ART MACHINES: PAST/PRESENT

The Indra and Harry Banga Gallery, City University of Hong Kong

November 2020 to February 2021

The history of art making and the history of tools and technology are inextricably linked because technology makes possible what can be artistically expressed. If there is one idea that the visitor should take away from Art Machines, it is that technology is not an impediment to the making of art but a condition of its possibility. Indeed, the history of modern art is the history of the collaboration between artists and engineers. The proliferation of new technologies, above all the computer, has afforded an ever-widening repertoire of material and symbolic forms from which art can be created. What makes something a work of art is not that it is handmade or machine-made, but the maker’s intentions that inform its creation. An artwork’s value lies in the success and coherence with which these intentions are communicated through the materials, bestowing upon the work its unique value.

The work Common Datum and Unruh(Bloodwork 2.0) was exhibited in the exhibition.

Common Datum

Common Datum is an environmentally reactive, hygroscopic sculpture. A series of suspended 3D printed vessels continuously absorb the humidity in the meticulously environmentally controlled exhibition space. This humidity stems from the visitors. It is generated through their breath and the conversations they have. The water drips along a series of threads drip into three glass volumes, mirroring the murmurs of conversation around the artwork. Without witnesses, in silence, the artworks seize to produce water. It stops, becomes inanimate without visitors, and only restarts when visitors, humidity, can be traced in the vicinity of the artwork.

The work explores the notion of reifying invisible forces, condensing the invisible traces of our presence as a physical element, accumulating the spoken memory of a place, into a solid form. The work articulates a confluence between traditional and digital craft in the context of environmental art, where Sublimation and Reification act as techne and the methods of Amalgamation/ Augmentation as poiesis.

The work Common Datum increases the complexities arising from combining traditional materials and making processes, digital fabrication approaches, leading to the articulation of novel characteristics of materials, and choreographed environmental reactions and forces, and thus, evolves and extends the notion of what constitutes a digital craft. It focuses on the application of a set of physical forces and reactive, entropic states, to extend the binary relation between traditional and digital making, the simulations of dynamic and inanimate systems. The synthesis of forces allows the discourse to include spatial and participatory elements, extending the object-based discourse to a notional architectural context.

Unruh

Unruh describes the balance of kinetic energy in mechanical systems. It is a German work describing as well the emotional state of being unbalanced. The work Unruh incorporates three energy exchanging systems, each relating to notions of complexity, control, balance, and energy.

The first system is linear – an engine that drives a belt, introducing a force in one axis to the work. It is a source of energy induced into an otherwise stable system. The second system is gravity and how the main glass-blown body of the work exudes its inertia into the whole system. The glass is filled with a mixture of water and ferrofluid. It is suspended within a gyroscope-like structure. Introducing the energy, through shifting the first axis, results in an imbalance that, through the second axis, is continuously rebalanced. The third, is a system of spherical magnets, moving within a series of hollow, tendril-like 3D printed black structures. The magnetic forces are invisible, however, the continuous shifting magnetic field augments the main gravitation based system through the visible shift in the ferrofluids, contained within the glass body. The delay between the rotation and the viscosity of the liquids creates a further imbalance of the system – leading to an entropic state of the work.

Each of the systems becomes amalgamated within a simulation and exchange of force, set in the distinct media, allowing the auto-poiesis of the liquids to react and form second-order cycles of feedback between systems. This articulates an energy exchange in cybernetic cycles, extending the basic definition of ‘how to’ into the genetics of the making, and the formal reaction of itself.

The exhibition opened from November 24th, 2020 to February 21st, 2021. At the Indra and Harry Banga Gallery, City University of Hong Kong.