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‘The Turkish artist Server Demirtas has been making mechanical, robotic sculptures since the late 1990s, which he himself calls ‘mechanical fictions’. Within his work and the subjects he addresses, he often chooses to reconstruct certain repetitive actions, such as a woman looking up from a deep thought, or the postures of a sleeping child. He is interested in the emotions that these movements can evoke in the viewer. In Koro/Choir, the artist clearly chose sexually tinted actions.’ — Mad Gallery
Twins, 2019
Scramble, 2019
Koro/Choir, 2015
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Inside a white-cube gallery space (with twenty-foot ceilings), visitors find themselves immediately confronted with Michael Sailsltorfer‘s Clearing at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City, three larger than life, upside-down trees, slowly and methodically twirling in different directions propelled by giant metal mechanical arms, like dystopian jewelry box ballerinas in an unfolding horror film of climate crisis.
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‘I stumble upon a distraught woman hunched over on the floor, her face buried deep in her hands and pink flip-flops cast aside. Her feet are worn and ragged; her clammy skin is so pale the veins peek through and is ice cold to the touch. She seizes up at my contact and the crying comes louder now, mimicking the effect of real human vulnerability. It’s only when she lifts her head I realize she’s a robot—and even then, it takes more than a few seconds to fully register: a slow realization that sends me through an emotional cyclone of empathy, sadness and fear. She is Annelies, Looking for Completion by Dutch artists (and twins) Liesbeth and Angelique Raeven, alias L.A. Raeven.’ — elephant.art
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Can’t Help Myself, by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu is a giant industrial robot. The neck-like machine whips around viciously and spews a reddish-brown liquid towards viewers then laboriously cleans up the mess.
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Rectangular Rotation by interdisciplinary researcher and artist Christian Faubel is an audiovisual performance based on a modified overhead projector, the ZoOHPraxiscope. Analog robotics are used to control motors and generate movement and sound. These movements are projected and create an animated shadow play that is always in sync with the sound. In addition the projector light can be switch at hight rates, to create flickering light and cinematographic animation of rotating picture discs.
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Stelarc’s Exoskeleton (1999). A six-legged, pneumatically powered walking machine has been constructed for the body. The locomotor, with either ripple or tripod gait, moves fowards, backwards, sideways and turns on the spot. It can also squat and lift by splaying or contracting its legs. The body is positioned on a turn-table, enabling it to rotate about its axis. It has an exoskeleton on its upper body and arms. The left arm is an extended arm with pneumatic manipulator having 11 degrees-of- freedom. It is human-like in form but with additional functions. The fingers open and close , becoming multiple grippers. There is individual flexion of the fingers, with thumb and wrist rotation. The body actuates the walking machine by moving its arms. Different gestures make different motions- a translation of limb to leg motions. The body’s arms guide the choreography of the locomotor’s movements and thus compose the cacophony of pneumatic and mechanical and sensor modulated sounds….
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‘Chrysalis by Chico MacMurtrie is a site specific, ever-changing, interactive inflatable architectural robotic environment. This live structure was composed to respond to and inhabit the great hall of MOCA Tucson, Arizona, in 2013. It is composed of 100 inter-connecting servo controlled fabric tubes, approximating both the qualities of muscles and the structural function of bones. 16 live networks can be selectively animated by the viewers’ motion, capable of opening up the structure, creating portals and inviting the viewer inside in order to sculpt the ever changing architecture.
‘Like the biological specimen, Growing Raining Tree responds to elements in its environment and is sensitive to movement around its perimeter. As you approach the pool surrounding the Tree, its limbs slowly come to greet you. Once they reach your location, the branches pull back and begin to drip rhythmically in response to your presence. When the Tree has no visitors, it takes a willow-like resting posture.’ — Amorphic Robot Works
Growing Rain Tree
Chrysalis
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Donato Piccolo Sebastiano (Il nottambulo) (2014)
platinum latex, oil, aluminium, electric system, motors, electronics
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In Ryuya Matsui’s exhibition Flower Robotics a large group of dangling robots dance frenetically on a strobe lit dance floor. Each robot’s character is determined by analyzing an inputted voice. As a result of the analysis, those robots have sex (pitch), characters (change in volume), and conditions (change in rhythm). Those robots also affect each others’ dancing styles, creating patterns of light and sound.
