2. Marcel Duchamp

4. Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin

5. http://vimeo.com/8537769
Tinguely: Homage to New York

8. Signature was Hawkinson’s first work to reflect
artificial intelligence. It functions as a machine
that endlessly and mechanically produces a
facsimile of the artist’s signature, yielding a pile
of papers on the floor with his scrawled
insignia.
Not only is this a laudable mechanical
achievement, because Hawkinson created a
self-functioning machine, but it is also
provocative in its theoretical inferences. What
does a signature imply? In the pile of papers
beneath the mechanical hand, these signatures
are nothing more than ink scribbles on scratch
pieces of paper. But, at the core of a signature,
is an intimate human identity. A person’s
signature represents significant emotional,
intellectual, monetary value; it reflects an
individual’s existence. Mechanically produced
signatures are devoid of human presence, and
therefore, the signature has no inherent value.
The machine-generated scribble is endless,
pointless, vain, lifeless; but ironically, the
machine’s signature will outlast the lifetime of
the human signature, which dies upon the
individual’s death.

9. Tim Hawkinson, Emoter, 2002, Altered ink-jet print on plastic
and foam core on panel, monitor, stepladder, and
mechanical components

13. Chris Burden and Samson
I found this art piece absurd, subtly narcissistic and fantastically subversive.
In 1985, performance artist Chris Burden set up “a museum installation
consisting of a 100-ton jack connected to a gear box and a turnstile. The 100-
ton jack pushes two large timbers against the bearing walls of the museum.
Each visitor to the museum must pass through the turnstile in order to see
the exhibition. 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.”

14. • A bastard stepson of Fischli & Weiss, Kersels produces objects that drag,
collapse, boom, clank, and steam, but unlike the Swiss duo, Kersels
presence never leaves the objects he sets in motion. One of the first works
for Kersels that extends his body and its performance to objects (in this
case, making objects an explicit stand-in for his body) comes in the form of
MacArthur Park, 1996, an object that is a stand-in for the artist’s body
which is landscaped out with green and yellow wooden balls. The object is
a stack starting with a wooden table, then a speaker, then the assembly of
body like green and yellow wooden balls and on top of that an amplifier
and CD player. A mechanism under the table pulls the balls for the head,
arms, and legs down and part to the rhythm of the song, before releasing
them to snap back together. They do this through a song cycle that
includes Kersels singing Karaoke-style, MacArthur Park, I Will Survive, and
the Carpenters creepily cheerful, On Top of the World, a cycle of pop
falling apart and coming back together. This work captures the crux of
Kersels’ aesthetic, as he himself states in an interview with Ian Berry in the
catalogue for his recent retrospective, “my better works have that wink-
wink humor mixed with a tragic element.”

16. Then there was Twist (1993)
— still one of my favorite
Kersels kinetic sculptures — a
prosthetic leg with Michael
Jackson footwear that, via the
continuously winding and
unwinding rope of
intertwined rubber bands by
which it was suspended, was
periodically sent into spasms
of ecstatic spinning.

17. Allan Wexler

18. http://www.ted.com/talks/theo_jansen_creates_new_creatur
es.html

19. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/arthur_ganson_ma
kes_moving_sculpture.html

20. • In the 1980s and 1990s huge installations were created
out of and dedicated to places charged with political
and historical importance. With her kinetic sculptures,
the artist releases and rediverts the weight of the past
on these physical spaces: as for example in Concert in
Reverse (1997) in Münster, where an old municipal
tower turns out to be an execution site for the Third
Reich: or in Vienna, with the Tower of the Nameless
(1994), where she sets a monument to the refugees
from Balkan states in the form of a tower with
mechanically playing violins. In Weimar, the Concert for
Buchenwald was composed on the premises of a
former tram depot.

21. • Ballet of the Woodpeckers 1986
Ballet der Spechte
Mixed media
installation
This work was originally constructed for the entrance hall of a theatre,
situated within a psychiatric clinic in Vienna. It was the first time in the
clinic's history that patients and visitors could meet, touching each other
through their mirrored images. Small hammers peck against the mirrors in
constantly changing rhythms. They are like birds discovering their own
image as they fly towards their reflections. One of the woodpecker
machines cuts into a bundle of charcoal. The dust falls to the ground, with
a mound settling on an egg suspended just above the floor. In order to
recall the presence of the patients left in the clinic after the installation
was dismantled, Horn later added two glass funnels filled with trembling
mercury.

22. Rebecca Horn

24. Her recent work, exemplified by a three- dimensional piece called Some Night Action (1993), in
which marbles become random clusters of constellations according to the laws of physics and
chance, deals with “creation and preserva-tion,” as the artist explains it. Increasingly Alice
Aycock weds architecture and technology, the past and the present. Her art, asserts Dorothy
Valakos, focuses on the “endless process of reconfiguration” and “the very magic and strange
beauty of these [incomprehensible] constructs that allows us to glimpse our true nature.”

25. Alice Aycock

26. ROXY PAINE
PMU (Painting Manufacture Unit), 1999-2000
Aluminum, stainless steel, computer, electronics, relays, custom software, acrylic, servo
motors, valves, pump, precision track, glass, rubber
110 X 157 X 176 inches

28. They were exhibited at the 1985 Venice Architecture Biennale as "Three
Lessons of Architecture." There's The Reading Machine, The Memory
Machine, and The Writing Machine, all intended as metaphors concerning the
then-hotly debated post-structuralist theory of architecture-as-text.

29. The Memory
Machine is
Libeskind's
interpretation of
Giulio Camillo's
"Memory Theatre,"
a 16th-century
structure where,
upon entering, a
person's mind
would be filled and
inscribed with a
knowledge of the
universe.

30. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

32. • http://www.williamsstone.net/pages/01AndTa
bles.html
• http://www.williamsstone.net/pages/03Dissip
ation.html

33. http://www.gregorybarsamian.com/