Alan RathBorn into the Machine Age

Rath working on a piece in his studio
Alan Rath in his studio, Oakland, California. © Klaus Tilman, 2010.

Since childhood, Alan Rath has been interested in machines. At twelve years old, the Moog synthesizer caught his attention, both for its mechanical sound as well as the beauty of its form. As a teenager he looked to musicians like Jimi Hendrix, who fused art with the machine when he incorporated guitar amplifier feedback into his innovative sound.1 Rath earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 and taught himself mechanical engineering through experimentation. Since then, Rath has built and programmed his own sculptures; from their circuit boards to the software that runs them, everything is handmade. There is an intimacy, or a kind of “feedback loop,”2 between the design and the build; each build informs the next design, so that technology itself is not just equipment, or material, it is also the subject matter of Rath’s work.3

  1. Alan Rath, in “Critic and Artist Residency Series: Alan Rath,” University Center for the Arts, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, filmed 2005, video, 1:02:14 hours, available at youtube.com/watch?v=oW2nr9VeEas. ↩︎

  2. Alan Rath, in “Critic and Artist Residency Series: Alan Rath,” University Center for the Arts, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, filmed 2005, video, 1:02:14 hours, available at youtube.com/watch?v=oW2nr9VeEas. ↩︎

  3. Peter Boswell, Viewpoints (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1991), 1. ↩︎