Etchells’ work What Can was created as a temporary commission for the Arne Jacobsen foyer at the Herrenhausen Garten in Hannover as part of KunstFestSpiele Hannover 2018. Like his related neon installation Best of All in the same location, it respond to the context by drawing specifically on the legacy of the polymath and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 -1716) whose patronage by Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg, allowed him to live and work at Herrenhausen.

Installed inside the Arne Jacobsen foyer the sound installation What Can invokes Leibniz’s legacy in mathematics and the origins of computing through his work on binary code, especially his far-reaching insights about the possibility for data storage and communication in the form of zeros and ones. Arranged on 20 Individual speakers, Etchells’ work What Can uses just two words – yes and no – spoken repeatedly by the artist and arranged to create a dialogue of dizzying energy and contradiction. Forming a corridor of sound down the length of the Arne Jacobsen foyer, through which visitors must pass, What Can appears to present a bewildering interior dialogue as well as referencing social processes of debate, dispute and decision making in families, offices and parliaments. It is also comical and passionate multi-track in which the most commonplace linguistic binary of yes and no, affirmation and negation, becomes at once a Dadaist poem, a minimalist polyvalent music composition as well as an always-changing attempt to answer the question posed by Etchells’ neon with which the sound piece shares space.