Mechanical and refreshingly original, this little robot fashions objects out of melted plastic. From a kind of beak, it squeezes out the colorful substance like a primordial liquid. The blobby cord coils in on itself, forming squiggles and loops that harden into a solid body. Once the resulting object is large or heavy enough, it falls over onto a pile of individual mini-sculptures, pulling tough strands with it. The technology used corresponds in part to that used in a 3D printer; the nozzle, which would ordinarily apply the material to a printing plate in a precise sequence of movements, points into the air and spits out the molten material in a seemingly uncontrolled manner.

The group of tiny robots sits quietly in the dark, but as soon as light hits their sensors, things get hectic. Like insects squirming under a rock, each Sibling starts to wobble in its own way—some of them dance, while others move more awkwardly; kept under a dark glass, the siblings can be playfully kept in check. The bodies of these unique relatives are made of plaster, with electronic components poking out at the top, like hairdos. Each family member has its own style.

Shiny metallic conductor tracks cut across a deep black surface, forming a net-like pattern with moving dots of light shimmering in bright colors. The play of light brings to mind the nighttime twinkle of distant cities. On the other side of the square black construction is a skein of milky lines with light spreading in pastel tones.

The sculpture’s shape and design are based on the microcontrollers built into almost every electronic device today. The light visualizes the rapid movements of electrical signals. Because the semiconductor chip is greatly enlarged by a factor ranging from 1:100 to 1:100,000, the sculpture transports the hardware, which in the digital realm ordinarily goes unnoticed, into the sphere of urban space. At this scale, the chip resembles a road map displaying the connecting paths of human interaction: it’s an invitation to explore the basic building block of digital global networking and its influence on life on our planet.

In a shallow black basin filled with clear liquid, a shimmering layer of dust has settled at the bottom, beneath the reflective surface. At the center is a small ring-shaped coil from which two thick shoots wind up to the ceiling and into the shadows of the building’s overhead installation. In the eye of the electrified ring, the particles arrange themselves in dark patterns, disperse, and reassemble in a regular rhythm, like a kind of breathing animating the intricate particle universe.

There’s a twitching and stirring: wave-like contractions ripple through a shiny copper body. A coil of thick copper wire forms a delicately articulated tubular shape with a smooth outer shell and a haphazardly branched system on the inside. Milky transparent strands with fine copper veins protrude from beneath the imposing object; once electricity runs through its veins, it takes on a strange life of its own.
The appearance and physical presence of the voluminous coil leave a wide berth for the imagination: associations include a human organ, a pupated larva, or a study of mechanical movement entirely outside the realm of human and animal life. The metallic body’s perspective seems to alternate between micro and macro: is this a small section of a larger, more complex system, or an independent (life) form? The strategies of abstraction and amplification create something deliberately ambiguous and even monstrous, alluding to the field of tension in which scientific and artistic exploration into artificial life and intelligence have always operated.

(Alexandra Waligorski)