The Concept of Conceptual Art:
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encounters a mouse robot, at which point the cat robot autonomously attempts to
destroy the mouse robot with his jaws and paws. The maze is completely
enclosed. It has no Start, no center, no finish, and no exit.
Materials used: Tiffany lamp pieces, bricks from a demolished school,
120 year-old bam wood, antique hemp rope, antique maps, parts from several
Roomba I-robots, various motors and gears, batteries, IR sensors, photocells,
heat sensors, sound sensors, nineteenth-century stained glass panels, tongue
depressors, motion detectors, various Computer mice, refurbished Robosapien
redesigned and outfitted in a white lab coat, vintage cloth fabric, antique
flashlights, robotic killer cat (designed by the artist), various salvaged and
Figure 8. Detail of The Lab is Dystopia. Photograph by Monika Lozinska-Lee
Conclusion: Here
If the world is ever-malleable, then the concepts we choose to promote
and live carry with them ethical and social-political import at every Step because
they do not exist on their own but rather are our Organization of the world, our
re-ordering of the chaos even as we celebrate it, our choices against a backdrop
of rules that limit us and make choice possible. With such living comes
responsibility. To organize the world this way instead of that—to make art about
X instead of Y, to celebrate A instead of B, to call this into further absence and
bring that into greater presence—is thus a decision that is at once aesthetic,
ontological, political, and ethical. In the end it is surely the case not only that the
activity of thinking is itself a sort of conceptual art, as thinking organizes and
remakes the world, but that the artist him-or herseif helps us think, elucidating