Machines Are Our Children: Q&A With Tim Lewis

Pony, a walking ostrich chair

Tim Lewis builds robotic sculptures that have mechanical parts, creating motorized automatons that react to their surroundings. Like Doctor Moreau, but without the dark cruelty, his Gothic machine-sculpture hybrids prominently feature animal parts, and explore the intersection between the natural and fabricated worlds. We caught up with Lewis in his East London studio to find out what inspirations lie behind these beguiling creations.

The Creators Project: Your sculptures are quite technical. When did you start exploring these ideas? Have you been an artist since childhood?
Tim Lewis: Yeah, I was always into that kind of stuff. I went to an art college, the Royal College of Art. It was either that or cybernetics, and I choose art college. But I’ve been making sculptures since the mid-1980s–I used to make mechanical special effects for Channel 4. With regards to technical knowledge, you can pick it up quite easily, especially since the internet. Anything you want to do you can just look up, it’s really fantastic. It’s changed everything.

Are you self-taught, then?
Forum-taught, more like. People are so helpful on forums. Maybe there’s a hundred people in the world that are interested in what I’m interested in, and you get to meet most of them [in the forum]. I think that the internet definitely changed that, because maybe 20 years ago there was as many people interested in what I’m doing as there is now, it’s just that you never came across them.

What sort of art are you into, and what are your influences?
I’ve never been that into art, other than kind of doing it. As far as influences go, I would say the amateur robotics community. I really think there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on there, and it’s not that amateur. And computer games. I really like EVE, but I’ve stopped playing it now because I wasn’t doing any work–it’s life consuming. I also have sci-fi, Gothic sensibilities that creep into the work. I try not to, but they keep creeping in. Jacques de Vaucanson is another massive influence, I’ve always really liked him. He made a duck that could digest food with rubber tubes and acid, which, in the automaton world, is probably the best thing that’s ever been built. He’s not making something that just looks like something, it actually does something.

Tim Lewis’ preliminary sketches for his work

So how does the genesis of a project start, and how does your process work?
The genesis of it just starts off pretty instantly. One minute I don’t have an idea in my head, and then I think, oh no I do, I want to do exactly this. You just think it has to be like this, you kind of see it pretty much complete from the initial stage, but then it takes years to actually get around to doing it. Because they take quite a long time to build, you go through a lot of things in your mind, like what are they about. I sketch a lot, for the visual aspect. But it’s interesting now that I’ve got the programming coming into it, because they become more like a system rather than a sculpture. Each one has an intent. But the look of it is still really important to me and of course it causes enormous problems, getting the mechanics to fit the structure without compromising it. Sometimes you compromise it too much, and maybe it’s more visually interesting to some people because they can see the mechanics, but it doesn’t do it for me. I recently started to use really simple simulations in Processing, and they give me a far better idea of how the mechanics are going to work.

Do you have any filmic influences on your work?
It’s difficult with films, but my favorite director is John Carpenter. I like him so much because he does everything himself. [His films] can sometimes look really crass, but there’s a real power to them, and it’s kind of like a dream—there’s a complete world in them. One of my favorite films of his is The Thing. It’s such a clever film. It’s one of the few horror films where everybody does everything right, like they never say “I’m going to investigate this alone,” and it still goes completely tits up. Plus the enemy is always something that is not human, and it’s never really explained.

How do automatons influence your work?
I guess visually, they’re the really early attempts at building automated machines. Like the Jacquard loom, or the really early attempts at making primitive electronics to make things happen, and the post-war autonomous vehicles that are really clumsy but rather beautiful and really underestimated. I like the otherworldliness of automatons, but I don’t like the wackiness, so I’m always really mindful that I don’t go into wacky from, say, dream-like. That’s always a challenge.

One of his stroboscopes

What about your stroboscopic work? It looks quite futuristic by comparison.
Well, they came about because there was one specific sculpture I wanted to build at first, which was people walking around in a circle. And it appealed to me so much, something about having tiny people, like toy soldiers in a movie. And also a bit like Harry Lime in The Third Man, looking down from the Ferris wheel, and there’s this kind of callousness about looking at these people entertaining you by walking around in a circle. You’re a bit like Harry Lime at the top of his wheel.

Does that tie in with you wanting to create these autonomous machines, maybe controlling them?
I see the machines as more like our children, our beneficiaries, like they’re the ones who will go and explore the stars for us. When you see people interacting with machines, people are very kind to machines. For instance, I always see my sculptures being stroked. And I want them to have a presence where people regard them not as an object, but as something that has rights, not in a big sense, but where they don’t just think of them as a beautiful bowl, for instance. I don’t think they’ve achieved that yet, but that’s what I want.

If you’d like to catch some of Tim Lewis’s robotic contraptions, his work is on exhibition at the Flowers Gallery in New York until June 18.