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At Kinetica Art Fair 2011: Animal-Hybrids And Dancing Holograms

Unfamiliar noises and curious forms abound in this exhibition of robotic, interactive, light, sound, and kinetic sculpture in all its many guises.

Walking into the hall at the Ambika P3 building in London where the third Kinetica Art Fair is taking place, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve stumbled into a futuristic mad inventor’s laboratory. Strange sounds soak the air and eccentric sights dance and shake before your eyes, like Christiaan Zwanikken’s reanimated animals, who jerk about and mutter to one other; or the musical nests of Japanese artist Tomomi Sayuda; or the chunky Calculator Orrery that swings about cosmically while nearby an Owl Organ stares out sharply, both the brainchilds of David Cramner.

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Here, art is not just an object but a living form—shifting, pulsating, spinning—the myriad and multifarious works bemuse as you wander around and marvel at their ingenuity and, well, just plain weirdness.

Tim Lewis’s incongruous sculptures cause you to double-take—was that a bird light-bulb you just saw? Nearby, his stroboscopic pieces are going at 17 rotations per second to create the illusion of a tiny man running around a hamster wheel or walking like a holographic pink ghost.

In a darkened room, you find musician and engineer Alex Posada’s spinning orb of fluctuating colour, The Particle, which you can catch a glimpse of in the video below. Hooked up to a computer, the light sculpture, which is a series of LED-covered rings rotating around a central axis, follows a set of algorithms that create forms at random. It spins around to create a whirring cyclone of colour and movement, mesmerizing you like an unearthly alien technology.

Holographic cinematic cross-breeders Musion are there too, mixing virtual with real in various performances featuring black leotard-clad dancers interacting with holograms. Sometimes the visuals venture into the more abstract and impenetrable world of contemporary dance, but when the holograms themselves take centre stage they are very impressive.

In one room your eyes are drawn to an impressive glowing orb, the work of interactive art collective Seeper, who are responsible for the awesome reactive art installation in Munich that launched the Kinect. They collaborated with Pufferfish to create a multi-user interactive inflatable sphere called the GeoSphere. Using a fish-eye lens projector and an infra-red camera, the glowing globe responds to the user’s touch.

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Pete Starkey with GeoSphere

Pete Starkey, one of the members of Seeper, spoke about how the piece had piqued the interest of someone who works with people suffering from autism, commenting that it might make a great communication tool for people with the condition, as it stimulates the senses and reacts to input, allowing them to communicate to each other through the sphere. He also spoke about digital art’s growth over the past few years, and how it has garnered a new audience by bringing the experience away from the screen, giving it physicality, making it playful and interactive, and accessible to broader audience that includes older generations and younger ones who may not have come into contact with this sort of work before.

The theme of the show was Evolution of Body, Brain, Mind and Consciousness, whether this rang true for all the exhibits is open to question, but the many pieces on show were strange, beguiling, dark, bizarre, and great fun.

Kinetica Art Fair 2011 is taking place between 4-6 February at Ambika P3, 35 Marylebone Rd (opposite Baker Street Tube), London, NW1 5LS

Photo credit: Alexis Hamilton

Slideshow: Musion Academy performances, the multi-coloured tiles of Whistling Sea by Jun Ga Young, materialising human movements into sculpture in Bodycloud by Raphael Perret, the fibre optic lines of Carlo Bernardini’s Progressive Code, the neon heads of Caduceus by Dianne Harris, Gregory Barsamian’s Runner, Stelarc’s ear arm, Alex Posada’s The Particle, and more Musion holograms.