SciArt Magazine - All Issues December 2015 | Page 34

PS: Yeah, exactly. Kevin Kelly, pretty early on, said,
“technology is anything that doesn’t quite work yet.”
After something works—a light switch, for instance—it’s
no longer considered technology. It becomes invisible
or ordinary. The lack of it becomes something that’s noticed, not the presence of it. We wanted to look at what
was present.
JF: What are the significant changes since E.A.T.?
PS: I think the older generation of artists had to work
with microprocessors and components that were dictated by, for instance, the aerospace industry. Whereas now,
the ability to create your own chips or your own ‘black
box’ is easily done.
JF: So, what you’re saying is that artists have far greater access
to technology. Previously, they were appropriating what was
available and now they’re creating from the ground up.
PS: Exactly. When you think about artists like Campbell or Rath, they started by going to flea markets to
find these components because they were so expensive
and then they would construct their work out of that.
Younger artists, however, don’t go to flea markets—they
can get a developer kit for 50 bucks.
JF: Is there something way out on the fringe that we’re not yet
seeing?
PS: I haven’t seen a lot of work that’s been critical
about what’s going on in the tech world. I think it would
be interesting to see what that would look like. There is
a deeper set of questions we need to ask as we take these
algorithms and embed them in the technology we use.
For example, my camera takes a picture that never existed. I’ve got a group of friends and I take a dozen pictures in burst mode. The processor in the camera goes
through these images and if somebody wasn’t smiling, it
finds a picture where they were. If someone’s blinking,
it finds a picture where they weren’t and it concatenates
this into the picture where everyone’s eyes are open and
everyone’s smiling. That’s a picture that never happened,
a moment that never occurred.
There’s the critique about ‘Photoshopping’ people to
look like they’re not supposed to look, but we’re also
now taking pictures that never really happened and
we’re embedding algorithms into devices’ ideologies.
How does that change or facilitate what the future will
look like?

I choreograph them in a playful way and kind of get into
this water space in a museum? Then, of course, there’s
the technology and how to control it.
The cases for the motors were 3D printed. The motors
are out of the RC airplane and helicopter world. I picked
two–dozen motions that I was really enchanted with and
then kind of rearranged them from time-to-time so that
it doesn’t become monotonous.
JF: Your piece has a very aural or sonic quality that sets the
tone for the exhibit being multi–sensorial. How did that come
about?
PS: I originally worked hard to remove as much as possible—the early pieces were much louder. I wanted the
viewer to know that there was a mechanical component
and that there were motors running. I really like the way
they sound all collected, like a drone.
JF: You’ve been an artist–in–residence at Autodesk. Did Rope
Fountain come out of that?
PS: They funded almost all of the parts that went into
that project as part of my residency: tools, materials, and
a stipend. I wouldn’t have been able to realize the work
at that level—I might have been able to make one or
two units, not the six I did for NEAT.
JF: What do you hope people take away from this exhibit?
PS: At a fundamental level, there is a place where art
and technology meet that creates works li