Alan Rath: Robotics

Rating:
Summary: fuzzy robots?
Review: If you're interested in the future uses and directions of digitized images, Alan Rath's joining of digitized images with kinetic sculptures is worth considering. Rath doesn't see kinetic art as alienating, so he's a bit baffled by commentaries on kinetic art such as those in his interview with Meredith Tromble ("There are undoubtedly more electronic circuits in my home than there are bits of painted canvas, yet when I imagine art about daily life I still think of a still life or a family portrait."). Rather he sees our relationship to technology as being just as intimate as our relationship to more culturally established forms of art. His digital video sculptures--built from circuit boards, memory chips, frame buffers and wires--are meant to be playful investigations of people's relationship to machinery and technology. For example, though Rath uses digitized videotaped images of the human eye to lend a psychological presence to his kinetic sculptures, he resists tendencies to anthropomorphize his sculptures in order to discover and create new modes of exchange and social relationships. In Rath's "Watcher," a wall-mounted monitor showing a shifting pair of eyes-neither quite inanimate nor animate-the effect of the image isn't to create a kind of portrait, or suggest any real perceptual ability, but simply to draw attention to our emotional responses as our traditional modes of relating are questioned and thwarted.

A 2-D book format is obviously not the optimal format for experiencing Rath's kinetic sculptures. Nevertheless, if you don't have the opportunity to go to one of his exhibits, the photographs of Rath's exhibited works at SITE Santa Fe is the next best thing.