In a previous post last week we looked at art that can fill us with hope, let’s resume this thread by looking at how collective art can heal, using as an example Karina Smigla-Bobinski's "ADA".
The German-Polish artist mainly works with new media and digital art. One of her major works is entitled "ADA" and consists in a large, interactive kinetic sculpture, a transparent helium-filled balloon about three metres in diameter with 300 charcoal spikes applied on its surface. The transparent globe is usually displayed in art galleries and museum spaces inside a white room.
Visitors come into contact with the orb, push it, pull it and let the spiked globe floating freely around the room and drawing marks, patterns and lines on the walls, ceiling and floor. The patterns become more complex when more members of the audience play with it. The membrane-like globe is a machine, but it is also human as it is activated by the viewers.
The idea behind this work of art is the same behind Jean Tinguely's "Métamatics", machines that could draw on their own producing artworks, but there are other inspirations behind the inflatable orb, and in particular nanobiotechnology (the sphere resembles a molecular hybrid) and 19th-century computer prototypes. Besides, the artwork is named after Ada Lovelace, daughter of Romantic poet George Gordon Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke.
Lovelace wrote the notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine that she deemed capable of going beyond mere calculating (Babbage mainly focused instead on the calculating aspects of the machine...). In her notes, Lovelace suggested indeed that the machine could even make works of art and compose "elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
"ADA" is the physical manifestation of this intuition, it is indeed an automatic post-digital art-making machine (Smigla-Bobinski usually refers to "ADA" as "she" and conceives "her" as an entity with "her" own will) and an interactive haptic drawing tool. Like a computer creating generative art or a Jacquard loom that in order to weave flowers and leaves needed a punch card, "ADA" reproduces the ability to make artworks through an open source method.
This is actually the intriguing point: in most exhibitions we visit, we maintain a passive attitude, as we just look at the artworks, but we don't take part in making art.
"ADA" invites instead people to take part in the art-making process and in videos showing the globe on display at different exhibitions and events it is interesting to see how people react to it or engage with it, grabbing the sticks like handles and energetically pulling and pushing the sphere around or simply letting it bounce as if it were a beach ball.
While the kinetic sculpture poses a core problem linked to the copyright debate (is art the orb generating the patterns or actually the drawings on the wall and who makes art, all the people who move the sphere or the artist who created it and the people?) this performative and participatory project usually gives pleasure to audiences (check out videos on the Internet and you will see visitors enjoying the installation).
This level of engagement, collaboration and participation is maybe what we need at the moment in art. Two years of Covid-19 have left us traumatized about sharing things and touching surfaces and the war in Ukraine has brought new fears and traumas, displacing people and breaking apart families.
In 2020 fashion designer Jack Irving created an inflatable transparent, membrane-like globe with spikes (View this photo) reminiscent of the "ADA" sphere but interpreted as an ironic way to maintain social distance. In this case, instead, the sphere is used to gather people together. "Ada" fosters indeed the healing power of the collective, leaving behind raw marks that could also be interpreted as the physical representations of the moods of the people activating it.
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