JOUR FIXE with Ruairi Glynn

If you’ve ever encountered skilful puppetry, you’ll find yourself willingly suspending your disbelief, projecting life into things that in all rational terms are devoid of life. Jean Piaget established that children of 2 till 7 in age demonstrate the highest degrees of animist perception but even as adults we still find ourselves projecting life into the most unlikely of things – particularly when they demonstrate movement or degrees of purposeful and intelligent behaviour. In a world increasingly inhabited by artificially intelligent systems, contextually aware gadgets, sensory spaces and robotic agents, will our sense of our built environment as inert and lifeless change to one rich in synthetic personalities, and strange forms of artificial life? How as designers we can design and build objects and spaces that move and transform and in turn create novel experiences and meaningful interactions will be the central theme of this lecture.

 

Ruairi Glynn is an artist who builds interactive kinetic installations that reveal the primacy of movement above and beyond colour, form and texture in human visual perception. His work draws on a rich heritage of cybernetics, puppetry, dance and architecture to achieve this. He has exhibited his work internationally, most recently at the Centre Pompidou Paris, the National Art Museum Beijing, Seoul’s Olympic Museum of Art, Sao Paulo’s Itau Cultural, Beall Center Los Angeles, the Madrid Art Fair, the Kunsthaus Graz and London Design Festival. In August 2012 he exhibited his largest and most ambitious art work to date titled “Fearful Symmetry” at the Tate Modern in London. An architectural scale interactive installation that brought robotics, sound, and light together with techniques borrowed from puppetry to animate the newly opened Tanks Gallery.

 

This JOUR FIXE is organised in cooperation with Liquid Things, University of Applied Arts Vienna.

 

"Jour Fixe concept"