Structural Patterns

The installation “a geography of being : una geografia de ser” that consists of a video game and networked kinetic wooden figures revolves around the immigrant experience. The installation is on view as part of ReGeneration at the New York Hall of Science through January 13th, 2013.

Last Thursday, October 25th was the celebration for the opening of ReGeneration, an exhibition at the New York Hall of Science in Corona Park, Queens that will be on view through January 13th. I will be writing one or more extended articles regarding the works in the exhibition. Meanwhile, I am posting a video of the Undocumented Drones being installed at the Hall of Science as part of my installation titled “a geography of being : una geografia de ser”. This is an installation comprised of a video game and three wooden figures with screens and motors that are networked to the game. The figures or undocumented drones help the player along through the game at specific points. Each figure has a corresponding icon on the game screen that tells the player that the small robot has a message. If necessary, the player may step away from the game to view the undocumented drone’s embedded screen for instructions.

This is the title screen for the new game that I’m building. The video game is one component of the installation titled “a geography of being” that will be featured as part of the exhibition ReGeneration at the New York Hall of Science. “a geography of being” is a creative reflection on the realities of undocumented youths in the United States. The exhibition opens on October 27th 2012 and will be on view through January 13th, 2013. Along with the video game, “a geography of being” will feature kinetic wooden sculptures titled “undocumented drones” that are networked to the game to help the player along the three levels of the game.

I had been so excited to see Tom Sachs’s “Space Program: MARS”, unfortunately it turned out to be a disappointment and a sharp reminder of how lame work that is executed to target the Art Market can be. I also made the mistake of taking my nearly four year old son, the kid was bored and I should have known better.

I’m a big fan of Tom Sachs’s work, his amazing craft at assembling functioning sculptures out of materials never meant to be used in the forms that he does or as he calls it bricolage. I’m also well aware that the end product of his work is the art object and what interactivity is available in the work is meant exclusively for the artist and a few friends. However from MARS I hoped for something different, more spectacular and more available to a general public. Ahead of the visit, I checked to see if the exhibition was kid friendly, according to the Armory site it was, so this fed my image of an immersive and interactive installation.

Upon entering the space, I was not entirely surprised to find that the Armory overwhelms the work. The installation feels like museums pieces staged on platforms in a gigantic armory. I think that each element would have been amazing in a museum or gallery where the environment itself is at a much smaller scale. But in the armory, the pieces look like scattered work that do not come together as a whole. The installation is not interactive, in fact twice I was told to get off a platform when trying to get a closer look at the work (second photo below) and later told to take a notepad off a stool, because the stool was part of the art… And then there was the annoyance of Sachs’s assistants skating or bicycling around the armory and climbing into the sculptures which just made it all feel like a playground for the artist and his friends.

Part of the reason that I’m writing this is that visiting the Tom Sachs MARS show brought into focus the effect of work created for a market driven audience and the limitations of a space like the Armory on Park where Art is meant to be seen and not touched. Tom Sachs’s sculptures themselves reminded me of an exhibition that I saw last summer in the Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Art. The exhibition titled The Due Return by a collective that goes by Meow Wolf, was entirely immersive, other worldly, engaging and fun. It didn’t carry any of the pretentions of the art world, it was a magnificent and sincere installation that still felt like fine art. The Due Return presents a giant ship that sails through space and welcomed anyone of any age to traverse its various levels and rooms and discover countless interactive elements. I can’t imaging coming across an installation like The Due Return at an art establishment in New York City and it’s disappointing. Below is an image from a post featuring The Due Return.

My son could not get enough of The Due Return and we visited multiple times during a residency in Santa Fe. Whereas he was bored at Tom Sachs Space Program: MARS… I certainly understand that MARS was not designed to entertain young kids, but it should not be promoted as “an immersive space odyssey”… immersive for whom?

In speaking with one of the store attendants (the exhibition has a store that features products in collaboration with Nike), the attendant told me that although the installation itself isn’t that exciting, the performances appeared to be something special. I did not attend any of the performances, however my recommendation is if you are going to see the show before it ends this week, do it on an evening of a performance, don’t go just for the exhibition.

Biomodd by Belgian artist Angelo Vermeulen, launches in Queens at Immigrant Movement International (IMI) from 11A-1P to begin a 6 month experiment in pop-up horticulture. The piece is part of NY Hall of Science, Regeneration exhibition that will open October 17th, 2012. Below is artist Angelo Vermeulen explaining Biomodd at TED Talk 2010

skyScape is the start to a JavaScript game engine.

Sarah Kanouse has published an excellent essay on radio as art practice in the public space. The essay “Take It to the Air: Radio as Public Art” is printed in the fall 2011 Art Journal and discusses three different art projects utilizing radio as the primary medium. Following the introduction, Sarah discusses the work of Jon Brumit and Neighborhood Public Radio, my own Public Broadcast Cart and the work of art collective LIGNA. The final wrap up of the essay is quite inspiring:

In these projects, radio is a prosthetic technology that transmits the physical world into the space of electronic communications and materializes the vast space of electromagnetic resources into something material and physically apprehensible. In so doing, it forces a confrontation with and contestation of the rules that govern and control the use of both spaces, positioning radio for creative interventions in manifold public spaces – not only those we inhabit with our bodies, as much of the best public art does, but also those we inhabit with our passions, our excesses, our energies, and our speech.

