Author: gyc

LookingOutwards-02

The australian artist LIA caught my attention. Her works are interesting in that she describes her process of creating art pieces as having a conversation with the program. One project that I liked was called ProximityOfNeeds (2021).

I admire the constant use of a similar motif throughout the video and also that she was able to find a solution through coding of the problem: not being able to get what you want. I suppose that she created a code that stopped looping after each sequence of black material enveloping the red dot. The shapes were random, but all started and ended similarly. It would start at one point in space and then find its way to a red dot. I think that a lot of her works have organic shapes, and that manifested itself in this recent work too.

LO: My inspiration

There is a project called ‘can’t help myself‘ by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. It is a large robotic arm that is programmed to clean up the mess of a blood-red liquid that surrounds itself in a given confined space. The thing that is so eye-catching is that this robot is programmed to do this continuous movement forever but its actions also is similar to those of a person’s emotions and actions that people have said it is like looking at a caged animal. The audience pities it but then also has this feeling of familiarity.

The robot was programmed using KUKA’s programming language, which is the company that the physical robot was made from. The Cognex visual recognition system script readings cause the KUKA controller unit to run custom scripts in so that robot performs to swipe the interact with the liquid.

Sun and Peng are the main artists that came up with the general movements for the robot to conduct but Harry and Han are the engineers/programmers with the entire project being overseen by Yu. Sun and Peng are famous for their controversial works, but this specifically focuses on the “pleasure and panic” of anticipating the future.