Fernando Orellana - Elevator Music

Elevator's Music by Fernando Orellana from jackadam on Vimeo.

The site-specific installation “Elevator’s Music”, visits the topic of synthetic creatures becoming sentient. What if centuries from now, we had the technology to make any machine self-aware? In this distant future, if an elevator could be self-aware, what would it be like? What might an elevator think about, what might it dream about, what might it sing about.

Hidden within the translucent ceiling panels of an elevator are installed four servo-driven mechanisms. Controlled by microprocessors and networked together, each robot includes a small speaker for sound output, a microphone and sonic sensorial input, and is designed with three axes of rotational freedom. Through this design, the mechanisms act as the vocal cords, the eardrums, and the appendages of the elevator. Additionally, each robot can individually “emerge” from within the elevator’s interior by opening a sliding door in the ceiling.

At times some robots will hide within the safety of the elevators ceiling, perhaps responding to passengers that are too loud or too active. During moments of relative inactivity, the robots might all come out of their shells, displaying emergent behavioral patterns driven by the echoes, whispers, murmurs, and motions of the elevator’s passengers.

This emergent behavior is also reflected in the sounds the robots produce, which are generated in “real-time” by the microprocessors. In this way, the resulting real-time soundscape can be said to be elevator music. More poignantly, one could say it was the Elevator’s Music.

The images of “Elevator’s Music” on this site document the installation of it in 2007 at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Spring, NY.

Henrik Menné

Whether they are dynamic or static; sculptures by Henrik Menné are basically about process, balance and about organizing matter through both rigid systems and chance.

The major part of Mennés production consists of large-scale machines or arrangements temporarily put at work when exhibited - all sculptures are ‘in the making’ so to say. Their process is always silent, controlled and structured by repetitive movements as the machines transform a single material - plastic, wax, metal or stone - into peculiar objects. These soft-formed elements are seldom regarded as autonomous art works and destroyed or recycled when no longer on show.
Although closed and often self-referring, the system in which the process takes place both changes the environment and is sensible to changes in the environment. The instability of the physical context is therefore what causes important marginal variations in the shapes of the particular outcome.

The static sculptures by Menné contain the same immense effort and obsessive trait when it comes to putting forces such as gravity and well-known qualities ascribed to conventional materials into play. Another more conceptual approach is to be found in the few replicas of everyday objects, which are disturbed to the point where they loose the original function.

The intriguing low tech and analogue character of all works by Henrik Menné make visible the principle on which the individual system of the particular sculpture is organised. Despite this rational transparency works by Menné almost always appear as logically impossible and tremendously beautiful.

I'm really impressed by these sculpture. I like the simplicity and fragility of some of these structures. I'm particularly interested in the piece called 'Container' (2005 polystyrene balls, fan diameter 210 cm).