the well was running dry, and I felt
I was becoming a very uninteresting
person. Around 15 years in, I started
breaking out of that through making music, and then I finally got back
into sculpture. I’d left off making
suspended pieces and loved working
in the hopeful and creatively inviting space “up there,” and things kind
of fell into place quickly, leading to
the pieces I’m now making. Ideas
for interactive kinetic pieces have
been accumulating and sintering for a
couple of decades, and there is a huge
creative territory to be explored.
I first wanted to build sound sculptures that would interact with each
other about 25 years ago and, in fact,
hired some smarter friends at that
time to help create the electronics
hardware to support it, but we were
unsuccessful. It’s still a huge amount
of work to design the circuit boards
and write the software that underlies
all of these pieces. It’s an integral part
of the art-making process, though,
and I enjoy it greatly aside from the
stress and expense. Sometimes I’ll
spend weeks or months on the pattern for a printed circuit board and an
inordinate chunk of that time is spent
making sure the traces look right
aesthetically, even though nobody will
see them.
My education was in sculpture, not engineering, and I’ve had to force-feed myself
all of this electronics and programming
business. I don’t take easily to it, but my
background in computer animation helps with
the programming, especially in regards to procedurally controlling motion and my father
was an electronics research physicist, giving me
both a subliminal understanding as well as fear
of the complexity of analog electronics. Both
the circuitry and the software present mental
barriers that I have to push through with every
piece, so it involves both pain as well as a connection at some simplistic level with the work
my father did.
Proto (2006). 1 meter span. Carbon fiber tubing,
electronics. Image courtesy the artist.
another and ultimately, their movements, sounds, and
actions are their own. Could you talk about the coding
and work that goes into that?
MM: Relative to what’s going on in serious
robotics research, my pieces are at kind of a
nursery-school level. My coding is usually chaotic enough that sometimes a behavior is not
what I expected, or more powerful than I imagined. Sometimes this is catastrophic—fortunately I’m making art and not Mars rovers, and
it really only takes a modest amount of technology, focused exactly where it’s needed, to make
DM: Your pieces in Albireo (2010) and your proposed artworks that might represent life in somewhat
piece for the Métamatic Research Initiative Sheep
the same way a painting might, within a very
Safely Grazing? has robots communicating with one
specific point of view and stylization. So I guess
SciArt in America June 2014
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