Posted on behalf of Lisa Vincenz-Donnelly

In the 1950s, when the German Pop Art pioneer Thomas Bayrle first trained as a weaver, he says he was “put into a state of trance by the loud and monotonous noise of the machines — until they began to sing”. His more recent artworks, currently on display at an exhibition of wall pieces, light projections, videos and electronically driven sculptures at the Kunstbau gallery in Munich, have a similar mesmeric effect. The ‘continuous-loop’ animations and smoothly moving sculptures, accompanied by monotonous sounds, are hypnotic portrayals of mass production and the complexities of society.

In 1958, Bayrle moved on from textiles to become one of Germany’s most important post-war artists. Since the 1970s, he has famously engaged with subjects such as motorways, car and airplane engines and the nexus of humans and technology in a range of media — including silkscreen, lithography and etching – and in works such as Flugzeug (not in the exhibition). This huge collage of an airplane is made up of many thousands of depictions of airplanes. Bayrle was among the first in Germany to adopt Pop Art in the 1960s, and to create computer-generated art in the 1970s.

The unusually long Kunstbau gallery space is located at a metro station, in the underground mezzanine storey directly above the tracks. Bayrle, now 79, was inspired by the “architectural brutality” of the space to create an immense wall sculpture 30 metres long, Autobahn (which he describes as his ‘last Autobahn’ — true to his love of repetition, he has created many similar sculptures). It’s a massive grey construction of intertwined angular loops, echoing the never-ending movement of traffic. Bayrle sees motorways as the centre of humanity’s gigantic cycle of production, distribution and consumption — a dynamic that has now evolved into the main surveillance body of human mobility, the information highway.

One of the most impressive pieces, a 16-millimetre film of montages of black and white stills, Autobahnkopf, appears at first glance to be an image of an anatomical human head turning its face in all directions. A closer look reveals the image as constructed from many loops of footage of busy highways.

Most compelling are sculptures created from scrap automobile parts, such as engines. Bayrle restores their working parts, exposing their solemn beauty in action, and supplies each with a unique soundtrack mixing the sound of the original machine with recordings of prayer groups. Bayrle first noticed parallels between religion and machines during his childhood. He used to live near a church, where a group of housewives stopped every Thursday to rattle off rosaries in a monotonous, yet powerful, manner. To Bayre, the rosary is like a type of machine – one that you power yourself as you work your way through its beads. And as he has noted, Tibetan prayer wheels mesh religion with machinery. In Monstranz, a nine-cylinder radial engine that once powered various utility aircrafts rotates to heavy hissing and grinding noises, merged with the recording of a church service from Cologne Cathedral. A Citroën car engine is matched to the chants of French prayer groups. The words blend into a multi-layered, repetitive, soothing soundtrack. In some pieces, the machines take on a life of their own: a Vespa engine seems to sing; a pair of windscreen wipers appears to wave.

In these extraordinary works, Bayrle captures the never-ending circle of production, distribution and consumption. As individuals, we come together in multitudes to form this massive system – like the threads that make up a fabric.

Lisa Vincenz-Donnelly is an editorial intern at Nature in Munich. She studied biochemistry in Galway, Ireland, and completed a doctoral degree at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich.  

 Thomas Bayrle runs at the Kunstbau, Munich to 5 March. A concurrent show, Thomas Bayrle, runs at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida, to 26 March.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Posted on behalf of Jo Baker

Scientists are makers. The specialized skills they hone in the lab over many years – from assembling robots and circuits to growing microbes and cells – mirror the practices of artisans such as seamstresses and potters. Chemists may melt, stretch and snap a glass tube to make a pipette. Jewellers rearrange silver atoms each time they warm the metal to anneal or soften it.

Bringing together makers of all stripes to innovate was the focus of MAKE:SHIFT, a two-day biennial conference this month in Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry, home to Charles Babbage’s loom-inspired computing machines. Scientists and designers explored in talks, panel discussions and demonstrations how joint working can advance sustainability, healthcare and communities.

Across smart materials, biodesign, wearable electronics and more, the speakers showed how such collaborations have led them to think and work differently. They explored emerging trends, such as 3D printing and small-scale production. And they asked big questions, such as how the concepts of craft and making have become lost in today’s digital world of instant gratification, yet remain central to hatching new models and cultures of innovation. The following insights and individuals stood out.

Tools and workshops are increasingly accessible, linked and powerful. Fabrication labs or ‘fab labs’ – where members of the public and skilled experts recycle furniture or even edit genes – are proliferating. There are now 700 around the world. And 16 cities (including Barcelona, Boston in the US and Shenzhen) have signed up to become ‘fab cities’– aiming to produce locally 50% of what they consume by 2054. Online networking and exchanges of experience between make spaces is increasing, linking know-how in California with needs in Cape Town, for example.

Small-scale manufacturing is on the rise, aided by the Internet and cheaper production technologies such as 3D printers. Digital blueprints allow anyone with such means to construct furniture or even houses locally. Generic designs can be customized. Garment patterns that can be tweaked and knitted on demand avoid wastage. Customers increasingly care where their products come from, and value sustainability, social good and ethical work practices.

