Modern Art Who Cares? : Reconstruction of a moving life

The Motorcycle in the Art Gallery, 1997

When New Zealand based conceptual artist Billy Apple (born Barrie Bates, b. 1935) displays a motorcycle from his personal collection in a gallery as one of his 'artworks,' is this actually a legitimate artistic statement or is it just confusion over what artistry actually is? I tend towards the latter view. This dissertation is born of a general prejudice against official culture, canonical ideas of art and culture, and the ‘caste- system’ that differentiates between fine art and other cultural activities. It is based on the premise that there are close similarities in the practices and products of both fine and the products of the industrial arts. The aim of the project is to undermine the ideal of fine art as being of a necessarily superior caste to other applications of imagination and creativity. That is, it is a challenge to the idea of ‘art’ as some mysterious, totally unique practice. By the traditional standards of creativity, imagination, technical skill, and of understanding of nature and of materials, the works of the engineer or industrial designer may surpass those of the fine arts in terms of art- making. The cultural aspects of industrial design will be the primary focus of the dissertation, although engineering as a creative art will also be discussed. Errata: at page 78, the name of Clément Ader (2 April 1841 – 3 May 1925), the pioneering aviator, is erroneously rendered as 'Adler.' (In my defense, Adler is German for 'eagle'). Additions: Billy Apple's weirdly redundant 'tribute' to John Britten is described here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurch-life/art-and-stage/visual-art/83160198/exhibition-review-great-britten--a-work-by-billy-apple. For an excellent account of the inspiration that bats have given aviation, see Tessa Laird's book, Bat. London: Reakton Books Ltd, 2018, pp. 26-27. https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/09/23/tessa-laird-on-the-weird-world-of-bats/

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 2006

This article presents a series of works called Machinic Trajectories, consisting of domestic devices appropriated as mechanical drawing machines. These are contextualized within the post-digital discourse, which integrates messy analog conditions into the digital realm. The role of eliciting and examining glitches for investigating a technology is pointed out. Glitches are defined as short-lived, unpremeditated aesthetic results of a failure; they are mostly known as digital phenomena, but I argue that the concept is equally applicable to the output of mechanical machines. Three drawing machines will be presented: The Opener, The Mixer and The Ventilator. In analyzing their drawings, emergent patterns consisting of unpremeditated visual artifacts will be identified and connected to irregularities of the specific technologies. Several other artists who work with mechanical and robotic drawing machines are introduced, to situate the presented works and reflections in a larger context of practice and to investigate how glitch concepts are applicable to such mechanical systems.

Body, Space & Technology, 2013

and other venues), in which sounds, amplified voice-overs, machinic and visual arrangements, objects and materials, instruments and sound machines, light and filmic projections become the performers or constitute what I will describe as the features of a "choreographic object." With the exception of two stage-hands/workers who tend to the water basins in the first section of this performance-installation, there are no human performers or instrumentalists. In other words, as one of its most unusual characteristics, this installation performs itself. Thus the attention is directed at the overall sonic scenography or machinic choreography materializing its Lauf der Dinge (to use a reference to Fischli/Weiss's notorious kinetic chain-reaction piece, The Way Things Go, 1987) and enunciating its "thingness," its multifarious object-presentness. The states of these "things" change over time, almost as if the matter at hand, the particles and part-objects, could transform according to seasonal or temperamental changes in their condition of being in the world, their appearance in front of us as they move towards us and retreat, mechanically and metaphysically , visually and sonically. The overall impact of this event is nothing but stunning, unforgettable and perplexing. And it begins even before the audience are let into the cavernous Ambika P3 warehouse underneath London's Marylebone Road. "Things" as protagonists-a striking concept certainly for music theatre and the performing arts but perhaps less so for media/kinetic art within the 20 th century tradition of conceptual art that stretches from Russolo's noise machines, Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator, Duchamp's objets trouvés to Christian Marclay's turntables, sculptural pieces and "screen plays" (recently exhibited in a Whitney Museum retrospective in 2010) via John Cage's prepared pianos, radios or his multimedia "Lecture on the Weather."(1) Goebbels is well known as a composer of music and theater works (including earlier collaborations on texts by

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2005

Technological failure is central to the logic of innovation; it exhibits the scope of the machine's profuse promises unfulfilled, while generating new assurances against a landscape of side effects. Artists working with technology at the inception of widespread automation, including Jean Tinguely and Gustav Metzger, focused particularly on machines geared toward failure. At the same time, E.A.T., an organization founded for the collaboration between artists and engineers, encountered failure at times unintentionally and attempted to recast the role that failure plays in experimentation. By considering how failure emerges at this moment in art and technology, this article suggests that the program of failure potentially reveals more about the drive of the automated machine than its recognized successes.

