*Gustavo Gelmini is an artistic director of dance and cine-dance. Brazilian, living in Paris, he has directed several performances and films that deal with the relationship between the presence of the performer and the audience. He is currently taking his master’s degree in dance at the University Paris 8 about dance and vulnerability and has held residencies at Le Centquatre-Paris and Cité International des Arts.

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*Ana Teresa Vicente is an artist and researcher based in Lisbon, Portugal. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts – Photography from the University of Lisbon, Faculty of Fine Arts, Centro de Investigação e Estudos em Belas Artes (CIEBA), with a fellowship by the Portuguese public agency Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT). Since 2005, she has presented her work through exhibitions, lectures, and publications. In 2020, she exhibited her work at Facing the Future | After Shot, Taipei Photo Festival, TW; SITUATIONS / The Right to Look, Fotomuseum Winterthur, CH; Selections from the Seagrave Museum, DAAP Gallery, USA; and Palimpsesto at Penafiel Museum, PT. In 2019, she co-curated with Professor Mónica Mendes the exhibition Timelessness at Ars Electronica Campus, and exhibited her work at the Athens Photo Festival, GR, and FORMAT19, UK. The previous year she exhibited at Binary/Non-binary, GESTE Paris, FR; Immersive | Imersivo, SNBA, PT; Failure is a Given, Archivo Studio, PT, and Face- Value at the Liverpool John Moores University, UK. She was a co-coordinator and researcher of the Post-Screen: International Festival of Art, New Media and Cybercultures (Lisbon). She received a Fundação Oriente Grant to pursue an AIR at Insitu, Hong Kong, 2020. Currently, she is a Professor at ESAD.CR (Caldas da Rainha, Portugal). > https://anateresavicente.webnode.com

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On the second weekend of February, art lovers again flocked through the doors of Eskisehir’s Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM), as excited as they were for the museum’s opening last September. This time, they came for ADA, a kinetic sculpture comprised of a helium-filled balloon that leaves its mark on everything it touches with carbon spikes attached to its entire surface. This larger-than-life creation fills the walls of the entire room with sketches that add another dimension to this already complex concept.
It’s been a decade since ADA was born in Munich. The artist Karina Smigla-Bobinski, told The Guide Istanbul that she did not anticipate the continuation of the project in its current form. “When I first made ADA, I never thought I would be making her over and over again,” Smigla-Bobinski says. “A year later, I received an invitation from Brazil to show her for the first time abroad, which was the real beginning of the international interest.”
ADA, named after Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer developer, has so far visited 30 countries and counting. ADA’s constructional simplicity (she’s assembled from scratch for every showing by the artist herself), her almost infinite number of possible interpretations, and her fully-interactive character have dazzled audiences all over the world. The dimensions of the balloon are decided according to the size of the space in which it is exhibited, leaving enough room for people to play and experiment. Throughout the showing, it is never cleaned or repaired, symbolically ending its life cycle when each presentation comes to an end.

Varying outcomes

“It’s incredible to be able to experience the reactions of people each time in a different way,” Smigla-Bobinski says of her exhibitions. “Some of them are more interested in the act of play itself; others only want to leave a mark.” The artist admits that the unpredictable nature of the work, which cannot be fully controlled, makes some viewers uncomfortable. “In the last decade, I have seen many people who were not nice to ADA,” she says. “When people interact with her, they can’t rely on their knowledge, but instead need to tap into their intuition, which is the point where outcomes begin to vary.” “On the one hand, they experience a child-like state, which makes many people very happy, because they begin to remind themselves of how to behave like this,” she adds. “On the other hand, you might tap into a dark part yourself, especially if you feel the need to be in control.”

As ADA’s incarnations travel the world, Smigla-Bobinski finds that, in most cases, people approach her art very cautiously at the beginning. “I never explain to people how my art works. Often they start by walking around, looking at it, and just nodding,” she says. “Once they notice that the object is moving, they begin to touch it, creating their own drawing—and at that point, everything goes crazy.” Nevertheless, she believes she is understood by most of those who interact with her work. “I’ve never had an exhibition where the audience would just stay back and watch,” she says.

“Work in progress” 
On several occasions throughout the installation’s opening evening, Smigla-Bobinski emphasizes the importance of the audience as the driving force behind her work. She only provides a framework for the experience, she explains, which it is up to the audience to fill in. “I always say that, when you make art, when you’re ready to give it to the world, it doesn’t belong to you anymore,” she asserts.
This open-source approach has been embraced by artists of other disciplines as well, including dancers and musicians, who feel that, by interacting with ADA, the artistic message is somehow elevated. “It began when we were exhibiting ADA in Vancouver,” Smigla-Bobinski recalls. “I received an email from a ballerina, asking me for permission to share her images of dancing with ADA. When she visited the exhibition, she felt a connection to the piece and began to dance with it.”
When the photos went viral, Smigla-Bobinski began receiving requests from other dancers as well. At her recent exhibition in the US city of Pittsburgh, as many as 12 performers danced with ADA. “I left that part completely to them,” she says. “I didn’t even know what they were going to do.”