The nature of materials is being rethought. Bio-materials such as fungal webs (mycelium) can be used to ‘grow’ bricks, pots and even dresses on wood-chip, clay or textile frames. Amsterdam-based ecodesigner Maurizio Montalti of Officina Corpuscoli described how, after working with University of Utrecht microbiologists on scaling up these fungal creations, his studio began to look more like a lab. University College London materials scientist Mark Miodownik invoked a future devoid of roadworks if self-healing asphalt becomes reality.

The Anthropocene offers new geologically inspired materials. ‘Fordite’, or ‘detroit agate’,  is made from fine layers of hardened car paint and can be cut and polished like semi-precious stone. We may one day dig up deposits of ‘bone marble’, retrieved from the metamorphosed skeletons of culled farm animals. The fashion industry is the second most polluting in the world, but sportswear company Adidas is scooping waste plastics out of the ocean to make its knitted footwear.

Crafts people are sensitive to people’s emotional responses to materials and objects. Yet few designers are included in research teams examining interactions between robots and humans, for example. Caroline Yan Zheng from London’s Royal College of Art is using soft robotics to make wall panels and accessories that swell or reshape in response to facial emotions. People tell her they find them comforting; one day they might be used to promote calm in hospitals.

Surgery is a craft – you don’t want your operation done by someone who has only read a book. Richard Arm from Nottingham Trent University brought in gorily realistic models of parts of the thoracic cavity that he has been making in silicone for surgeons to train on – complete with slimy finish, spurting arteries and the slash across the chest for you to dig your hand into. But introducing design innovations into the healthcare sector is difficult, Jeremy Myerson from the Royal College of Art noted; the sector is risk averse. His redesigned ambulance interior reduces the time it takes for paramedics to treat a patient’s wounds, by giving them better access to the patient and equipment. Yet, despite running it through ‘clinical trials’ successfully, it has yet to be taken up.

For making to drive innovation, many challenges need to be overcome. Craft has an old-fashioned hobbyist image, and many courses are closing as universities struggle to attract students. Yet jewellers and textile and industrial designers are open to new materials and technologies as never before, while few scientists are trained in metalworking or AutoCAD. And it is hard even to define what tacit skills and knowledge are.

That said, some technologies are overhyped. 3D printing remains expensive and impractical with many materials, such as porcelain. While printing is useful to make a detailed prototype, traditional processes like casting are often better for mass production. Also, the software needs to become more intuitive. Ann Marie Shillito of Edinburgh College of Art showed how she is using touch-sensitive ‘haptic’ computer design software to form organic shapes.

So how far can this model of local production be scaled? Ways must be found to promote collaboration between workshops, and optimize who makes what, where. And new business models are needed so that small-scale manufacturers can make a living; most workspaces depend on government grants. Nonetheless, MAKE:SHIFT was a heartening experience that highlighted what science and design have in common rather than, as is too often the case, what divides them. After all, even graphene (carbon that is 1 atomic layer thick) has been linked to traditional craft: the Japanese paper-cutting art of kirigami have been applied to graphene sheets to make stretchable electrodes, hinges and springs.

Jo Baker is senior Comment editor at Nature.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

I’m gazing at a stage draped in white when a giant zipper suddenly appears, projected onto one wall. As it works its way noisily around, more projections — live-streamed or pre-recorded moving images of buildings, blurred pedestrians, discarded clothing and simmering water — judder on crumpled backdrops. An apparently random urban soundtrack lulls and roars in the background. In the foreground, performers skip rope and cut hair; one solemnly rips up, boils and eats her shirt. It’s quite an evening.

The artist behind this indeterminate, playful, technologically rich and vaguely disturbing piece, Side Effects (commissioned by Arts Catalyst) is Robert Whitman. The evening is an homage to 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a legendary series of performances that, 50 years ago, galvanised New York with an unprecedented mix of cutting-edge technologies and avant-garde art. Whitman was one of 10 artists — among them multi-media maverick Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage and choreographer Lucinda Childs — who collaborated one-to-one with 30 engineers, most from research powerhouse Bell Labs and including, notably, the visionary electrical engineer Billy Klüver. Klüver was adamant about involving technologists rather than scientists, feeling that technology is essentially about “the material and the physicality”. It was a moment that paved the way to crossover disciplines such as digital art.

There was a utopian edge to technology then, as America literally reached for the Moon. For artists seeking new media, high-tech expertise enabled fresh explorations in sound and vision. For the engineers, artists expanded what Klüver (already a veteran of collaborations with Jean Tinguely, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg and Cage) saw as constrained horizons. Whitman, whom I caught up with after the performance of Side Effects, recalled that the 9 Evenings teams included a lot of “arranged marriages”, but worked if goals and enthusiasms chimed.

By that time (October 1966), Whitman had been creating immersive pieces for some years, combining film, performers and ‘shape-changing’ props such as plastic sheeting. His 1960 The American Moon, for instance, had a hallucinatory quality and a sense of “slow time”, according to fellow experimentalist Claes Oldenburg. 9 Evenings offered a chance to push the boundaries in a bold venue.

