The M.A.D.Gallery is pleased to present the Nixie Machine, a jaw-dropping, sculptural clock featuring beautifully glowing Nixie tubes, unveiled during the Geneva Wonder Week. Crafted out of burnished steel and brushed brass, and featuring six Nixie tubes made half a century ago, Nixie Machine – created by German artist Frank Buchwald for M.A.D.Gallery and based on an idea by Alberto Schileo – is a clock like no other. Each of Nixie Machine’s glowing six digits is displayed via an original, incredibly preserved Z568M Nixie tube manufactured by RFT in East Germany during the 1960s and recently discovered in a Bulgarian army depot. The Nixie Machine features no fewer than 350 components, each one painstakingly hand-crafted by Buchwald himself out of bars and blocks of raw metal.
 
The six tubes are presented as three pairs – for hours, minutes and seconds – atop an eye-catching structure built in Buchwald’s signature “heavy engineering” style, that he established in his Machine Lights series. The stunning retro-futuristic design, bearing four legs and body-like symmetry, could have stepped straight out of a sci-fi movie.
 
Sourced by Schileo, the Nixie tubes used in Nixie Machine are among the largest – 90mm in height – and rarest ever made. The radiant discharge of the Nixies coupled with the assertively engineered structure makes Nixie Machine, in the words of Buchwald, a veritable “altar of time”. Nixie Machine is available in a limited edition of 12 pieces.