Last Thursday I made it to the opening of Ecologías Correlativas at 319 Scholes curated by chimera+ and was treated to excellent new work. The piece pictured above left the strongest impression on me as I think that it’s beautiful at many levels. “untitled slime moulds” by Dan Baker is a stop motion animation of mold seeking out food and surviving. The artist set up a backlit mold environment that he documented over an extended period of time. The final video isn’t simply a compilation of the stills, but rather the artist pans throughout the environment following the mold as it moves and grows, seeking food or dying. The animation is beautifully rendered and the manner in which the mold moves and expands appears programmatic. It brought to mind some of the more beautiful data visualizations that I’ve seen in different years, however this is a living entity moving in space. The piece immediately reminded me of Thomas Aquinas’s writings and his argument of geometry as the language of God.

Although I have mixed feelings about my work in the show, projected in the back room and documented below, I was flattered to be part of a thoughtful and compelling exhibition that thematically stemmed from Félix Guatarri’s “Three Ecologies”. The beginning of the video “El Rito Apasionado” is available online.

Another piece that I thoroughly enjoyed is Miguel Soares “Place in Time”… brilliant!

Miguel Soares, Place in Time from migso on Vimeo.

And below is a textual contribution by the Chilean artist Ignacio Nieto.

The exhibition is only up until the 27 of this month and definitely worth the trip. Gallery Hours: Thursday – Saturday, 2:00pm – 6:00pm, and by appointment, 319 Scholes, Brooklyn, NY.

I’m the one artist without a cart in the exhibition Mobility, however the curators elected to include my “Undocumented Drones” as part of the show. The exhibition looks great, upon entering the gallery, I wished that one of my carts was available for the show, unfortunately they are either disassembled or in another part of the world. The exhibition opens Friday, September 9th and runs through October 17th, hopefully my bots will survive. The images below are a preview, the paint bucket in the first photo is not art.

From left to right: Undocumented Drones, Blender by Hidemi Takagi and Pimp My Piragua by Miguel Luciano

From left to right: SOS Mobile Classroom by Tattfoo Tan and Máximo González’s Changarrito

Consume Love by Atom Cianfarani

Close up of an Undocumented Drone – a series of modified hobby robots that have been enhanced with an additional microcontroller, screen and radio module. Each robot presents a rotoscoped animation until it receives a twitter message with the tag “DREAMers”. Upon receiving the tweet, the animation freezes, the motors are activated and the message or tweet is displayed.

The Undocumented Drones represent a near slave class within the United States that exists for cheap labor and does not have a voice – the undocumented laborers contributing to this country and primarily concerned with providing for the children and family. The twitter tag “DREAMers” alludes to the children of undocumented immigrants, brought to this country at a young age who have grown up in the United States, but may not have a right to higher education or employment. The DREAM Act was introduced a decade ago to create a pathway toward citizenship for undocumented youth. The DREAM Act has never been passed, however many of the young adults who would benefit from it have exposed themselves as undocumented and become activists; they are the DREAMers. Each bot juxtaposes the silent day laborer with the activist offspring.

Sci fi has long predicted an army of drones, however today’s NYC Times’ article on Microdones is at once awe striking and fearful. Hear are a few excerpts that rung strongly as I read through the article:

Last summer, fighter jets were almost scrambled after a rogue Fire Scout drone, the size of a small helicopter, wandered into Washington’s restricted airspace.

“There’s a kind of nostalgia for the way wars used to be,” said Deane-Peter Baker, an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy, referring to noble notions of knight-on-knight conflict. Drones are part of a post-heroic age, he said, and in his view it is not always a problem if they lower the threshold for war. “It is a bad thing if we didn’t have a just cause in the first place,” Mr. Baker said. “But if we did have a just cause, we should celebrate anything that allows us to pursue that just cause.”

One of the smallest drones in use on the battlefield is the three-foot-long Raven, which troops in Afghanistan toss by hand like a model airplane to peer over the next hill.

And here are a few images of the shrinking size of drones:
The highly used Predator Drone, particularly since 9/11.

The Shadow Drone.

And as photographed in the NY Times article the prototype for a hummingbird-like drone.

Of course in more recent critical art practices, setting aside the long history of drones in Science Fiction, there are several works that come to mind, particularly the long standing fictional work of Alex Rivera – Cybracero and the sculptural work “Parasitos Urbanos” of Gilberto Esparza. Although Esparza’s work reflects upon the self-sufficient nature of Mexico City’s street commerce, Rivera’s work points squarely at the de-humanizing aspects of the transnational corporate-military machine. Unfortunately, critical art, does little to stop the growing drone army by the Empire’s military. And we – all tax paying U.S. citizens and non-citizens are contributors.