That was the 69^th Regiment Armory, a hangar-like midtown Manhattan edifice where, over 50 years before, another exhibition had exploded America’s cultural complacency with artworks such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. For 9 Evenings, some 1,500 people a night filed into its reverberating spaces.

Signal splitters, Geiger counters

Whitman’s contribution Two Holes of Water – 3 featured input from a number of engineers, including cellular telephony researcher Robby Robinson. The piece involved 23 performers, seven plastic-wrapped cars equipped with film projectors, one of the first fibre-optic miniature video cameras, film shot using an optical device with parallel mirrors, and a signal splitter that allowed a performer’s front and back view to be superimposed. A projected live image of water being poured into a glass on the Armory floor and documentary footage of Alaskan flora and fauna also featured.

Equally bravura was Cage’s composition Variations VII (pictured above), which harnessed live feeds from numerous sound sources. As Cage ‘played’ several transistor radios, 10 telephone lines picked up ambient noises from locations round the city, including the 14th Street Con Edison electric power station and the press room of the New York Times. Signals from two Geiger counters were converted into sounds; six contact microphones amplified noises generated by performers handling devices such as juicers, while data from electrodes on the forehead of another were converted into sound waves.

Some critics tore into the event, as technology historian Patrick McCray has noted. Whitman, Rauschenberg, Klüver and fellow engineer Fred Waldhauer, however, had already forged ahead with another venture. The non-profit foundation Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) took the cross-fertilisation further. By 1969, E.A.T. comprised 2,000 artists and as many technologists, riding the wave of innovation in electronics and communications. Their Projects Outside Art series, for instance, featured Telex: Q&A, which linked public spaces in India, Japan, New York and Sweden to encourage citizens of each to question future possibilities.

Meanwhile, a programme with aims similar to E.A.T.’s had sprung up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Art and Technology, the brainchild of curator Maurice Tuchman, boasted star physicist Richard Feynman as consultant. Whitman was also involved. So began his immensely fruitful teamwork with optical scientist John Forkner, then at Philco-Ford, the company that built the equipment at NASA’s Johnson Space Center mission control.

“This public-relations official introduced me to a guy with a long beard. I was lucky,” says Whitman. “John was a natural genius in optics and very interested in music and art. I remember that at one point I was sitting in a car with Feynman and he said, ‘Where’d you find him? He’s terrific.’”

Over 18 months, Whitman and Forkner created a spectacular installation for LACMA at the US Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Tuchman described the work as an “optical tour de force” incorporating 1,000 corner-shaped mirrors reflecting the viewer’s multiplied image to them, as well as pulsating mylar mirrors and “eerily bright three-dimensional objects (a pear, drill, goldfish bowl with live fish, a knife, a clock, ferns, etc.).”

E.A.T. was equally busy at Expo ’70: the Pepsi Pavilion was a focus for several of its cutting-edge collaborations. A major element was a spherical mirror over 27 metres in diameter that created real images of visitors, hanging in space above their heads. Whitman contributed here too, along with physicist Elsa Garmire, while artist Fujiko Nakaya worked with physicist Tom Mee to create the evocative fog sculpture capping the structure. It was clear that by this time, as McCray puts it, artists and engineers between them had “rewired modern art”.

Whitman is now 81, and busy. Many other movers and shakers behind 9 Evenings and E.A.T. are gone. As for E.A.T. itself, it has effectively ended as an entity, but “exists as an idea,” notes its director Julie Martin (Klüver’s widow). Klüver himself, in a 1999 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, said, “once everybody understands the idea of artists and engineers working together, there is no reason for E.A.T. to exist”.

I asked Whitman what he thought about 9 Evenings now. “Looking back is what I call ‘dead guy stuff’. You need to get onto the next thing. As for the future, it’d be fun to be around.” There is something there of the unquenchably optimistic technophile, always looking for the next innovation. Yet just for a moment, he did look back. “I didn’t know it at the time, but for me it all started with Emmett Kelly,” he told me. On a childhood visit to the circus in the 1940s, Whitman had been galvanised by the iconic American clown, who had a routine where he swept up the spotlight with a broom. “I was staring at everyone around me, wondering why they weren’t seeing this miracle. It set me on my way.”

I thought of the spotlit zipper in Side Effects, and began too to see how an early bent towards flux and illumination led him to performance, advanced technology and the intensive mix of both that was 9 Evenings. And beyond.

Arts Catalyst’s 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering Revisited 1966/2016 continues to 29 October.

Archival information on 9 Evenings and E.A.T. can be accessed at the Daniel Langlois Foundation Collection. Maurice Tuchman’s report on LACMA can be accessed here. My thanks to Robert Whitman, Julie Martin and Patrick McCray for additional information. McCray is currently writing a book (tentatively entitled Art Rewired: Engineering a New Creative Culture) on the art-technology nexus in that era. His Leaping Robot blog meanwhile offers much fascinating detail on 9 Evenings, E.A.T. and more.