2018

Gondolas are still potent Venetian icons. Nonetheless, now they face a profound identity crisis, as a consequence of market trends and the use of new materials and techniques which are radically changing the way they are built. From a wider perspective, the juxtaposition between the new ‘gondola simulacrum’ an empty symbol without any artisan quality and the traditional ‘gondola valuable handicraft’ reflects the clear dividing line between the city of Venice crossed every year by almost 30 million tourists and the living city animated by inhabitants and original activities. In this way the process of gondola’s heritagisation (recent attempts to candidate it in the UNESCO List) becomes a lens to read the destiny of an entire city where resilient energies, not properly native but deeply rooted, look for forms of survival to mechanisms of mass tourism. Summary

Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 2019

Correlations Between Independent Publishing & Artists Book Practice, Dc3p bookfoundry, 2018

It’s the mechanics of it that are interesting. At the airport I sit watching the loading and unloading, refuelling, the little carts coming and going with their trailers full of baggage. I observe all the feeding and loading of the plane that is needed to get it going, and marvel at the magnitude of the activity it takes to achieve that miracle: flight. I’d much rather sit here, watching all this machinery move across the tarmac, than wander the boutique-lined glossy- floored airport avenues, feeling like a stranger amongst the glittery glassiness of the shops and cafés. And in making a printed image there is a similar fascination with mechanics. No matter the idea, the image, the text; once we send our thoughts off to the printer— whether it’s in the form of a hand printed etching or a laser printed Word doc—a similar miracle occurs. Your content is transferred to a printed page. It is all too easy to discount this set of rather mundane and prosaic mechanical activities. But to realise that this sensational transformation would not happen without them is a cause for wonderment: a huge and enormously weighty metal structure is made airborne, a set of hieroglyphics on a screen become text on a crisp white page, and lines etched into a rectangle of copper become a fine art print.

West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 2017

This article reviews the exhibition entitled "Curious Objects" hosted at Cambridge University Library (November 3, 2016 -- March 21, 2017) and showcases select pieces from the Library's vast holdings of non-book objects including clothing, furniture, bric-a-brac, toys, etc.

2009

Curator: The Museum Journal, 2019

2019

In this paper we propose to examine the cognitive aspects of artistic creation. Art objects are supposed to elicit emotional responses in the viewer. Behavior related to the making of art objects are analysed. Both visual art and artistic verbal expressions are considered for analysis. Emotional appraisal is claimed to be indispensable to artistic creativity, as opposed to appraisal objectives in design cognition where structural variation and the resulting innovations produced could well be emotively neutral in their appearance. The authors propose a heuristic and connective-functionalist thesis of machine art following identification of responsive elements for art as they are laid down in precepts of different philosophical traditions. The insights deriving from ancient and contemporary traditions demonstrate that innovative variation in art presupposes the presence of a set of corresponding variations in visual patterns or linguistic expressions that typify a range of expectation...

devoted to the scientific study of toys in all their facets. ITRA brings together toy researchers from all corners of the globe (see www.itratoyresearch.org for further information). This is our 8 th World Conference to discuss research, collaborate on international projects and exchange information with other researchers, students and leaders in the toy industry. More than 80 international delegates attended our previous meeting in Braga, Portugal in 2014.

Larsen, J., & Christensen, M. D. (2015). The unstable lives of bicycles: the ‘unbecoming’of design objects. Environment and Planning a, 47(4), 922-938.

AOM Larsen, J., & Christensen, M. D. (2015). The unstable lives of bicycles: the 'unbecoming'of design objects. Environment and Planning a, 47(4), 922-938.