January 2009 Archives

Seen at Make, sculptor Jud Turner's unfortunately non-functional yet gorgeous skeletal "Bio-Cycle" led me to explore more in his galleries, chock full of what he deems blending biological hallucinations with hard steel, and his love of "(...) the physical processes involved in creating my artwork: welding/grinding/machining metal can be very meditative."

It doesn't matter to me that Turner's machine art is static; seeing organic forms expressed and honed into machine forms by mechanical means is enough to get my head spinning dreamily into the right direction. I'd imagine his self-published book Morphogenesis reflects that, too. All of his work is for sale, unless it has been sold -- at the bottom of each image set there is a PayPal button, and he accepts checks. The stunning "TriloTemporalis" (top of post) is still available can be had for a wicked song -- $2000.

Last year's Maker Faire was my introduction to the methodical, meditative whimsy of Benjamin Cowden's wonderful machines. His bizarre and beautiful hand-crank machines rely largely on worm gears, which I LOVE. Worm gears are sexy. When falling into a trance at Cowden's Maker Faire booth, I started shooting live video (with my Nokia N95, via Qik), and Cowden introduced himself, turning the video into an off-the-cuff interview and demo of a couple of his machines. Here's the video:

The really exciting news is that Benjamin Cowden just re-did and relaunched his website twenty seven gears, and it looks fabulous -- and he's got fresh video of his machines, like the Kissing Machine, (seen in the above video). Plus he's introducing a new fantastic, mad-scientist creation: his latest piece, A Small Force. Cowden emailed saying, "I will have images and better video of the latter soon, but for now there is a little clip my friend Nemo [Gould] took." Go look at his site and see all the fantastic new videos he's got on it! Yay!

Even though he's been making complex and huge art machines locally (San Francisco Bay Area) for over a decade, I hadn't encountered the astonishing work of Reuben Margolin until I saw this short video segment on Make TV, where he explains who he is and we get a quick glimpse of his work and shop:

From that video, I only had the impression that his art machines were largely wood-centric, and being a girl who loves her metal machines, it took me a minute to dig into Margolin's work -- and I'm ever so glad I did.

In December of 2008, Margolin combined forces with Technorama Science (in Switzerland) to create one of the largest and possibly the most complicated mechanical art machines in the world. Measuring 25 square meters, Margolin's Magic Wave contains more than 50,000 individually fabricated pieces, and demonstrates three characteristics of waves: wavelength, amplitude and frequency. Here's the official video from the exhibition: note the complex series of slowly turning pulleys around the ceiling of the piece. All told, the Magic Wave contains 3000 pulleys, 5 kilometers of steel cable, and 9 motors.

And they made it all -- Margolin and the Technorama staff. It's exciting me to pieces just thinking about how much fun it must have been to work on this project; to make matters more frothy for me, Margolin thoughtfully put together this incredible video compilation of the making of the Magic Wave -- and YAY for women in the machine shop! It takes a special kind of machine art geek (like me, and hopefully you, dear reader) to sit through this silent video detailing the construction process, but if you've ever run a lathe before (I have), you'll thrill when you see an incredibly skillful lathe-fetish moment. Geek out with me on this:

Of course, the Magic Wave isn't all you should see of Margolin's work (as evidenced by the Pentagonal Wave at the top of this post). His website is in need of an update, but that's okay: His YouTube channel is full of treats and art machines aplenty -- many shot in his Emeryville, California shop. He's created many different kinetic, mechanical waves (and the videos of them in action are small, but of higher quality than most of the YouTube clips). See even more higher quality videos and photos of his various (and recent) installations on Flickr.

Jeweler, sculptor and fabricator Ira Sherman has been busy making sleek metal creations since the 1970s, but it wasn't until a friend -- jeweler and artist Holly Bobisuthi -- directed me to Sherman's mechanized sculptures and Impenetrable Devices last night that I became a full-on fan. The series was originally shown in 2002: Sherman interviewed five rape victims and designed chastity belts and corsets to fit the desires of what the women *most wished* they'd had when they were attacked. From brutality comes a feeling of vindication, and in this case, frightening beauty.

His Impenetrable Devices are jewels themselves, comprised of materials such as stainless steel, brass, glass, and jewels -- like a garnet for The Injector, carefully positioned. For The Injector, Sherman said " Two viewpoints were common with all rape victims, female or male. The desire to identify and capture the rapist was universal. The Injector device uses pneumatically powered hypodermic syringes to simultaneously inject tattoo dye and a powerful sedative into the attacker. The rapist drops in his tracks and is permanently identified making for easy apprehension."

According to his website, his sculptural work "... uses materials and shapes from science and technology, yet "bio-engineered" to interact with the audience or viewer in a uniquely human way. Many of Sherman's pieces are, in fact, "prostheses" created around a humorous social concept. These are worn on the body, and may be shockingly intimate. Many of Sherman's sculptures have sensors that let them interact with the participant or the audience. Parts of his current traveling exhibitions, "Panaceas to Persistent Problems" and "Impenetrable Devices" have been displayed in exhibitions in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Israel and Japan; the Spertus Museum, the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art and the National Ornamental Metal Museum have recently acquired Sherman art work for their permanent collection."

For his 2006 exhibition of Impenetrable Devices (which are rarely shown), Sherman told the Sydney Herald, "When you talk with someone who's been raped, you start getting details that are just horrifying. That horror I transform into my work," Sherman said.

"But if I were to make pieces horribly ugly and brutal, there's no redemption. The beauty of the work has a kind of redemptive quality."

Sherman's devices have names like Bear Trap Corset (below), Saber Tooth Speculum and Intimate Electric Fence. They are mostly steel and brass, with some electrical wiring and small mechanical parts.

When you visit the website of sculptor and painter Kris Kuski, make sure you go right to the sculptures and: a) look at it on the largest monitor possible, and b) have plenty of time to spend soaking up the unbelievably intricate mechanical dioramas he's created over the past few years. Then take a moment at how fast his images load and how incredibly awesome his fullscreen mode is where you can zoom in to see the smallest mecha-detail: the site is pure win for the gallery design, for sure.

Kuksi's sculptures, unlike most of what's featured and focused on here, do not move or operate in any function, yet they're such outrageous imaginings of past, present and future fantasy mythology combined with all the pain and beauty found in human-machine mergings. Much of his sculptural work references decadence, devices, Babylon, illusions that lie within divinity, war, and of course, the macabre. His capacity for mechanical fantasy is overwhelming.

Dark, glorious and beautiful; I've been stalking this site all week. The small screencaps here don't do the images on Kuksi's site justice; click through. Take your time and don't expect a cheerful ride, but do expect to have your imagination altered and taken to a very (pleasingly) dark carnival, indeed.

Right now London Gallery space Behind the Shutters is featuring an exhibition called Mutate Britain -- with none other than the legendary Mutoid Waste Company at the centerpiece of the artists on exhibit. (Here's a short video tour of the exhibit.) The show has been going on since mid-November, but the MWC and the sprawling collective of artists that fuel the group have been up to some right mischief since the show opened, and last week was no exception. Here is what artist Joanna Peacock did in the street for the exhibition on December 20:

I also think this robo-tank is cute:

The Mutoid Waste Company has been around for over 20 years, creating gigantic lethal mobile machinery and kinetic art; some spews fire, some is rideable -- in fact, if you read Digg you'll recall a recent post about a giant fire-spewing robot dog that some guy took for a ride around on a street in London. I immediately recognized it as "Larry" (that's the machine's name), but I didn't realize that Larry was taking a stroll from the back of the gallery exhibit for fun.

There are some really incredible pieces of machine art in the Mutate Britain exhibit. I'm especially drawn to MWC's 20-year member Giles Walker's pole-dancing robots -- not for the obvious reasons, but because their heads are CCTV cameras, making a dual statement about peep show viewing and privacy, and the culture of surveillance that pervades London with these cameras. About Pole Dancers, Walker writes,

These pieces are two fully animated robot pole dancers. They are made from raw materials found in various scrap yards (eg. the motors that animate the pieces are 12V car wiper motors or window motors) and controlled, via a PC, using a DMX lighting programme.

'PEEPSHOW' - we are now all living in a peepshow. Continually being watched by mechanical peeping toms. With this in mind, I wondered if it was possible to literally make a CCTV camera sexy using simple mechanics...and by using the imagery of a pole dancer question the roles played in voyeurism. Could this pile of old windscreen wipers and odd pieces of metal become something sexual....

ABOUT CCTV:
- Street lighting is seven times more effective in cutting crime than CCTV. CCTV has no significant impact on crime statistics.
- Britain is the most monitored country in the world with 4.2 cameras....oh, and 500 000 bins fitted with electronic tracking devices.

Here's a sleek video of Pole Dancers in action:

The Mutate Britain photo pool is here, and full of great imagery, like this:

On photo sharing site Flickr there's a new group pool called Macro Machine Stuff (and things), where the main thrust of the user-generated and member found photographs are pure, delicious machinery eye candy. Macro and micro, or just focused detailed images of pumps, assemblies, wiring, gearing, engines, homemade boxes of all kinds, and all manner of unusual mechanical creations -- close up. It's pretty much machine art pr0n, and the photos are stunning.

It's a small but quickly growing community, and is a fabulous addition to the RSS reader for an occasional dose of machine art beauty of the most mysterious kind; often, we have no idea what we're looking at, but love what we see. The occasional video is also a nice treat.