ADA’s magic, it seems, has the power to inspire new ideas. According to the artist, people have continued to develop new ways of interacting with the floating work.
“We started with an art installation, which evolved into dance performances,” she says. “Nine years later, I was approached by an artist who created music inspired by the sketching sounds of the balloon.” “As long as there are new ideas,” she adds, “this is still a work in progress.”
ADA’s debut in Eskisehir was also accompanied by a dancer. When Smigla-Bobinski first saw Chinese performer Li Kehua dance, she hoped to arrange an artistic collaboration at the earliest opportunity. “Lico [Li Kehua] is an incredible dancer. We thought of collaborating on many occasions, but the timing was never right,” Smigla-Bobinski says, going on to point out that this was the first time she had made a personal request to an artist.

The strong connection between the two artists is clear when they begin finishing each other’s sentences while explaining the ideas behind the opening performance at the OMM. “Dance and drawing are my passions, and I love how they come together in my favorite color, white,” Kehua told The Guide Istanbul. “When you’re a dancer, you always have to strictly control your body,” she says. “What I like about ADA is that I can’t control her. I have no choice but to follow her—and this is what makes the difference in this experience.”
Leaving the opening performance, I find Smigla-Bobinski surrounded by a group of young admirers who have come to see her work. “What I really like about Turkey,” the artist says later, “is that people approach you to simply share their thoughts.” As it has been in numerous other venues around the world, ADA has now been set up in Eskisehir, where she awaits curious locals to come fill her in with their own unique experiences.

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Eskişehir’s Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM) hosts Karina Smigla-Bobinski’s “Ada,” an interactive kinetic sculpture and installation, welcoming the visitors to play with it. The opening of the exhibition and installation was presented with a performance by dancer Li Kehua.

The aim of the performance, which attracted many art lovers both from Istanbul and the Central Anatolian province of Eskişehir is to show how an artwork is able to get in relation with the audience around it.

“Everyone can touch, feel and play with this installation,” said Smigla Bobinski, noting that “Ada” is a huge, free-floating interactive drawing tool that unearths the hidden creative talents of machinery and is controlled by humans. “However, it is producing its own autonomous language in charcoal marks across the white walls, ceilings and floors of the gallery space,” she added.

The artist’s aim is to let the audience to perform with “Ada” to find their own way to deal with this artwork. “And what I also wanted to do is to let other artists, dancers, performers to find what they can do with Ada,” she said.

Once, a musician was interested in Ada and told me that Ada’s noise while it is moving is magnificent, so he recorded the noise.

Creating “Ada” was a process full of inspiration. Smigla-Bobinski was inspired by the first computer programmer in history, countess of Lovelace, Augusta Ada King. She was an English mathematician and writer and she is still known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.

“So, we can say she was the first computer programmer,” said Smigla-Bobinski, noting that she was a pioneer woman. So, the artist played with the name “Ada.” Smigla-Bobinkski said Lovelace was the first to recognize that the potential of computers lay beyond mere calculation

Underlining how important she was, Smigla Bobinski said Ada King set out to create a machine that could paint and write poetry. Similar to Ada Lovelace, the installation ADA extends the possibilities of automation into a realm of creative generation.

The secret and beauty of “Ada” is that it is both controllable and not at the same time. The visitor may control Ada’s trajectory but how it is going to move cannot be calculated in advance. So, it is a free and also controlled installation letting everyone work with it.

Smigla-Bobinski’s “Ada” idea also coincides really well with the OMM’s being and identity. The museum’s urge to gather people is in parallel with Ada. While “Ada” welcomes everyone to play with it, so does the museum with its architecture and audience engagement programs.

Ideas and art

Smigla-Bobinski developed Ada’s idea, gathering many different approaches from history, technology and art. “We artists do not think just one way or in a horizontal line. Ideas move inside our heads and we collect ideas and feelings, and once in a while they crossover.

That’s when I discovered the idea of creating Ada,” she said.

The installation is a part of advancing OMM’s mission to promote projects that combine art, design and technology. The installation will be in motion at the museum through April 12, marking its inaugural appearance in Turkey.

During an opening ceremony to launch the installation, dancer Li Kehua directed Ada’s initial movements in dialogue with her body, creating its first tracks in the museum.

