The Mechanical Blog

Here is something else to see on your upcoming visit to London. Danish artist Jeppe Hein has created a site-specific installation for The Curve at The Barbican.
The piece is called ‘Distance’ and you can see it working here.

Visitors trigger the rolling balls by entering the space, so the experience varies depending on how busy it is. If you can visit when it is quiet you will be able to follow your own ball from start to finish. Good fun.

If you are coming to London for the CMT exhibition at Kinetica, make sure to visit the Museum of Croydon to see Eduard Bersudsy’s fantastic travelling circus.
Beautiful while still, once an hour this magical menagerie of recycled metal will spring to life to perform an incredible choreography to haunting music and synchronised light, weaving funny and tragic stories about human life.

Tim Hunkin’s talk ‘Popular Art’ (11th April 6pm) will be the first in a series of talks at Kinetica to coincide with the CMT retrospective and Ride of Life exhibition which starts on Friday 6th April. Tim’s Chiropodist (1986), originally made for CMT in Covent Garden, will be treating visitors’ feet throughout the exhibition, which runs until 5th May 2007.

Other talks include Will Jackson, Paul Spooner, as well as an evening with Sue Jackson and Sarah Alexander looking back over the past 28 years of CMT.

April 6th to May 5th 2007 - Kinetica, Old Spitalfields Market, London E1 6AA
This fascinating new exhibition will trace the story of Cabaret Mechanical Theatre from its birth in 1979 as ‘Cabaret’ - a crafts shop in Falmouth, Cornwall. Featuring over 80 pieces of automata from the past 28 years, as well as some new commissions.

The upper floor of Kinetica will be devoted to The Ride of Life, a major CMT project from 1989. Although most of the 25 life size automated scenes were completed by the artists, the Ride was never installed at its intended destination - Meadowhall Shopping Centre, in Sheffield.

This exhibition tells the story of the Ride, and will display the one remaining complete scene, - Ron Fuller’s Adam and Eve Pubic Bar, alongside parts from other scenes including Tim Hunkin’s ‘Living Room’ - where the Ride was to have started off with visitors seated on their travelling sofas, and Paul Spooner’s ‘Main Street UK’.
Talks and Screenings to be announced.

CMT’s Touring Exhibition ‘Mechanics Alive!!’ opens today at the Singapore Science Centre.
The exhibition is part of iFutures a celebration of new technologies in Singapore. CMT’s automata are used to introduce a pre-digital and artistic element to the exhibition. The official opening by the President of Singapore took place last night amid remote controlled kites, robot dancers and an indoor firework display.

The exhibition continues until March 2007, and there are a series of workshops planned using the Designing Automata Kit.

To Kinetica last night for the launch of their exhibition, Magnetic Visions. It was a delight to meet Bruce Shapiro whose latest work, part of the Sisyphus (IV) series, was the centre of attention.

These pieces are mesmerising to watch. A magnet traces complex, computer controlled paths beneath, while above, a steel ball in a field of sand creates dune patterns in its wake. As in the Greek myth from which it draws its name, Sisyphus rolls its “boulder” endlessly, only to witness the cyclic undoing of this labour.

Bruce is giving a talk on the Art of Motion Control this Saturday 25th November at 4 pm at Kinetica.

If you are in the USA check out Bruce’s Ribbon Dancer which has just been installed at the Science Center of Iowa.

Arthur Ganson’s new exhibition, ‘Machines and Mechanisms’ can be seen at the McColl Center for the Arts in North Carolina until November 4th 2006.

Book a place, (a snip at £5) at Paul Spooner’s forthcoming talk at Trelowarren, Cornwall.

You will be thoroughly entertained as Paul discusses his pieces in the current ‘Smile’ exhibition, as well as an almost complete history of everything else he has ever made.. including the lovely ‘Das Fischermadchen’ (2005) pictured.

The Fisher Girl’s skirt is filled with 27 tiny painted fish, which gently undulate as the handle is turned.

Note: If you are planning to go there pay careful attention to the map before you set off, my visit last week was considerably delayed by visiting the village of Gweek three times.

Kinetica, a brand new museum devoted to Kinetic art will open in a fantastic new two storey building in London’s Spitalfields Market in early October 2006.

The first museum of it’s kind in the UK, Kinetica, is the vision of it’s artistic director, Dianne Harris. Dianne’s success with the Luminaries, (a series of three exhibitions in 2002) inspired her to pursue the idea of a permanent venue for this type of art.

As she says, ‘This ‘wave’ in reference to the metaphor of our ‘great’ machine ‘the Universe’, has inspired generations of artists to explore scientific discoveries and challenge technological life’.

Kinetica will showcase the most cutting-edge U.K and international contemporary New Media art alongside pioneering works from the recent past, with a revolving permanent collection and at least six temporary exhibitions each year, as well as seminars, workshops, discussions and special events.

Tim Hunkin revealed the latest machine for his Under the Pier Show in Southwold, Suffolk, earlier this week.

As Hunkin says, ‘The problem with ordinary seaside telescopes is that they are monotonous. The Quantum Tunnelling Telescope solves this problem by concentrating on interesting events over the horizon, under the waves and into the future’.