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‘An art-making robot was detained on her way to show at the pyramids because Egyptian customs officials thought she was a spy. Border agents kept the robot artist Ai-Da in custody for 10 days and debated removing her eyes, which have built-in cameras. “The British ambassador has been working through the night to get Ai-Da released, but we’re right up to the wire now,” said Aidan Meller, an Oxford art dealer who is both Ai-Da’s creator and representative. “It’s really stressful.”’ — Artnet
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Rafael Lozano-hemmer‘s Wavefunction is a kinetic sculpture comprised of fifty Charles and Ray Eames moulded chairs (designed in 1948) and placed in ten rows of five chairs each, facing the entrance to the exhibition space. When someone approaches the work, a computerized surveillance system detects their presence and the closest chairs automatically begin to lift off the ground, creating the crest of a wave that then spreads over the whole room. A system of electromechanical pistons raises each chair forty centimetres from the ground. The pistons are controlled by a computer that runs the mathematics of fluid dynamics, thus making the waves interfere with each other, creating turbulence or becoming calm, just like real water.
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‘Swiss/French artist Guillaume Reymond presents a new project Transformers. This series of performances brings together different types of vehicles, gathering them according to a precise choreography, and creating what looks from the sky like gigantic robots.’ — presurfer
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In a scene reminiscent of a life drawing class, Patrick Tresset’s 5 Robots Named Paul await the human sitter. When the subject arrives he is invited to sit in an armchair, an assistant pins sheets of paper onto the robots and wakes each one up. Immediately the robots look at the sitter and start to draw, their gazes alternating between the drawing in progress and the posing human. As the model in a life drawing class, the sitter is an object of study. Immobile, yet active in keeping the pose, the human is there to inspire the machines. For the audience he is only one of the 6 silent actors of a short theatrical event. The sounds produced by the robot’s motors create an improvised soundtrack. The robots, stylised minimal obsessive artists, are only capable of drawing. Each look alike except for their eyes, either obsolete digital cameras, or webcams. Their bodies are old school desks on which the drawing paper is pinned. Their left arms, bolted on the desks and holding black biros, are only able to draw. Paul’s behaviours are based on research into the cognitive, perceptual and motor processes involved when artists draw from life, and also by the author’s drawing practice.
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Arcangelo Sassolino Figurante (2010). Steel, bone, hydraulic system, 29 ½ x 26 3/8 x 9 1/16 inches (head)
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In ‘colmena’ by Pascal Glissmann and Martina Höfflin, a swarm of one hundred creatures settles in the trees of the Mediterranean park upon the hills of Palma where Joan Miró used to live and find his inspiration. At the break of dawn the silent population becomes a vivid collective that assimilates sunlight into organic and chaotic sounds and movements. The hanging creatures have a solid skin made of hand-crotched isolated wire to protect their simple analogue electronic organs. These are connected to tentacles that wind up the trees to collect as much sunlight as possible. Fed by light each corpus releases a repetitive monotonous movement accompanied by a a rather technical sound. Gathered as a swarm the individual output is merged into an organic soundscape and a united motion that feels natural and merges with the environment.
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In Wade Marynowsky’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Robot (2008), the scene is this: both side walls of the gallery are lined with gramophone horns that hiss gentle static; a robot spins around the floorboards at the arrival of each new guest. Human height, its mechanism is hidden by a lace-trimmed black bustle; a single (also lace-trimmed) video camera eye beneath a plastic dome is all that ties this machine to the 21st century. At a glance it resembles the autonomous robotics experiments of Mari Velonaki’s Fish-Bird, minus the Research Council support: the machine’s erratic trajectory and myopic focus speaks of the buggy algorithms of artificial intelligence on an arts grant budget, and the tinny, canned voice sounds the routine synthesised knell of another ‘new’ media interactive.
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Mark Pauline’s Extremely Cruel Practices, featured the downtown L.A. 1985 performance of industrial-sized killer robots and occasionally fire-breathing monstrosities, all equipped with unique destructive capacities. That August 11, 1985, public performance — the full title was actually “Extremely Cruel Practices: A Series of Events Designed to Instruct Those interested in Policies That Correct or Punish” — featured incredible post-apocalyptic death machines built by Pauline and Matt Heckert, with assistance from Eric Werner, Neal Pauline and Monte Cazazza, not to mention a team divided into groups who specialized in computer and electronics work, props and mechanical operations.
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Max Dean & Raffaello D’Andrea Robot Chair (2006): Raffaello D’Andrea, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, has created a chair in conjunction with Canadian artist Max Dean that can crumple itself into a disjointed pile of wood and then reassemble itself.
