These are some of our favorite art projects. We've referenced them countless times in our teaching and in conversation. We've collected them here to share with you and our future forgetful selves.
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Mechanical Watch
Bartosz Ciechanowski
An in-depth description of the inner workings of a mechanical watch.
| 2022 | CodeTimeTechnology |
Compilation Video 3.9
Zimoun
Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of simple and functional materials, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life. Carrying an emotional depth, the acoustic hum of natural phenomena in Zimoun's minimalist constructions effortlessly reverberates. - bitforms gallery NYC
| 2020 | SculptureSoundKinetic |
Papier-Mâché Masks
Liz Sexton
Rejecting anthropocentrism, Liz Sexton wants to break down the boundary between human and animal life. The Minneapolis-based artist creates large papier-mâché pieces of foxes, owls, and other wild animals designed to be worn by humans, creating a hybrid being that she often situates in non-natural environments, like a rat near the subway lines or a porcupine fish out of water.
| 2019 | Sculpture |
Breeze of Light
Nendo
When a spotlight is layered with a polarizing filter and projected on to another flower-shaped polarizing film, the light passes through two layers of filters which makes the flower’s shadow darker than expected. Pivoting the filter 45 degrees creates a more translucent shadow, and by rotating it an additional 45 degrees, the shadow completely disappears.In order to create a spatial experience using this principle, 115 polarized spotlights with individually-controlled motors were suspended from the ceiling. On the floor, 17,000 flower-shaped polarizing films were spread in calculated patterns. Each flower was placed in a different height so the entire space appears as a smooth and wavy landscape, as if it was a real garden of flowers.The movement of the polarizing films on the spotlights allows constant change in the intensity of the flower’s shadows, even though there is no change in the amount of light in the space. And although there is no air blowing in the room, the shadows appear to be effected by a gentle breeze passing through the garden.
| 2019 | InstallationLight |
PLAY
Urs Fischer
At the intersection of sculpture, behavior, and choreography, PLAY is an arena of chance encounters where visitors are invited to interact with nine office chairs that seem to have lives of their own.
| 2018 | InstallationInteractive |
Light Barrier
Kimchi and Chips
99 robotic mirrors continuously move throughout the day to follow the sun like sunflowers. These mirrors, arrayed across two 5 meter tall towers and one 15 meter long track, each emit a beam of sunlight into a cloud of water mist. The beams are computationally aligned so that together they draw a bright circle in the air. Dependent entirely on the presence of the sun for its completion, the work explores the possibilities and limitations of technology to capture what is out of reach, to harness nature and bring the sun down to earth. Collaborating with the natural fluctuations in the climate, Halo appears only for moments when the wind, sun, water, and technology coincide, creating a form which exists between the material and immaterial.
| 2018 | Installation |
Positions of the Unknown
Quadrature
“Positions of the Unknown” locates the current whereabouts of these mysterious objects by simply pointing at them as they revolve around Earth. Missing the legal proof, those unidentified artefacts remain entities of pure speculation, secret companions of us and our planet. Even so they have been sighted several times and their ubiquitous presence is therefore somehow validated, they linger in a state between existence and non-existence. Quadrature’s 52 small machines constantly follow their paths and serve as silent witnesses of the unknown.
| 2017 | SculptureKineticElectronics |
The Mechanics of History
Yoann Bourgeois
The Mechanics of History, or La Mecanique de l'Histoire, sees grey-suited performers climbing up steps before falling onto a trampoline while rotating together. It was devised by French dancer Yoann Bourgeois and is on show in Le Pantheon's highest dome
| 2017 | Performance |
B612
Airbus
Airbus initiated in 2010 a research collaboration on a prospective study aimed at defining and validating an “aeronautical” font ( Definition and Validation of an Aeronautical Font ): the challenge was to improve the display of information on cockpit screens, in particular in terms of readability and reading comfort, and to optimize the overall homogeneity of the cockpit.
| 2017 | Font |
Anemone
Reuben Margolin
Anemone is a kinetic sculpture by Reuben Margolin made in 2017. Standing four and a half feet tall, it has two wooden helices near the ground. These rotate, and acting through 48 blue steel rods and an equal number of strings, give motion to the upper pink and yellow elements.
