The kinetic installation Putting the Pieces Back Together Again is a complex system with self-organizing and emergent behavior. It is also an artistic inquiry and meditation on contemporary scientific methodology. The installation investigates non-hierarchical communication and collective behavior by implementing such a system physically through many electro-mechanical actors. 1250 stepper motors, equipped with white pointers, are arranged in a two dimensional grid.
The radii of the pointers are chosen to intersect with the pointers of its neighbors. Through a custom driving circuit, the pointers reverse their turning direction in the event of a collision. Through the interplay of many entities, a complex behavior emerges on the surface of the installation. During runtime, the system will form spontaneous patterns on its surface, as if they were negotiating its position with nearby actors. Through this, the system is showing a self-organizing behavior.
Project Credits:
- Produced with the support of the City of Kirchheim unter Teck, Verlag des Teckboten and Kulturregion Stuttgart.
- Production assistants: Mariana Schetini Basso, Irena Kukric and Antje Weller
- Special thanks to Katharina Sophia Hardt (Stadt Kirchheim unter Teck / Kultur Abteilung
Website:
Biography:
Ralf Baecker (DE) is an artist working at the interface of art, science and technology. His practice explores fundamental mechanisms of new media and technologies. In his representations and spatializations of digital and technological processes, he offers a poetic, behind-the-surface outlook of contemporary technological infrastructure, its material dimension, and complex, self-organizing systems. At the core of his objects lies the entanglement of the virtual with the real. His work seeks to form a hybrid between contemporary digital methodologies and a materials-oriented artistic practice. As a result, he understands technology not as a tool but as an epistemological instrument by which to pose fundamental questions about a world perceived through technological impressions. Since 2016, he teaches at the University of the Arts Bremen as Professor for Experimental Design of New Technologies.
http://www.rlfbckr.org/
