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CHRIS CUNNINGHAM

Björk: All Is Full of Love

The video reaches its harmonious climax as the robots join in embrace, still being detailed by the robotic machines beside them.
Each robot was designed by Cunningham, faces reminiscent of Björk’s own delicate visage. The sterility of the room and lighting and the rendered movements of the machines contrasts with the fluid motions of the robots as they connect in a purely human method.

Jean Tinguely

让汤格利
ז’אן טינגלי
ジャン·ティンゲリー
장 팅겔리
ЖАН ТИНГЕЛИ
03823 Metamechanical Sculpture with Tripod

Born in Fribourg (1925) and passed away in Berne (1991), Jean Tinguely is a Swiss painter-scultpor usually associated with the kinetic art and the Nouveau Réalisme. After a short period of abstract painting, he turned towards the mechanical sculpture. From 1951, he assembles strange robotic machines working on the physical and perceptive movement.

RUAIRI GLYNN

루아리 글린
Performative Ecologies
Each one of the four crude and very technically appearing devices is fitted with a punctually attached, luminous rod of fibreglass, which moves back and forth arrhythmically and freely. This installation’s poetry lies in the choreography of the little robots. They continuously try to gain the observers attention and impress him by waving their luminous tails. They recognise the reactions and movements of their human audience, learn from failure and share their experience with their robotic neighbours – a social structure of humans and machines.
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Ricardo Barreto and Maria Hsu Rocha

Martela
FILE FESTIVAL
Tactila is an art form whose medium is the sense of touch (tact) which is independent from the all the other ones and has its own intelligence, imagination, memory, perception, and sensation. It is well known that vision and sound have hegemony in arts and in other disciplines. Tactila takes place in time and, therefore, can be recorded and have various forms of notation for subsequent executions. That is why its development became possible only now, thanks to mechatronic and robotic systems which are compatible with machine languages.
The creation of tactile works involves a (tact) composition, which can be made through handmade notation and played on a keyboard or directly on the computer of the tactile machine ( robot ).
Tactile machines can present numerous tactile possibilities through points, vectors, and textures with varying rhythms and intensities, and be run in different extensions and locations of our body.

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The first tactile machine is called “Martela”. It is a tactile robot comprised of 27 engines subdivided into three squares (3 x 3), i.e., each square has 9 engines. Each engine corresponds to a matrix point, so we have 27 tactile units that allow to touch the user’s body with various intensities.

Stephen Cornford

Binatone Galaxy

An installation for used cassette players which looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded as playback devices, they become instruments in their own right. Replacing the prerecorded content of each tape with a microphone gives us the chance to listen instead to the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous plastic shells. Binatone Galaxy brings the framework within which a generation purchased their favourite records to the centre of attention, revealing the acoustics of the cassette and the voices of the machines themselves.“On the walls of a white room, brightly illuminated with natural light, Stephen Cornford, and artist who describes his work as existing “at the intersection of sculpture and music”, has mounted some 30 old cassette recorders. Models from Boots, Sanyo, Robotic, one lone and gorgeously named Binatone Galaxy: they all hang on the walls, wired up, tapes loaded and ready for action. Smitten by an attack of technological melancholia, the visitor can wonder who owned these things, what pop charts did these machines once record? Were they ever placed next to pillows, late at night for surreptitious listening pleasures? What happened to the voices that once rubbed the magnetic heads of these little machines? For some artists, the speed (and resulting impact) of obsolescence on the technology we once took for granted has spawned a form of fetishism, in which the voices – the human agency – they once recorded exist in an alternate, ghostly dimension, a reminder of what once was. This is not Cornford’s theme. The fact that each audio cassette in his machines is fitted with a motion sensor and a contact mic, so that, on entry the machines whirr into action, indicates that Binatone Galaxy is very much of the here and now. Yes, Cornford has chosen old, cheap and accessible technology with which to realise this, but I suspect that he is aiming for a furrruuuzzy audio intimacy.

Heidi Kumao

Protest

“Protest” is from the project, “Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out”(2002-2007), a series of mechanical girls’ legs, each with their own prescribed and programmed behavior. In each tableau, an electronically controlled, mechanical being protests with a voice of erratic physical gestures and projected video imagery. As a combination of robotics and performance, they represent girls who disobey or resist expectations. Unlike machines designed for perfect job performance, these machines will declare their fallibility, impatience, approval, and disapproval through small gestural acts. In these tableaus of protest and transformation, the machine is spirited, emotional, thoughtful, and irregular. “Protest” consists of aluminum, mechanized pairs of 6 year-old girl’s legs fitted with shoes and standing on a table top. An electronic circuit and proximity sensors make her responsive to the presence of viewers for whom she stomps loudly and erratically