Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art

Ken Feingold has been writing personalities for talking animatronic sculptures and virtual characters for some time now. As the work has gone along – coding the applications that run on customized computers and microprocessors which control sculpted, molded and cast figures fitted with pneumatic actuators, or, alternately, the digital processes control virtual 3D figures – the central problem is in the creation of a time-based “scene”. So what is materialized is first imagined, written, sculpted, cast, assembled; a convergence of processes, the “mise-en-scène” for what, finally, becomes an artwork, usually something of a time-based installation or sculpture. This much has been the case for a while, and working in this way continues to attract his attention. To a large extent, the focus of the work is, as mentioned above, “writing personalities” and letting them “run” and interact with each other.

The characters need to be doing their scene perpetually, but without explicit dialog or repetition. What is involved in writing a personality, or a scene, in this way? First, each needs a vocabulary, a database of words they can speak. The organization of these words becomes the unconscious mind of the characters, and from here there is a coming and going between this database and the surface of their language, their syntaxes and most importantly, their ability to link one thing to another. The speaking character is a fountain of associations, and what serves as their mind is a configuration of algorithms which model and remodel these links, and through their articulation of responses to the language of each other (or an other) they enact. The scene becomes an image – in some cases, as in the work “Interior", a talking, moving virtual scene/moving image (a projection or screen); in others, as in “Hell” and "The Animal, Vegetable, Mineralness of Everything", it is a talking, moving sculpture as object/image. The continuum between them is what Feingold thinks of as the Image-Action; and finally the screen itself is found in the perception of the work - its mental representation - and its relations to the experience of affect in the viewer. This Image-Action is a primary site of convergence, located within the subject who is constituted by the convergence itself, and where we can observe with some introspection how we are experiencing affect and representation.

The Art+Science Meeting project has been subsidized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

BIP

Municipal Institution of Culture