The Tower of Babel, 1989, as the artist describes it, is a time capsule composed of “the discarded materials of a throw-away technical age.” It reminds us of the computer’s domination and recurrent obsolescence. Contemporary education has devalued handwriting, and the skills involved in inscribing the alphabet or tabulating a column of figures are now lost arts. In social media, there is constant chatter but also a question as to whether any meaningful dialogue or communication is taking place. Gachot’s tower is shiny, beacon-like, with a microphone on top. Equipped with an element of sound, it appears, like the agitprop speaker-towers from the Russian Revolution, built to spew out indecipherable messages to uncomprehending ears.

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— Franklin Hill Perrell, from "Richard Gachot: An American Original"