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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Artists Reanimate Electronics
By Vince Kong
Journal Staff Writer
Inside the Santa Fe Complex, a clock with no hands dangles from the ceiling.
Instead, a series of wires and circuit breakers connect it to a main panel, counting down the seconds from the time when the plutonium from the first atomic test site in White Sands reaches its half life — 11,398,046,511,104 seconds, to be exact.
Next to it, a series of gourds — also suspended from the ceiling — are wired to a main computer, echoing sounds from a microphone placed inside a larger gourd hanging near the entrance of the complex.
Pretty heady stuff, right? Well, that's exactly the point.
The inaugural three-day Re:Make It! exhibit was under way Saturday, featuring about 50 local and regional artists reanimating defunct electronics and, in the case of Corvas Brinkerhoff's "Robot Food," creating works of art from found objects.
"The support structure is actually a staircase donated to us from a theater company," said Brinkerhoff, who created the piece in conjunction with Meow Wolf, a local art collaborative. "The rest of the stuff was just dropped off."
And the name for the about 10-foot-high sculpture was derived from its purpose.
"This is a monument to an extreme consumer society," he said, "and this is food for that."
That, sitting just a few feet away, is the main event.
Part tractor, part crane, part medieval torture device, the radio-controlled "Subjugator" and its smaller sibling, "Manipulatrix" — which are the progeny of Taos' Christian Ristow, founder of the robotic performance art troupe Robochrist Industries — wasted little time in feasting upon "Robot Food."
Any remorse for Brinkerhoff, who spent a couple days erecting the sculpture?
"That's the best part," he said. "It's in line with everything we do. ... (At Meow Wolf), we build these massive installations at our warehouse and then we tear them down. We're used to building things and then having them destroyed."
And creating and recreating is the theme found throughout the exhibit, said David Enoch, event organizer.
"This is about fringe artists who are about recycled, reused and repurposed technology," he said. "It's about taking art forward into new and experimental and unexpected realms."
Enoch's own piece, which is intended to simulate being in space, was constructed of giant sheets of reflective black Plexiglas, mirrors and lights — all found at the Los Alamos salvage yard, the Black Hole.
"These are all user controlled lights, so people can — in a sense — fly this spaceship," he said.
Also using scraps from the Black Hole, the clock, which is the brainchild of Zavin Polzin and Tristan Chambers, was assembled using similar technology to that of the Trinity explosion of 1945.
"The Black Hole is like a Piggy Wiggly grocery store, filled to the ceiling with cast-off junk from the lab. So, we repurposed from what it's original use was into something more contemplative," Polzin said. "This is a witness to what it made."
However, actually finding out if the clock can precisely determine when the White Sands site will be no longer radioactive may be slightly problematic.
"This will fall apart long before 24 billion years," he said. "But you get a sense of the consequence."
Oakland-based artist Alex Potts is the man responsible for the gourds. "Resonance," he said, is an exhibit that blends new technology with nature.
"The gourds, which I get from a farm in California, have been used for centuries as instruments — sitars in India, drums in Hawaii, and everywhere in between," he said. "These plants are used for this purpose, so the idea was to work with the resonance of the object and how the resonance triggers sound."
When a person makes a sound into the gourd, a computer mixes that sound with previously stored files, creating something, well, otherworldly.
"It's resonance triggering sounds from the past," he said. "Almost like when people tell stories. It's about bringing the past to life."
Re:Make It! concludes today, running from noon until 8 p.m. at the Santa Fe Complex, 624 Agua Fria. Cost is $10.
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