SciArt Magazine - All Issues February 2016 | Page 33

The idea was to take a live signal of seismic data from
the Hayward Fault and use it to create a live immersive
visual or acoustic experience. In Wow and Flutter we’re
working to evoke droplets of water.
These works ask an existential question: “Could this be
a recording…am I just looking at a loop?” It’s the same
with Telegarden. The difference between fiction and reality is what I’m trying to challenge.
JF: Interactivity is an increasingly popular aspect of tech art.
What are your thoughts on that?
KG: I think there is a danger of easy interaction. The
fact that you just move and something responds to you
gets old very quickly, it felt like a gimmick in the early
stages. It was enabled by computing and sensing technology, but it got played out too much.
Interactivity is a tricky word. For instance, when you
walk into a room and see a painting that you’ve never
seen, you sit down and study it and when you walk out
it’s a different painting to you. That’s an interaction,
too—you’ve interacted with the painting visually. It
doesn’t have to actively move and respond to your body
moving.
It requires a fair amount of discipline and dedication
to understand a piece of art. You can’t just expect to
walk in and get it instantly. You have to know its history,
what it’s referring to, and that takes a bunch of speculation and creativity on your part. You have to figure it
out. Whether it’s a piece of interesting engineering or
art, you have to work at it.
JF: There is a long lineage of aesthetic critique for traditional
forms of art like painting or sculpture. Without that history, is it
more difficult for viewers to relate to tech art?
KG: When it was all brand new, perhaps it was more
difficult to understand. My sense is that this form of art
and the standards for evaluating it are evolving. There
are writings and books that are developing a critical
vocabulary for media and digital art.
It’s like mathematics—it’s a language, but you have
to spend time with it in order to learn how to read it.
This is also true for art, whether it’s classical painting or
aboriginal art or abstract expressionism. If you just walk
up and see a painting, it can be difficult to figure out
why it is hanging in this gallery or museum. You have to
spend time looking at it and a lot of other paintings to
figure out why this one is important. It’s analogous with
tech art.
What I’m always looking for is what can a work of art
express that couldn’t be expressed before. That’s the
fundamental question that applies to any work of art,
classical or new media. When I look at something new
I have to ask myself, “what is it trying to reveal that I’ve
never seen before?”
JF: Are the objectives of tech art different than those of

SciArt in America February 2016

traditional art?
KG: If you think about Warhol or the Happenings or
Fluxus, there was a real attempt to jar people out of
their comfort zones. That wasn’t the focus of most classical paintings.
What I’m interested in is creating something that
disrupts the viewer’s expectations. That’s my goal as an
artist—I want people to rethink their relationships with
technology.
JF: One of your newer pieces bridges the divide between classical and tech art. Tell us about Body-in-White.
KG: I’m very excited about that piece. It’s a collaboration with Stephen Antonson. It’s a life–sized sculpture of
a classical robot arm. It doesn’t move—it’s not interactive in that sense. It is based on the Pygmalion myth—
the Greek sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had
carved. Stories from The Golem to Frankenstein to Ex
Machina—they’re really the Pygmalion myth in different
ways. The piece captures that this idea is rooted in a history that goes back long before robots.
Body-in-White is an experiment. Many times these
things turn out differently than what I anticipated. It’s
somewhat true of research, too. You don’t know what’s
going to make an impact. It’s really hard to recognize
that at the time.
JF: As someone rooted in the two seemingly disparate camps of
science and art, how would you recommend people from these
two disciplines approach each other’s work?
KG: The divide between the two cultures—science
and the humanities—is still very wide. It’s not surprising if you consider the roots of the words science and
art. Science comes from the Latin word scindere, which
means to cut, so it’s about cutting things up in order to
understand them. That’s the reductionist model. Art, on
the other hand, comes from the wo &B'2