www.alanrath.org

Little Running Man VII

Well known for his electronic, kinetic, and robotic sculpture, Alan Rath has produced ever-evolving work since the early 1980s. Rath was born in Ohio in 1959 and was fascinated with machinery from an early age. He cites important childhood influences that include NASA, Robert Moog, and Jimi Hendrix. Although largely self-taught in electronics and art, Rath holds a degree in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An acknowledged pioneer in the exploration of electronics as an art form, Rath has been central to the developing dialogue of the role of new media in the arts. The computers he creates and places within handcrafted aluminum, steel, glass, and plastic armatures are capable of complex directives over time (some evolve over decades). The “life force” in these machines is encapsulated and carefully controlled with seeming aesthetic and mechanical ease.

Throbber

LALA ZAZA 2006

www.donnaconlon.com

My work results from observations of my immediate surroundings and the pondering relationship I have with the stuff right around me, in my house, my neighborhood, and the nearby forest. Much of this stuff is the leftovers of my/our consumption and provides me with material to analyze, in an archaeological and anthropological way, our current way of life and its inherent contradictions.

Two video works will be presented in the exhibition.

The first video, Urban Phantoms, poses Panamá City as a sculptural object atop a concrete post, and then proceeds to rebuild it with plastic and metal bottle caps, gum boxes, match boxes, and other bits of trash. The quirky movement of the animation takes its inspiration from flip books and clay-mation. The video ends with a sketch of a hollow bird flying over the plastic city.

The second video, Coexistence, was a response to the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. As actors, I employed leaf-cutter ants, which are very common in tropical Panamá, where I live, and I simply took advantage of their normal behavior. They spend their days cutting bits of leaves from plants and carrying them to their underground nests where they will be chewed up and used as compost for the cultivation of a fungus they then use to feed to their young. They willingly carried additional artificial leaf fragments, which were painted with peace signs and the flags of the 191 countries that belonged to the United Nations at the time the video was made.The title of the video comes from a quote by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, “The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction”

http://www.ekac.org

www.romankirschner.net

ROOTS

Roots is a dreamlike screen that follows an old persian image: a bush growing heads. – In a green and brownish fluid iron crystals grow steadily…Bubbles ascend like jellyfish. Branches break off and sink to the dark ground. They start to dissolve and become thick clouds hovering over the scene.

Sound and Electricity
Electricity is pulsed through the whole Sculpture. It is the key to the constant transformation. Growth changes the flow of the current. The modified flow changes the growth. Software and Hardware leave the next step to the material. The voltages at each wire are put through a resonance filter and thus transformed into sound. The 4/4 pulse results in a sublime rhythm.

Utopian Screen
The installation is based on the model of a chemical computer by Gordon Pask in the early 1950s.
It was open to the environment and it managed to grow to a configuration which was able to distinguish between different frequencies.
Roots refers to a time when the big synthesis and simulation of image, sound, thinking and memory was soon to be started.

www.strandbeest.com

Since 1990 Theo Jansen is working on a new nature. By doing this he hopes to fathom real nature. His nature exists of skeletons made of yellow electricity tubes. They walk by the wind. In the end Theo Jansen wants to set out his animals (Animari) on the beaches so they can live their own lives. During the years the animals were due to evolution; they become better and better. In the future they will survive the storms and the tides.

Animaris Ordis walking towards Trondheim Matchmaking…