| 2017 | SculptureKinetic |
Come and Go
Michael Koehle
This is a plastic relief that is cyclically filled and then drained of tinted water. The depth of the water sets the intensity at that point. When the entire relief is overfilled, the image is dark. As it drains, the image begins to break down, as more and more white plastic is visible. The video is a timelapse, played at 32x actual.
| 2017 | SculpturePhotography |
Contours
Reuben Heyday Margolin
Contours contains three electric motors. Two of them turn the pair of aluminum helices that drive the wave movement, while the third controls the overall height of the wave. Being analogue rather then digital, the sculpture adds movement by means of 6534 pulleys.
| 2016 | SculptureKinetic |
Real Time
Maarten Baas
The Real Time series are 12-hour films of performances indicating the time. With Real Time, Baas combines theatre, art, film and design in a series of new clock designs. Real Time was launched in April 2009 at the Salone Del Mobile in Milan, Italy with with the Sweepers, Analog Digital and Grandfather clocks. Since then, Real Time has expanded from films and grandfather clocks, to an iphone app and special commissions, such as the Schiphol clock, launched in July 2016.
| 2016 | VideoTimeInstallation |
Pneumatic Masonry / Houston
Pneuhaus
Pneumatic Masonry is a lightweight construction system designed around the ideal of an atomic building block. It builds off of traditional masonry techniques with some major twists: air replaces stone and net replaces mortar. The system uses modular geometric units to combine and recombine to configure spaces and forms of different shapes and sizes.
| 2016 | ArchitectureInflatable |
STUDY FOR FIFTEEN POINTS
Random International
Study for Fifteen Points / I experiments with the minimal amount of information that is actually necessary for the animated form to be recognised as human; and the fundamental impact created by subtle changes within that information. When arranged and animated in order, the points of light represent the human anatomy.
| 2016 | SculptureKinetic |
Celui qui tombe
Yoann Bourgeois
This method bypasses traditional printing processes, using instead additive or subtractive manufacturing with materials like plastic, or metal as the base and glass, resin, or water as the coating. In addition, images can be applied to three dimensional surfaces.
| 2016 | Performance |
TV Drums
Ei Wada
Wada says it happened completely by mistake. After plugging a sound cable into a composite video connector port and seeing the sound on the screen as an image, he started pairing multiple TV’s with PC-controlled video decks at different pitches, thus turning them into percussion instruments. Then, he connected guitar amps to his feet and started touching the TV screens to produce buzzing noise. Today, he can make the old cathode ray tube television sets sound like electric drums.
| 2016 | SoundElectronicsPerformance |
Sakamoto Aged Simulation Suit (Model M176)
Sakamoto Model Corporation
Unlike modular strap-based systems, this suit features a "wearable overalls" design that allows for quick setup (approximately 3 minutes) while simulating the physical constraints of advanced age. It utilizes adjustable control belts to restrict the range of motion in the neck, elbows, and knees, along with a unique "step-limiting" belt that forces the wearer into a stooped posture with a shuffled gait. Distributed by Nasco Healthcare, the kit includes sensory impairments—such as vision-blurring goggles, earplugs, and weighted extremities—to provide nursing students and caregivers with an immersive, empathy-building experience of the daily physical struggles faced by the elderly.
| 2015 | Wearable |
Encoded Mirrors
Florian Born
Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian are two famous artists of abstract art. Both had different approaches in terms of form but when it comes to the choice of color they agreed. The three primary colors red, blue and yellow are the most essential in their work. To demonstrate the connection between both artists the installation takes Kandinsky’s painting „Yellow-Red-Blue“ and turns it into Mondrian’s “Composition with big red square, yellow, black, grey and blue” just by using static mirrors. Every mirror on the surface is tilted to a specific angle to reflect a certain color of the Kandinsky painting hanging on the wall. If a person stands at the correct distance and height to the surface, the sweetspot, the image of the Mondrian painting appears in the mirrors. The whole image is just constructed by redirecting the sight to different spots located on the Kandinsky painting.
| 2015 | Sculpture |
Jller
Prokop Bartoníček & Benjamin Maus
A set of pebbles from the Jller are placed on the 2x4 meter platform of the machine, which automatically analyzes the stones in order to then sort them. The sorting process happens in two steps: Intermediate, pre-sorted patterns are formed first, to make space for the final, ordered alignment of stones, defined by type and age. Starting from an arbitrary set of stones, this process renders the inherent history of the river visible.
| 2015 | Robotics |
Amplitude
Studio Drift
The movement in this installation is like the pulse that occurs in all organism. Each element is triggered by a weight that slides back and forth in the tube. Because the movement of the collection of tubes is synchronised by a computer, an impression is given of watching a bird flying in slow motion.
| 2015 | InstallationSculptureKinetic |
PomPom Mirror
Daniel Rozin
Rozin’s anthropomorphic "PomPom Mirror" features a synchronized array of 928 spherical faux fur puffs. Organized into a three-dimensional grid of beige and black, the sculpture is controlled by hundreds of motors that build silhouettes of viewers using computer-vision. Along its surface, figures appear as fluffy animal-like representations within the picture plane, which is made permeable by a ‘push-pull’ forward and backward motion of meshed ‘pixels’. Ghostly traces fade and emerge, as the motorized composition hums in unified movement, seemingly alive and breathing as a body of its own.
| 2015 | SculptureKinetic |
Black Flags
William Forsythe
In Black Flags (2015) two industrial robot arms wave around an enormous black flag, sometimes in unison, sometimes in counterpoint, in immense, impressive sweeps. The work foregrounds the contrast between the specific, unchanging process of the code and the aleatory movements of the fabric. Visually, it suggests Loie Fuller dancing with poles, elongating her arms to accentuate the line and the swirl of her oversized sleeves.
| 2014 | Robotics |
Remote Material Deposition
Gramazio Kohler Research
In this elective thesis we continued our investigation into Remote Material Deposition and demonstrated – in cooperation with the Sitterwerk St.Gallen – this entirely new fabrication technique for the first time at full architectural scale. The architectural installation was a result of a one-month-long workshop and, within this scope, proposes a radically new way of thinking about materializing architecture: Featuring an industrial robot that aggregates material over distance and therefore exceeds its predefined workspace, this installation brings not only forward a novel scale of digital fabrication in architecture – it also takes a first step in characterizing a novel approach in digital fabrication, taking architecture beyond the creation of static forms to the design of dynamic material aggregation processes.
| 2014 | RoboticsFabrication |
Light Boxes
Yael Erel
Light Boxes are a series of small, interactive installations designed to reveal the sculptural potential of reflection. Within each box, a simple optical system—light source, reflector, and architectural screen—creates projected drawings that shift as the reflector slowly rotates. Viewers peer through a small aperture to observe the reflecting plane, while the projections themselves are cast onto an interior surface. The light drawings are not fixed; they emerge and evolve in response to subtle changes in alignment and curvature. What unfolds is a temporal visual event—momentary compositions that hover between image and motion.
| 2013 | SculptureLight |
2 prepared dc-motors, cotton balls, cardboard boxes 16.5 x 12 x 5cm
Zimoun
| 2013 | SculptureKineticSound |
Signature
Tim Hawkinson
Signature Chair, a 1993 sculpture, deals with themes of rhythmic repitition and self-obession through the use of a small motorized contraption attached to a vintage school desk. The contraption, which contains a pen, copies out “Tim Hawkinson” endlessly on rolls of paper, discarding the sheets around the desk itself.
| 2013 | SculptureKinetic |
Mataerial
Petr Novikov, Saša Jokić and Joris Laarman Studio
Plastic extruded from this robotic 3D printer solidifies instantly, allowing it to draw freeform shapes in the air extending from any surface. Unlike normal 3D printers that require a flat and horizontal base, Mataerial prints with plastic that sticks to horizontal, vertical, smooth or irregular surfaces, without the need for additional support structures.
| 2012 | RoboticsFabrication |
Pacific Sun
Thomas demand
...Demand has recreated a dining room of a cruise ship using paper models. The environment references to a clip shot from a surveillance camera on a real cruise ship during wavy turbulence. All the pieces of furniture were made on a 1:1 scale and choreographed in movement. The final two minutes film were obtained from the sequenced animation of almost 3,000 photographs, capturing every minimal movement.
| 2012 | VideoSculpture |
Drawing Machine 01
Eske Rex
once set into motion by hand, the pendulums, linked together at the site of the pen, continue in motion from the transfer one another’s kinetic energy. the images produced can range up to nine feet by nine feet in size, and can be produced with any ink pen, in either monochrome or multicolour by switching pens in and out during the production process.
| 2011 | Drawing Machine |
The Clock
Christian Marclay
In The Clock, Marclay samples thousands of film excerpts indicating the passage of time. Spanning the range of timepieces, from clock towers to wristwatches and from buzzing alarm clocks to the occasional cuckoo, The Clock draws attention to time as a multifaceted protagonist of cinematic narrative. With virtuosic skill, the artist has excerpted each of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to form a 24-hour montage, which unfolds in real time.
| 2011 | Video |
El Claustro
Penique Productions
Penique installed an inflatable in the cloister adjacent to the former convent of San José de Gracia. Dating from the late 17th century, the cloister is now part of the Museo de la Ciudad, Querétaro.
| 2011 | InstallationInflatable |
Metropolis II
Chris Burden
Chris Burden's Metropolis II is an intense kinetic sculpture, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one six lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour; every hour, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings. According to Burden, "The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars produce in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st century city."
| 2011 | SculptureInstallation |
Self Portrait
Random International
Self Portrait invites viewers to become active agents in the making of their own depiction. The work creates a large-scale, impermanent representation of the person standing before it, printing their image with light onto a light-sensitive surface. The portrait begins to fade away almost as soon as it emerges; the work erases every mark it makes.
| 2010 | Interactive |
The Toaster Project
Thomas Thwaites
I'm Thomas Thwaites and I'm trying to build a toaster, from scratch - beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster.
| 2010 | Sculpture |
The Tenth Sentiment / 10番目の感傷
Ryota Kuwakubo
“On the front of the model train running around the darkened room is a small, lit-up LED light. This train slowly navigates the room, which contains various large and small “objects,” according to the model rail route, throwing the shadows of the “objects” onto the walls and ceiling as it goes. Due to the movement of the light source, the shadows of the stationary “objects” move as images like views from the carriage windows, surrounding viewers with images as if they were passengers riding on the train.
| 2010 | InstallationSculptureLight |
The Wave
Ned Khan
A 60-foot tall by 600-foot long cable net structure composed of tens of thousands of hinged aluminum elements that sway in the wind. The net forms the backdrop for a new urban plaza that weaves the new ballpark into the urban fabric. The project was a collaboration with landscape architect Tom Oslund and Associates. Completed in 2010.
| 2010 | SculptureKineticArchitecture |
Poly Chair
Max Lamb
A process of destruction is used to construct a bombproof chair. A variety of simple tools and a reasonable amount of energy is all that is required. By making furniture by hand the unique is achieved and individual beauty inevitable. The chair takes less than 30 minutes to carve and the soft tactile polyurethane rubber finish takes only 10 minutes to apply. The chair is ready to sit on just 40 minutes from start of production.
| 2009 | Furniture |
Margot’s Other Cat
Arthur Ganson
This machine was inspired by watching a randomly shaped object bouncing off the surface of a slow moving, reciprocating and irregularly shaped piston head on the moon. Of course anything is possible in the virtual world of the computer.
| 2009 | SculptureKinetic |
Mudtub
Thomas Gerhardt
By sloshing, squishing, pulling, punching, etc, in a tub of mud (yes, wet dirt), users control games, simulators, and expressive tools; interacting with a computer in a new, completely organic, way. Born out of a motivation to close the gap between our bodies and the digital world, the Mud Tub frees the traditional computer interaction model of it’s rigidity, allowing humans to use their highly developed sense of touch, and creative thinking skills in a more natural way.
| 2009 | InteractiveElectronics |
Tweenbots
Kacie Kinzer
Tweenbots are human-dependent cardboard robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, they rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal. The Tweenbot’s success is dependent people’s willingness to step outside of habitual actions and engage with a technological object in the city space. As emotive characters placed in the improbable setting of the city, Tweenbots create an unexpected interaction, disrupting the narratives of our everyday experience, and offering a fleeting and playful connection in the context of the city street.
| 2009 | Interactive |
Strandbeest
Theo Jansen
Since 1990 Theo Jansen has been engaged in creating new forms of life: the so called strandbeests. These are not made of protein like existing forms of lives but they’re made of another basis stuff; yellow plastic tubes. Skeletons made from these tubes are able to walk. They get their energy from the wind. They evolved over many generations, becoming increasingly adapt at surviving storms and water from the sea. In redoing this creation, he hopes to become wiser in the dealing with the existing nature by encountering problems the real Creator had to face. https://www.strandbeest.com/explains
| 2009 | SculptureKinetic |
One Day Poem Pavilion
COSTAS VOYATZIS
Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice, a reflection on the passing of time at the period of the winter solstice. The time-based nature of the poem–and the visitor’s time-based encounters with it–allow viewers to have different experiences either seeing a stanza of the poem or getting the whole poem.
| 2008 | ArchitectureTime |
a circular structure for the internal observer
Norimichi Hirakawa
A computer-generated image projected onto the wall is transformed by sounds generated by the computer that originally drew it. That is to say, the image changes in accordance with how actively the computer is operating. The work is structured so that when the image transforms, a load is placed on the computer, causing the sound of the drive to change, which in turn impacts the generated image again. https://soundandinteraction.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/norimichi-hirakawa/
| 2008 | InstallationElectronics |
Daring Machines
Adriana Salazar
This machine performs the repeated gesture of trying to light a match without ever achieving it: there is an increasing tension between the possibility of starting a fire and the failure of the action that precedes it.
| 2008 | SculptureKinetic |
Camera Obscura: View of Central Park Looking North
Abelardo Morell
Using a Camera Obscura technique, Morell produced black and white images of interiors that reflect a view of their outdoor surroundings. Allowing a small ray of light to shine into the unlit room from outside, he then captures the reflection on his large-format camera, often exposing the film for up to 8 hours. From the interior spaces of his own home, he went on to create many more Camera Obscura images in rooms all over the world. Carrying heavy equipment up mountains, into deserts and onto New York rooftops, he has travelled the world to photograph famous landmarks with a piquant curiosity. The Eiffel Tower, San Marco Square, the Manhattan Bridge and Yosemite are all immediately familiar and yet eerily altered.
| 2008 | Photography |
The Dig Cunt
Gelitin
Seven days, day after day, Gelitin commuted in the morning from a small hotel at Times Square to Coney Island bringing shovels and spades to dig. Sometimes people joined. Every evening the hole was filled up again and we caught the Q or the B home to Manhattan.
| 2007 | Performance |
BEE’S
Susana Soares
Bee's explores how we might co-habit with natural biological systems and use their potential to increase our perceptive abilities.
| 2007 | InteractiveTool |
Arithmetik Garden
EUPHRATES / ユーフラテス
https://euphrates.jp/1859898
| 2007 | InteractiveInstallation |
Bird Wave
Martin Smith
http://www.smithautomata.co.uk Kinetic Sculpture by Martin Smith permanently located at Mansfield Museum and Art Gallery, UK.
| 2007 | SculptureKinetic |
Pewter Stool
Max Lamb
My Pewter stool was made using a very simple form of sand casting. I chose to use the natural landscape of Caerhays beach on the South coast of Cornwall to make the stool. Most of my childhood was spent on this, and other, Cornish beaches building castles, boats and tunnels in the sand, and I decided it would be nice to return to my favourite beach to produce a stool using a process Cornwall was once famous for. During the mining boom, Cornwall had two of the World’s three largest mine engine foundries (Harvey’s 1779-1903 and Copperhouse 1820-1869). They were both located in Hayle, where the fine quality of the Hayle estuary sand was perfect for sand casting.
| 2006 | SculptureFurniture |
Bridge
Michael Cross
Bridge is a mechanical structure that lets you walk out into the middle of a body of water with nothing connecting you to shore. You walk on steps that rise up out of the water in front of you and disappear back under behind you.
| 2006 | InstallationKinetic |
Chichu Museum
Tadao Ando
Chichu Art Museum was constructed in 2004 as a site rethinking the relationship between nature and people. The museum was built mostly underground to avoid affecting the beautiful natural scenery of the Seto Inland sea.
| 2004 | Architecture |
Counter Window
Tatsuo Miyajima
This work is Time change as numbers and visiter see the landscape cut out through the number. Time moving forward in real time. And the landscape outside that changes realistically. From the inside of the special space of the museum, visiter see the outside landscape of everyday life. The inside and outside become blurred by the visitor's time and the device of the work. The visitor sees the changing numbers on the liquid crystal of the work and at the same time sees the outside landscape. The viewer's perspective shifts and oscillates. Art and reality, landscape and time, inside and outside. This is a work that considers what art is, what time is, and what landscape is.
| 2004 | Installation |
Wall (I Want to Become Architecture)
Allan Wexler
"Of course, the organic human form, which Wexler never actually depicts, is an intractable problem in itself, as it always has been in the geometry of art. It can twist and turn and even stand on its head; it doesn't really fit any system, though it must. It is soft, architecture is hard. It is variable and changeable, architecture is precise and eternal (for a while).
| 2002 | SculptureArchitecture |
Emoter
Tim Hawkinson
It’s something that emotes, and it’s motorized. Emoter falls into the category of body depiction—references to the body—like the bathtub-generated piece and balloon self-portraits that I’ve done. But it’s much more about mechanics and probably closer to a piece I did that synthesized voice using really primitive methods. Emoter uses the expressions of the face that are so cued into reading the face. I took a picture of myself and cut the features up into little pieces, like a puzzle, and rearranged the features. And each time I did it, I created a different emotion, and that’s just something I read into it. Anybody looking at it would read into this, would reinterpret it, as I think we all pretty much interpret the same basic emotions—frowning, smiling—but I was interested in seeing how much inflection and emotion I could get out of the face using a random input of signals. -https://art21.org/read/tim-hawkinson-drip-and-emoter/
| 2002 | SculptureKineticInteractive |
The Tarot Garden
Niki De Saint Phalle
Amongst the steep Tuscan hillside is an eccentric garden, home to a variety of unusual sculptures inspired by a deck of tarot cards. The Tarot Garden is the brainchild of artist Niki De Saint Phalle, who created the 22 works of art as a safe space for healing. After being committed to an asylum in the 1950s, she found refuge in art and wanted to build an environment that made others feel the same way. Today, visitors can explore the garden, built to be a “dialogue between sculpture and nature.”
| 2002 | InstallationArchitecture |
Uberorgan
Tim Hawkinson
Überorgan is an enormous contemporary sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Tim Hawkinson. It exemplifies Hawkinson's characteristic use of the ordinary to achieve the extraordinary, combining and recomposing common industrial materials and found musical phrases into a multisensory sculptural experience.
| 2000 | InstallationInteractive |
paraSITE
Michael Rakowitz
ParaSITE shelters are custom built inflatable structures designed for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system.
| 1998 | Architecture |
Ever Is Over All
Pipilotti Rist
Ever Is Over All is one of Rist’s first large-scale installations, giving spatial dimension to her lush visual language, which often combines imagery suggestive of female sexuality with enhanced images of nature and the everyday to create hypersaturated worlds that are part reality, part fantasy. Shot in a single take using consumer-grade video cameras, the work emphasizes the painterly qualities of standard-definition video, in which the pixels or “color noise” that compose the image are visible.
| 1997 | VideoInstallation |
Knotted Chair
Marcel Wanders
Eliminating the distinction between craft and industry, the ‘Knotted Chair’ (1996) unites conflicting aspects, methods and materials in order to surprise and innovate. Combining hand-crafted tactile design with high-tech industrial processes, the design begins with an aramid braided cord around a carbon fibre core that is manipulated in the traditional technique of macramé to form the shape of the chair. The slack threads are impregnated with epoxy and hung in a frame to harden thus using gravity to accomplish its shape.
| 1996 | SculptureFurniture |
Speed of the Earth
Mitch Benoff
Speed of the Earth™ is a large-scale light sculpture installation that depicts the speed of the earth's rotation on its axis, in full scale and in real time. Creating the illusion of a 600-foot long meteor of light racing east to west at over 700 miles per hour, the installation creates an exhilarating experience of speed and beauty, while making visceral and concrete the concept of relative motion and the perception of the earth's rotation. Here's a link to the original thesis paper. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/64515
| 1993 | InstallationLightPublic Art |
Luminous Earth Grid
Stuart Williams
Area = 8 American football fields • 20 kilometers of electrical cable • 200 installers
| 1993 | Land ArtLight |
“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers)
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Time is something that scares me… or used to. This piece I made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.
| 1991 | SculptureTime |
Beach Birds
Merce Cunningham
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROmTHBg8Nw0 https://www.mercecunningham.org/the-work/choreography/beach-birds/
| 1991 | Performance |
The Monument Against Fascism
Esther Shalev-Gerz
By engraving, gouging and hammering signed messages, opinions and commentaries, members of the public engaged with the dynamic of the project. When one accessible part was covered with inscriptions, it was immediately sunk into the ground. After seven years of progressive descents, all that remains visible are the top of the monument now level with the ground and the text panel.
| 1986 | MonumentPublic ArtParticipatory |
Samson
Chris Burden
Samson (1985) consists of a 100 ton jack connected to a gear box and a turnstile. The jack pushes two large timbers against the walls of the gallery. Each visitor to the exhibition must pass through the turnstile and each input on the turnstile ever so slightly expands the jack, and ultimately, if enough people visit the exhibition, Samson could, theoretically, destroy the building.
| 1985 | InstallationParticipatory |
Space Traveller I
George Daniels
http://www.danielslondon.com/daniels-watches/the-space-traveller/
| 1982 | Timepiece |
Radio in a Bag
Daniel Weil
Radio in a Bag, transistor radio components in a printed plastic (PVC) bag, 29 x 20.7 x 3 cm. The flexible and transparent bag features the radio's scattered components as the object's decoration.
| 1981 | SculptureElectronics |
DEC. 18, 1979
On Kawara
From January 4, 1966, Kawara made a long series of "Date paintings" (the Today series), which consist entirely of the date on which the painting was executed in simple white lettering set against a solid background.
| 1979 | PaintingTime |
Broken Kilometer
Walter De Maria
Overview The Broken Kilometer, 1979, located at 393 West Broadway in New York City, is composed of 500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The 500 rods are placed in five parallel rows of 100 rods each. The sculpture weighs 18 3/4 tons and would measure 3,280 feet if all the elements were laid end-to-end. Each rod is placed such that the spaces between the rods increase by 5mm with each consecutive space, from front to back; the first two rods of each row are placed 80mm apart, the last two rods are placed 570 mm apart. Metal halide stadium lights illuminate the work which is 45 feet wide and 125 feet long.
| 1979 | InstallationSculpture |
The Hypercube: Projections and Slicing
Thomas Banchoff and Charles Strauss,
"The Hypercube: Projections and Slicing" by Thomas Banchoff and Charles Strauss, Brown University, was awarded the Prix de la Recherche Fondamentale at the International Congress of Scientific Films in Brussels in 1978, the year it was produced. It was featured in a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki in that same year.
| 1978 | VideoGeometry |
Earth Room
Walter De Maria
The New York Earth Room, 1977, is the third Earth Room sculpture executed by the artist, the first being in Munich, Germany in 1968. The second was installed at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany in 1974. The first two works no longer exist.
| 1977 | Installation |
Splitting
Gordon Matta-Clark
This film documents the major building cut made by Matta-Clark in a house on Humphrey Street in Englewood, New Jersey.
| 1974 | SculptureArchitecture |
PAGEOS
NASA
PAGEOS had a diameter of exactly 100 feet (30.48 m), consisted of a 0.5 mils (12.7 μm) thick mylar plastic film coated with vapour deposited aluminium enclosing a volume of 524,000 cubic feet (14,800 m3) and was used for the Weltnetz der Satellitentriangulation (Worldwide Satellite Triangulation Network) – a global cooperation organized by Hellmut Schmid (Switzerland & USA) 1969-1973. Finished in 1974, the network connected 46 stations (3000–5000 km distance) of all continents with an accuracy of 3–5 m (approx. 20 times better than terrestrial triangulations at that time).
