother Matt (a computer scientist), my older brother Brian (an embedded systems engineer), and my father (who designed battery-operated implantable medical devices for several decades). My job was to create demonstrative evidence in the form of hundreds of courtroom exhibits. I spent five years of my life working alongside expert scientists and engineers investigating mechanical device failures and patent-infringement cases. I believe I bring a unique perspective to the mystery. The recent incident around Banksy embedding a shredder into the frame of his Girl With A Balloon has caught the world’s attention.Īs a nerd obsessed with the intersection of art and tech, I too was sucked in over the weekend in trying to unravel the mysteries behind Banksy’s self-shredding painting.
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