sally mckay and lorna mills

Infrasense by Robert Saucier and the collective Kit is on at Interaccess (in conjunction with Subtle Technologies). Horse-shaped machines lumber along tracks. Blob-shaped machines with miscellaneous pieces of obsolete computer equipment stuck all over them lumber around hither and yon. There is some kind of technical interrelationship between the two types of machine involving sounds that are broadcast from the horses. These are "Trojan Horses" and "Bugs". The pun is somewhat compelling: to manifest in clunky, clumsy three dimensions an image of computer viruses that normally have no corporal reality. But it's not working very well. Hardly any of the machines were moving. There was a hand-held controller console with levers to push that appeared to produce zero results. There is supposedly a web component to the project where you can input directives to the "bugs" but the terminal in the gallery was A: confusing in the extreme and B: offline and disfunctional. I can't find a link to the web part of the project anywhere (not on the Interaccess site nor the Subtle Technologies site). To be fair, the installation is complicated, and I think this is the first time it's been installed. For robot-art afficianados there may be some interesting tech going on. I do, however, find this kind of object-oriented technology art pretty tedious. Is it R&D? if so, to what end and in whose service? If its all for the fun of puttering/tinkering invention, then please let go of the forced, tacked-on content and just give us some cool machines (that hopefully function) to interact with (or maybe we can just go watch Junkyard Wars on TV).

digital mock up of Infrasense taken from Subtle Technologies

installation shot of Eddo Stern's GodsEye View taken from Postmasters

C-Level member Eddo Stern is showing at AGO next week. I've seen his work at Postmasters in New York and, while his level of artistry is much more sophisticated than Infrasense, some of my complaints still apply: clunky objects that 'refer' to computer casing, with genuine technology going on 'inside" them. I like Stern's work, though, because the dork factor is acknowledged and folded into the content, with reference to the medieval fetish, war tech fetish, and general geek factor of computer games. I like Stern's video work better than his objects, and I like C-Level's exploratory provocations in the interface of gaming very much indeed. I'm hoping to attend Stern's talk at Interaccess on Saturday, and will report back on both this and his AGO show next week.

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