The OMM, designed with a synthesis of traditional Ottoman and Japanese architecture, opened on Sept. 7, 2019 in Eskişehir’s Odunpazarı district, covering about a 4,500-meter-square area.

The museum was designed by the famous Japanese architectural firm Kengo Kuma and Associates. The architectural design of the building draws attention as it consists of a group of square-shaped blocks that are surrounded by laminated-timber beams stacked on top of each other.

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The 6th edition of KIKK Festival is back from 3 to 12 November 2016 to explore the phenomenon of interferences.
Whether we are talking about sound or light interferences, a wave is always the propagation of a disturbance. In physics, the superposition of two waves of a similar frequency result in what we call an interference. We experience it everyday. On the surface of water, in the reflection of a soap bubble, in the crowd’s hubbub, and so on. This phenomenon makes perfect sense, if you think about it; we’re immersed in a fabric of waves where each intersection is an interference. You only have to think about our world as a whole or down to the smallest detail of its organization; our system undulates as much as it breathes. We cannot conceive a still world that would exist without this rhythmically organized motion of nature: the orbits of planets, the ebb and flow of the sea, the oscillations of electric current, the duality of the binary system, the evolution of species, etc. We could sum it up in one sentence; our world is vibrations.
Effects resulted from the interaction of waves have been thoroughly observed and studied in the history of modern physics. Far from only being an interest for physicists, interferences have always  fascinated artists. A playground particularly stimulating and subject to esthetic experimentation. Playing with perception and tricking the senses, they are using the nature of waves and their ability to cause interferences to create optical illusions, auditory confusion, they compose with the unexpected and its permanent renewal.

KARINA SMIGLA-BOBINSKI works as intermedia artist with analogue and digital media and move between science, intuition, expression and cognition. She produces and collaborates on projects ranging from kinetic sculptures, interactive installations, art interventions, featuring mixed reality objects, multimedia physical theatre performances and online projects. Karinas works bridge kinetic art, drawing, video, installation, painting, performance and sculpture, her works contain the method of their making, they are direct art, which foregrounds the material, movement through time and impact on results. Her works have been shown in 45 countries on 5 continents at festivals, galleries and museums.Karina will explain what her working methods and inspirations are in general, also how her works between bits and atoms, such as‚ ADA, SIIMULACRA or KALEIDOSCOPE have come to existence, as well as her search for adequate presentation methods.

KIKK festival is an international festival of digital and creative cultures. Its interest lies in the artistic and economic implications of new technologies. The event gathers people of all backgrounds from all around the world. They are designers, scientists, makers, entrepreneurs, artists, architects, developers or musicians. They come to KIKK to tell you their personal anecdotes, to share professional experiences and innovative ideas, to present an artwork, a project or a product. You return home full of inspiration with plenty of contacts and new passions.
This year, through a program of conferences, exhibitions and workshops, KIKK Festival will analyze how art and science collide in contemporary culture with new waves of artists exploring the physical phenomenons of light, radio, acoustic, magnetic, water or matter waves interferences. Interfering also means to come into opposition. Numerous activists, critical designers are scrambling systems to denounce intrusive practices or policies, others condemn mass surveillance and question privacy issues. Design and economy are also concerned by the subject: a disruptive product, practice or market, can be first seen as an interference before being considered as a new model of disruptive innovation.

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Karina Smigla-Bobinskis schwebende Skulptur ist ein Spielball des Tanzes. Benannt nach der Erfinderin der Programmiersprachen, Ada Lovelace, entfaltet sie als Gegenüber unberechenbare Energie. Verführerisch leicht, so sieht das Spiel aus, zu dem ADA einlädt. Mit den Fingerspitzen scheint es möglich, diesen mit Helium gefüllten Ballon zu bewegen. Wer nach den Kohlestiften greift, die wie Stacheln aus seiner transparenten Haut herausstehen, bekommt schwarze Hände. ADA leistet wenig Widerstand, schwebt hierhin, schwebt dorthin, hüpft hoch, senkt sich herab, ein sanfter Tanzpartner.

Dicht und komplex aber sind die Spuren, die das Spiel hinterlässt. Denn Widerstand leisten die Wände, der Boden, auf den der Ballon aufkommt und von dem er sich wieder abstößt, schließlich die Decke des Raums, in dem die Skulptur von Karina Smigla-Bobinski ihren Auftritt hat. Ein Punkt, den der Kohlestift hinterlässt, hier und dort zuerst, ein Kringel, eine Linie, manchmal ein von einem Besucher kraftvoll gesteuerter Kreis, dann wieder nur ein Wischer, der dem Lufthauch, dem Zufall geschuldet scheint: All das überlagert sich im Lauf der Zeit an Wänden, