Light, glass, gears, plastic + performance

I mentioned yesterday that kinetic light pieces fascinate me when they are done mechanically, but are highly uninteresting to me when done via software (e.g., a screensaver). I wonder if this has something to do with the "performing through obstruction" idea that I was thinking about last year.

I'm sure Wilfred felt his Lumia was possible only because of the machine. But I suspect his devices were like vacuum-tube based computers; the idea and the potential far exceeded the hardware. I wonder if Wilfred's machine was simultaneously expressive and obstructive? The machine made Wilfred's work possible but the process of combining light, glass, gears and plastic to simulate the floating quality of modern painting via light was bound by numerous engineering concerns. Perhaps it is this tension that makes the work interesting.

This reminds me of John Knoll's description of his experiences with optical printing. Knoll has spoken of the tension-filled dance that accompanied an optical print run in which a number of elements had to be combined. Perhaps the charm of technologies-on-the-edge is not that they evoke technological mastery, but that they disclose a lack of it. The machines are doing things for which they are ill-suited. It is the tension between control and a lack of control that generates a performance. This may explain why certain computer-based effects are so unsatisfying; the match between concept and machine is so well aligned, that the performance is lost. This is the phenomenon of the screensaver—the perfect realization of machine-based abstraction, yet artistically empty.

This idea seems consistent with my love of misusing technologies. My friend Ward made fun of me saying, "Not everything is a transistor radio that you can turn into a bubble machine." But maybe that's why I keep trying—because it is in the ability to expressively use a mismatched technology (performing through an obstruction) that a performance arises.