Kinetic Art: precursor to digital art?
Lately there has been a lot of talking around the theme of digital art and, as we mentioned in one of our last posts, it’s important to remember that it did not develop in an art-historical vacuum.
Already back in the 1930s artists started to experiment with mechanical devices and -later- with analog computers: this was just the beginning of what it would have then turned out to be the work of the digital pioneers in the 1960s.
Kinetic art can be regarded as a precursor to digital media art and here we want to share with you some of the very early works by the pioneers of this movement.
László Moholy-Nagy believed in the potential of art as a vehicle for social transformation, working hand in hand with technology for the betterment of humanity. He created his film Light Play: Black-White-Gray, which showcased his kinetic light display Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator) in 1930.
Alexander Calder, best known for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents), really challenged the definition of sculpture.
Alexander Calder, Dancing Torpedo Shape (1932)
Victor Vasarely was as a graphic artist, he produced the Zebra studies and carried out his initial optical experiments. He then turned away from figurative painting and developed his unmistakable style: optical image patterns paired with kinetic effects.
Victor Vasarely, Arlequin II, 1935–1976
Jean Tinguely: As a creator of kinetic works of art, the Swiss artist counts among the great pioneering artists of the second half of the twentieth century. What interested him most was how machines work, how they move, the noises they make and their intrinsic poetry.
He invented the Méta-Matic drawing machines in 1959 which make abstract art.
Jean Tinguely, Radio WNYR Nr. 15,1962
Creditline: Museum Tinguely, Basel
Nicolas Schöffer is considered the Father of Cybernetic Art, thus of so-called "interactivity", he wanted to bring a prospective and non-backward-looking vision of art, which could help mankind to develop itself with a good hold on true creative and liberating possibilities of our times.
Nicolas Schöffer, N°6 Cysp 1 1956, Concorde et Sergeant de Ville
Photographe : Jean Yves Hervochon
from ‘Automat und Mensch’exhibition at Kate Vass Galerie
CYSP 1. (1956)represents the first cybernetic sculpture of art's history.
CYSP 1. is a name composed by the first letters of cybernetics and spatiodynamic: it’s the first "spatiodynamic sculpture" having total autonomy of movement (travel in all directions at two speeds) as well as axial and eccentric rotation (setting in motion of its 16 pivoting polychromes plates).
Nicolas Schöffer has executed this spatial composition in steel and duraluminum, into which an electronic brain, developed by the Philips Company, has been incorporated.
The whole is set on a base mounted on four rollers, which contains the mechanism and the electronic brain. The plates are operated by small motors located under their axis. Photo-electric cells and a microphone built into the whole catch all the variations in the fields of colour, light intensity and sound intensity.
Spatiodynamic sculpture, for the first time, makes it possible to replace man with a work of abstract art, acting on its own initiative, which introduces to the world a new being whose behaviour and career are capable of ample developments.
Before Cysp 1., in the paths opened by Norbert Wiener, there were indeed some robots, complicated and hideous feats of fledgling technologies ... but no artistic research ventured until then ...
It took Schöffer's idea and his strength of conviction for the Philips Company, whose Director was Marcel Jolly, to take the risk of putting its engineers and its financial resources at the service of art in one of its new beginnings .
(source: https://www.olats.org/schoffer/archives/eindex.htm )
Also worth to mention are some of the most famous exhibitions related to this movement which had been held in the 1960s and marked the art history:
1955, Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise René, Paris
1960, Kinetische Kunst at Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich
1960, Bruno Munari Polarized Light Projections, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
1961, Bewogen Beweging (Moving Movement) at Stadelijk Museum, Amsterdam
1961, Nove tendencije at Galerija Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb