New media art has no noisier advocate than the Kinetic Museum, whose international art fair now enters its fifth year. Their 2013 show comprises a small authored exhibition and a selection of self-representing exhibitors. Whereas the latter element gives us a clear sense of what its practitioners are currently getting up to, the former – this year entitled Doors of Perception: The Thin Veil – attempts to further the legitimacy of their cause by reaffirming its historical roots.
The task is complicated by the fact that ‘kinetic art’ is something of a catch-all term, capable of denoting anything electronic or interactive regardless of the capacity for movement. What most exhibits do share, however, is a sense of nostalgia for the promise of the future – a longing for lost optimism. The possibilities the artists present are frequently dazzling, but tend to look backwards as well as forwards; thus the most sophisticated effects are founded on the simplest of tricks, and the technology underpinning them belongs not to the future, but to the past. Like those discovered by the great apes of Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the tools that facilitate our progress have their own parallel, symbiotic history.
These ideas manifest themselves in two ways at Kinetica. The first of these is in the widespread reimagining and re-evalution of old techniques: Victoriana reigns. We are surrounded by the tricks and attractions of the fairground – mirrored boxes that house the infinite; images projected onto angled glass making convincing holograms; everywhere, the crude paraphernalia of early cinema. The most popular revival at this year’s fair was the zoetrope, which appeared in a number of different guises – not least, in the ubiquitous mechanical flipbooks that could serve as a leitmotif for the show and festoon the gift shop.
Tim Lewis offers a more refined implementation in Transformer (2012). Here, two-dozen plastic miniatures are mounted on the inside of a vertical wheel. The transition between individual moments is masked by a strobe light as they rotate; toe-to-toe, the little men appear to perpetually jog with delightful fluidity. But in addition to furnishing the illusion, the lighting focuses attention on the unlikelihood of what we see – surfaces are vivified and over-determined. A paradox is suggested: the act of illumination conceals the underlying truth of what we see; the search renders itself impossible.
Gregory Barsamian’s astonishing Die Falle (1997) shares Transformer’s basic premise, but on a far grander scale. Barsamian’s models are mounted on a tall, horizontal armature that spins alone in a strobe-lit room. Whereas the flashing light in Lewis’ machine was soft and dreamlike, here the affect is obtrusive, even nightmarish. This is stop-motion animation in the round – Ray Harryhausen’s monsters brought to life. At our feet, a circle of decapitated heads gurn in their endless sleep; beyond them, as though arising from their dreams, naked bodies tumble over one another in their Dadaist ascent to the ceiling. The repetition excites our morbid curiosity. On one hand, we may be repulsed by its mindless introspection – by the threat that this evokes to our sense of self and self-determination; on the other, it is perhaps precisely towards this we are drawn – the idée fixe sucks us into its fission. Freedom and its relinquishment are thus presented as equally desirable alternatives. Die Falle hijacks our perceptive apparatus and holds us in its thrall, substituting its dream for ours.
These tricks draw attention to the simplicity of the workings of our brains and bodies – to the notion that our inner-mechanics can be exploited, hacked, shorted-out. Works employing such techniques encourage us to experience our bodies as something other – something that lacks the ostensible sophistication of consciousness. It is in the exploration of this idea that we find the second of the dominant themes at this year’s Kinetica: several exhibits seek to represent organic processes as mechanical, autonomous, possessing a will of their own.
Chief amongst these is Christiaan Zwanikken’s Exoskeletal (2012-13), a robotic bodysuit with a crane-mounted boar’s skull. The wearer is reduced to a sliver of consciousness amidst wires, motors and steel; as powerfully as he or she is meek, the boar’s head convulses left and right, gnashing its jaws and howling through incorporated speakers. The user exercises little control over this aggressive display, which thereby assumes a sexual dynamic; the appendage is phallic – its actions independent and unapologetic. Sexuality is thereby argued to be a site of unfreedom. Exoskeletal reveals the imperatives of instinct to be as prescriptive as computer code, and there is a sense too that the irrefutability of this fact may be a source of shame.
Such a view is upheld by Lewis’ other contribution to the exhibition, Pan (2012), which not only draws attention to the parallel between the automaticity of the machine and instinct’s command but also serves to root the expression of this interest in the history of art; artists seek to explore and develop themes that have fascinated for centuries, regardless of mode or medium. Pan, of course, is a satyr – a combination of beast and Man; accordingly, Lewis’ robot treads a short, linear path with hoofed legs. Like Exoskeletal before it, Pan turns a skull to the world –an admission, as Freud would have it, that the loss of freedom implied by the pursuit of desire is analogous with death.
Finally, by way of answer, Roseline de Thelin’s Seated Child (Columba) (2012) takes the ultimate step and denies the corpus altogether. The contour of a girl emerges from a bundle of fibre-optic cables, traced out by individual points of light. This sculpture of pure energy reveals itself as the departing ghost in the machine – may she comfort all who wallow in material baseness.