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‘The ORLANOÏDE is a sculpture that was created especially for the Artistes & Robots exhibition at the Grand Palais. The artificial hybrid has collected social intelligence that in turn generates texts and movements. The ORLANOÏDE that resembles ORLAN questions AI and new technologies which search to rebuild, reconstruct and reinvent the human body. In this installation the robot speaks, dances and sings with ORLAN’S voice and multiplies using mirrors to create a real visual spectacle and a theatre of deep learning. The ORLANOÏDE is in dialogue with ORLAN through the use of two HD screens and three cameras and a presence sensor. ORLAN asked many people to participate in the collective intelligence by imagining questions ORLAN might ask the ORLANOÏDE In the dialogue the social intelligence of social networks is also created and ORLAN invites the public to participate by responding to the Questions of Proust on the website: ORLAN.EU.’ — ASVOF
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Bill Vorn, Emma Howes, and Jonathan Villeneuve’s Grace State Machines is a Robotic Art performance project. The name of the project is inspired by a virtual “state of grace” that could be expressed by automatons and other finite state machines. Through this project, we want to explore the close relationship between the real physical human body and machine body. We want to express the inner perceptions of both entities and how they intertwine, blend, mingle and become blurred as they interact and exchange in an intimate dialog between the organic and the artefact. The show is a twenty-seven minute stage performance involving solely a human performer and a machine. Both are linked via a high-end motion capture system and a set of biofeedback sensors and interfaces. By monitoring the human body movements and internal states and transposing this information to the robot body, we aim to establish a dynamic and symbiotic relationship between the actors. Both eventually blend into a single organism, where flesh, bones, wires and tubes become a whole individual body. The robotic machine is built as an abstract shape and is composed of actuated sections similar to flight simulator platforms and capable of producing very complex movements. The machine will sometimes react to the performer’s body movements, sometimes move on its own behavior and induce a response from the performer. We aim to induce empathy from the viewers towards a character which is nothing more than an articulated metal structure. The strength of the simulacra is emphasized by opposing the personalities of the performer and the machine, by subverting the normal perspective of human communication.
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‘Korean artist Choe U-Ram‘s Round Table is made up of a gigantic round table supported by 18 headless straw statues. Sculpture moves so table tilt constantly changes, preventing the ball from falling out. Whenever the sphere is close to falling, the statues towards you stand up, changing the slope and forcing the sphere’s trajectory in the opposite direction.’
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A Los Angeles based ‘Street’ artist who uses the name XVALA has stolen teen idol Justin Bieber’s wheeley bin and created a sculpture from it titled BieberBot. The work of art has been completed with a crate commandeered from the Facebook headquarters’ cafeteria and forms a singing life-like robot of the star. It will now make its debut at an upcoming gallery exhibition in Los Angeles.
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Andro Wekua’s Some Pheasants in Singularity featured the life-size figure of a young woman. The blonde girl, sporting a short black mesh dress and silver tennis shoes floats, ghost-like, just above the floor. But she is no spirit, she is a cyborg; one of her arms is encased in a robotic prosthesis and the other, adorned only with a sweatband, thrums against her bare thigh. Her chin rests upon a rectangle of reflective glass suspended horizontally from the ceiling, which simultaneously recalls both a childhood swing and a hangman’s noose. The eerie pallor of her face, her almost peacefully closed lids and the rhythmic thrumming of her fingers against her bare legs would almost be erotic if it weren’t so distressing. Connected by black wires to the source of her movement, a conspicuous black box, she makes a hair-raising sight.
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‘Muhannad Shono worked with Factum Arte, CALiper and the Beuth Hochschule für Technik in Berlin to create ‘On Losing Meaning‘: a robot encased in plasticine-like pigment designed to enact a performance with its own body.’ — Fact Arte
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Perched on the edge of a stage at Prada Foundation wearing a transparent PVC jacket, sits Goshka Macuga’s bearded android. Created by A-Lab in Japan, he blinks, moves his hands, and turns his head as he rehearses a monologue pieced together from excerpts of history’s greatest orations. Surrounded by a cosmos of great art from around the world that suggests a history museum rather than a contemporary institution, he is a repository of human speech for a post-human world. Like Wolfson’s installations, Macuga’s man-made man is both alluring and repellent, for though he may spout the wisdom of ages, he suggests a somewhat dystopic future where this wisdom is manipulated into demagoguery bereft of meaning.
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‘For Rumba I: Incubator, Cao Fei combines an automated vacuum cleaner with synthetic chicks in a kinetic sculpture.’ — Parkett
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‘Accomplice is a large-scale robotic installation by Petra Gemeinboeck that embeds a group of autonomous robots into the walls of the gallery. The work presents an allegory of our world as a complex machinic ecology, nestling itself into our human environment and turning it into a playground for a colony of creative, social machines.’ — GTA
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‘San Francisco artist Alan Rath, internationally recognized for his pioneering exploration of electronics as an art form, died at age 60 on October 27, 2020 after battling a rare form of multiple sclerosis for many years. Beginning in 1985, Rath made sculptures with robotics and computer-generated video animations, which he designed, machined, and programmed himself. Formally elegant and meticulously crafted, yet playful and unpredictable, his leitmotif was the relationship between the mechanical/technological and the human body and behaviors.’ — Hosfelt Gallery
Forever
Wallflower II
Again
Moist
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Mika Rottenberg‘s Ponytail (Raven) & Ponytail (Gray) (2022) consists of two fine ponytails — one blond and one raven coloured — that protrude through holes in the wall and vigorously bounce up and down.
