A lot of people use machines. I want to build machines. The best way to examine the meaning of machinery and the nature of machinery is to build it.
Alan Rath, in NEAT: New Experiments in Art and Technology, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, filmed 2015, video, 2:06 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=9BLp9zyejkM.
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
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Peter Boswell, Viewpoints (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1991), 1. ↩︎
Alan Rath’s robotic sculptures often resemble living forms—humans, plants, or animals—alluding to the organic qualities of machines made in our image. While studying electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rath became interested in learning what he could get machines to do, rather than using machines to perform predetermined tasks.1 The software he writes to animate his sculptures privileges play over thinking, leading them to perform and modify their behavior in relation with the world around them. Using light and motion sensors, robots like Absolutely (2012) improvise their own movement. As the artist has stated, “I want to evoke that feeling of transience, information flow, and make objects which are active, alive, not passive.”2 Influenced by the work of John Cage and Buckminster Fuller, Rath believes the art of our time should move.3
Three cathode-ray tubes, one showing a human mouth and two featuring a hand each, are connected through curvilinear wires that send electrical impulses like a central nervous system in Alan Rath’s Info Glut II (1997). Despite its synthetic quality, the sculpture’s form speaks to underlying similarities between human bodies and machines. Gesturing in American Sign Language messages like “batteries not included” and “objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” it mimics a sentient being overloaded with a litany of fragmented data. For the artist, electronic materials are basic elements of our everyday experience, which his sculptures embody in both form and content: “I am making a window on our world, a picture of what is ‘out there.’”1 Trained as an electrical engineer, he is interested not only in how technology facilitates a process but in the structure or logic of the system; here, electronics are the process and the object.2
In the 1980s Alan Rath began making electronic sculptures with “body parts” that were recognizably human or animal, such as eyes, ears, and hands. “Machines are extensions of the sense organs, giving us the ability to ‘remote-sense’”1—like a telephone, for example. In the snaillike sculpture Thumper V (1996), a pair of pulsating speaker cones form the body and two smaller speakers perched on the tips of antennae suggest a pair of eyes. Moving at low, inaudible frequencies, the pulsing speakers seem to breathe and blink, evoking the rhythms of the human body. In an era dominated by virtual movement, Rath became interested in the physical movement of motorized sculptures. Like human surrogates, they point to the complex relationship of humans to technology, offering “critical alter egos to the sleek, efficient machines that surround us in daily life.”2
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