| 1974 | ScienceSculpture |
Dust Brush
NASA - Johnson Space Center
"When we got back to the LM, we tried to dust each other off. Usually, it was just Pete trying to dust me off. I would get up on the ladder and he would try to dust me off with his hands, but we didn't have a lot of luck. We should have some sort of whisk broom on the MESA. Before we get back in (on subsequent missions), we'll dust each other up high (that is, dust off the upper parts of the suits); (and) then the LMP will get on the ladder, and the CDR will give him a dust and then will get in. We are bringing too much dust into the LM.
| 1969 | Tool |
I Am Sitting in a Room
Alvin Lucier
In 1969 American composer Alvin Lucier first performed his landmark work I Am Sitting in a Room, conceived for voice and electromagnetic tape. Lucier read a text into a microphone. Attempting to smooth out his stutter, he began with the lines, “I am sitting in a room, the same one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice.” As described in the text, his voice was recorded, then played back into the room. This process was repeated, and with each iteration Lucier’s recorded speech grew muddled, sounding distant, and specific sonic frequencies started to dominate the recorded sound. These tones that began to overwhelm the text and abstract the sonic landscape are the room’s resonant frequencies and are entirely specific to the architectural particularity of a given space. As these frequencies grew, reinforced with each playback, the result was an erasure of the human performer and the dominance of an environmental music.
| 1969 | PerformanceSound |
Raytheon Lectron
Georg Greger
The Lectron kit consisted of electronic components installed within individual "building blocks" with a clear plastic base, an opaque white top with the component's schematic symbol and permanent magnets attached to the leads of the enclosed components. Each building block was magnetically attached to a metal plate serving both as a work surface and ground, eliminating the need for soldering, spring terminals or a breadboard. This gave the benefit of safety as well as the ability to rearrange the blocks to determine the effect on the circuit.
| 1965 | ElectronicsKit |
Magnet TV
Nam June Paik
Magnet TV is an early example of Nam June Paik’s “prepared televisions,” in which he altered the television image or its physical casing. This work, which was featured in Paik’s first solo exhibition in New York, consists of a seventeen-inch black-and-white set on which an industrial-sized magnet rests. The magnetic field interferes with the television’s electronic signals, distorting the broadcast image into an abstract form that changes when the magnet is moved.
| 1965 | SculptureElectronics |
Automorphic Tube
Robert le Ricolais
Robert le Ricolais’s wire-frame tensegrity structures may well stand as sculptural artworks in their own right. His finely crafted forms appear to have a remarkable lightness, insinuating objects of flight, part kite, part airship skeleton. Their balanced forms create a meditative aerodynamic aesthetic, implying propulsion or rotation. Some, throwing their graphic wire-frame shadows into space, defy gravity through their nearly-not-thereness.
| 1962 | GeometryArchitecture |
Poème symphonique
György Ligeti
Poème symphonique is a 1962 composition by György Ligeti for one hundred mechanical metronomes. It was written during his brief acquaintance with the Fluxus movement. The piece requires ten "performers", each one responsible for ten of the hundred metronomes. The metronomes are set up on the performance platform, and they are then all wound to their maximum extent and set to different speeds. Once they are all fully wound, there is a silence of two to six minutes, at the discretion of the conductor; then, at the conductor's signal, all of the metronomes are started as simultaneously as possible. The performers then leave the stage. As the metronomes wind down one after another and stop, periodicity becomes noticeable in the sound, and individual metronomes can be more clearly distinguished. The piece typically ends with just one metronome ticking alone for a few beats, followed by silence, and then the performers return to the stage Here's another version... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOcBSFTu1oI
| 1962 | InstallationSound |
Untitled from 1954
Atsuko Tanaka
Atsuko Tanaka (田中 敦子, Tanaka Atsuko; February 10, 1932 – December 3, 2005) was a Japanese avant-garde artist. She was a central figure of the Gutai Art Association from 1955 to 1965.
| 1954 | SoundDrawing Machine |
Dots
Norman McLaren
An experimental film in which both sound and visuals were created entirely by Norman McLaren drawing directly upon the film with ordinary pen and ink.
| 1940 | Video |
EM 1 (Telephone Picture)
László Moholy-Nagy
EM 2 + 3 exist also. Moholy-Nagy made these works by giving instructions to to an enamel factory in Weimar Germany over the telephone. This is an example of repurposing tools and techniques used commercially as expressive medium.
| 1923 | TechnologyPaintingBahaus |