Overview
Mechanics of Reality
4/3 – 10/4
During the 60s, a group of artists composed of Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, Tom Shannon and Edward Ihnatowicz, began experimenting with robotics. Their artworks, closer to robots than to paintings or videos, made use of sensors and AI to move and respond to the environment, interacting with human spectators. This decade, which proved to be an important milestone in terms of an emerging relationship between technology and art, was dominated by digital tools and seduced by the capacity of powerful, memory-rich machines. Since then, we are witnessing the development of a new role for both contemporary art and the contemporary artist.
Due to the increasing convergence between scientific developments in artificial life and the emerging art movement, some immersive technologies, such as AR and VR, are now using live data inputs to transform the invisible into visible and give our environment a voice to express itself.
The language of artists such as Armin Keplinger, Diogo Gonçalves, Error-43, Ida Kvetny, Krystof Bruha and Studio Above & Below reveals how thin is the border that divides art from science. These artists, concerned with showing us predictable patterns of behavior in the world, are using art and technology as a research laboratory field.
Insofar, as an inevitable natural mechanics appears in a given work, it does so within its traditional role, represented descriptively and passively, as a point of reference or as a metaphor. In this way, the selected artworks come together to explore themes and processes through digital language in a place where nature, machines and humans come together, finding ways in which these systems collide.
Curated by MJ Teixeira