Vernissage

Our exhibition has opened. It can be viewed until about the end of the month. The vernissage turned out to be quite succesful, there were so many people. We didn't even have enough space for everyone to hear Nina Czeglédy's kind words.

Update

We've occupied the gallery on Saturday! :-)
The paintings are obviously not ours, they are from the previous exhibition.

Exhibition details

Where is Your Art?
kinetic sound installation

where: Deák Erika Galéria
when: 31 June 2009 - 25 July 2009
opening: Tuesday 30 June, 18.00-20.00 p.m.
opens: Nina Czegledy media artist, curator and writer

Robots at home

This is how the robots look like right now

Opening the exhibition

photo by KIBU

Here comes more info on Nina Czegledy, who opens the event. Thanks, Nina!

Nina Czegledy, media artist, curator and writer works internationally on collaborative art& science& technology projects. She has produced time based and digital works, won awards for her artwork and exhibited widely. Czegledy has lead and participated in workshops, forums and festivals worldwide. Her academic lectures lead to numerous publications in books and journals.
Czegledy exhibited with the ICOLS group in Australia, the US (2004-2005) with the Girls& Guns collective's in Europe (2005). "What will you do to cool the earth?" a public art project in collaboration with Greg Judelman and Daniel Barber was commissioned by the City of Toronto in 2007 and presented in 2009 at the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Zealand. Resonance, the Electromagnetic Bodies Project, Digitized Bodies Virtual Spectacles, Points of Entry and the Aurora touring projects initiated by Czegledy, focus on the changing perception of the environment and the human body and are presented via on-line and on-site events internationally. Czegledy curated numerous digital art and video programs presented in more than 30 countries. President of Critical Media a Canadian based Knowledge Institute,. Czegledy, is a Senior Fellow, KMDI, University of Toronto, Associate Adjunct Professor Concordia University, Montreal, Honorary Fellow, Moholy Nagy University of Design, Budapest, member of the international space art network, co-chair of the Leonardo Education Forum (LEF), executive board member of Increate.org (NZ) board member of Leonardo/ISAST, member of the OLATS scientific community and and ex-officio chair of ISEA.

Tweet on Art for us

If you tweet on art during the exhibition, there is a great chance that your tweet will be told by our robots. You can even try it out at the opening event.

Animals? Robots?

I have a few words about our relationship to these creepy little object.
Pepe's toy store is located on Kőbányai street, in the huge chinese market which consists of Four Tigers market on the left side, and a vast amount of wholesale stores on the right side. Pepe Toys is on the right side.
When we first saw these senseless singing-dancing plush-covered toys, even we didn't think of what's inside, we just collected some with many others in 2007, during the preparations for the Paris exhibition of re:orient. Then the idea came already in KIBU to take a look inside and see what's under the plush cover. What we found fascinated us so much, it was obvious for the first moment that we'll use these toys undressed. The process of getting rid of the plush and the wadding evoked some kind of acquittance, or redemption. It felt like revealing the real substance of these little creatures, getting rid of their masque and show their genuine face. This genuineness along with some anthropomorphic, or animic charachter (legs, arms, head, or feelers) strengthened this feeling. What's more, every one of them can appear in different forms. The same core can be dressed like a cow, a frog or a puppy.
The third exhibition upcoming by now, it's something really familiar to go to Pepe. We browse among the toys, we already know the toys we want, or if we find a new kind, we can tell by the touch, what type of mechanical core is inside. Well, at least, most of the times. Last time I've ought three cows. I thoght they are of a type I already know, only a bit differently dressed. When I freed them, surprisingly they turned out to be the funniest little bozos of all.

We have a new contributor

His name is Juhász Márton András. He has pretty funny fields of interest, such as neurocybernetics, robotics and chaos theory. Right now, he works at KIBU as a researcher. Marci's algorithm collects the feed from Twitter and delivers the sign to the robots. Besides, he set up a pretty nice audio system for our plush fellows.

New istallation forming

Thinking about how to install our new project phase, we've thrown up many ideas about how to place our little robots in the available space (not to mention the activities the robots will do, that's the topic of a forthcoming post). It was Barbara's idea to bring something natural element into it, just to enrich the relation between the robots' technic look and their animal- or human-like character. There was another problem, to bring them up to the height of the perceiver without building pedestals, which would make them more like regular art pieces. We really want to avoid that, these aren't sculptures. Anything that holds the robots should be something organic, like legs for example. Something that can work as a part of a whole, not just like a separate structure.
Thus came the idea of long flexible supports, that can hold the robots high, and can be associated with something natural, like grass or reed.



The actual objects will consist of a steel foot, a fishing rod and another steel piece to fix the robots to. The rods are
nice black and slightly swing under the move of the robot.

The new installation

Our robots are still connected together, but this time they are tweeting as well. They are connected to Twitter and whenever a new tweet about ART appears, a text to speech software translates it and one of the robots shares the tweet with the others in human voice.