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‘A robot terrier named AICCA is capable of analyzing and printing art critiques thanks to AI. It was created by artist Mario Klingemann, who wants to debate the use of AI in a provocative way. “AICCA, when it comes to an art space has the capability to recognise artworks so, when it has recognised a piece, it will take a closer look and analyse it. It´ll look for forms, shapes, abstract concepts. It tries to extract all these and turn them into a text prompt. When it defecated the text, the elements and symbols that it analysed appeared, 80% of them had a lot to do with the original concept.”‘ — AP
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p.s. RIP Terence Davies. ** Armando, Hi, pal. Really nice to see you. Yes, still editing the film. We’re in a push right now to get the film ready for a deadline this Friday. It’s all good. Oh, yeah, ‘The Illiterate’. I’m happy you read it. It seems to have slipped through the cracks. She’s major, for sure. Great, man. How are you? What’s new? ** David Ehrenstein, Nice! Actual Dusty up close and personal time. Much missed: her. ** Misanthrope, Again, so sorry. That’s rough. I wasn’t big on the first ‘Avatar’ either, duh. And I guess I’ll sit through the second one a plane at some point. People are funny. ** Darbi 🦧, Hi, D! Thanks for the warning. I ducked just in time. Not that I couldn’t use some facial scratches. No, I really loved the sculpture. Word. Cross my heart and hope to die. Your roommate sounds wretched, but don’t let her overpower your good sense. Mountains are nice. As long as you’re not too high up and feel short of breath all the time. Yeah, ‘Martin’ is really good, or I think so. Maybe Romero’s best? You should watch it again, no? Is it at your fingertips? ** _Black_Acrylic, I think you’ll like ‘Blood Feast’. What’s not to like, really. I still need to read Chris Kelso’s book. For all kinds of reasons as well figuring why Burroughs and Scotland are/were a power couple. I have no clue. ** Audrey, Hi, Audrey! Thank you for entering. Thank you so, so much for saying that. That really means so much, and I’m grateful on behalf of my work. If you feel like it, come back and tell me anything you like about you and yours. It would be a pleasure. In any case, I send you love right back. Dennis. ** T, Hi. Uh, some of the locations were on the hill, yeah, but ‘Tim’s’ house was in the suburbs somewhere. We just yesterday got hit with a fast Friday deadline and will start editing the film this morning. I’ll know better by tomorrow how much time that’s going to take. This week might be rough though. Hope not. Let’s meet up as pronto as possible if so. I’ll give you the word. ** ANGUSWAVES, Hey, man! Great to see you! Wow, awesome about the Leckey exhibition! I just saw something about that yesterday on artnet or somewhere that I will now go back and read thoroughly. That sounds totally amazing on every front! And meeting and starting to get to know the ‘big deals’. Dude, that’s so fantastic! You sound really jazzed, and that’s wonderful to hear. I’ll go look at the Turner Contemporary website post-haste. Don’t lose your troublemaking side, yeah. Great, great. I wish I could get over there to see it before it closes. But I’m beset with work on our film right now, so I don’t know. Take care. Please keep me as informed as you find it interesting to do. xo. ** Corey Heiferman, Man, I’ve thinking about you the last few days, obviously. Holy shit. I’m glad you’re okay and still watching things on your roof. It sounds intensely scary. My imagination and willpower are attempting to construct a force field around you, my friend. ** Steve Erickson, Oh, other Vollman faves would be ‘Rising Up and Rising Down’, ‘The Ice Shirt’, ‘The Royal Family’, I guess, if I were to pick and choose. You a fan/reader of his? Everyone, For Gay City News, Steve has reviewed Pedro Almodovar’s short STRANGE WAY OF LIFE here. ** Yes, RIP Terence Davies. That was sad, unexpected news. His last short is online, wow. Everyone, Before we leave Steve for today, he tips us to the fact that the great and newly departed filmmaker Terence Davies’ final short film, ‘PASSING TIME’ is available to be viewed on youtube right here. I haven’t seen it, but I highly recommend it nonetheless. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. Oh, no problem. I totally understand busyness. Honestly, I would say your two faves are mine as well. ‘Gore Gore Girls’ is pretty fun. ‘Peeping Tom’ is amazing. So influential too. Great you watched it. I’ve read the two big Shirley Jackson books. and some stories. Yeah, I’m a real admirer too. I hope your day and night drift/fly by lustrously. ** Right. I’m giving you a bunch of machines to ‘play with’ from a distance today. Check them out. See you tomorrow.
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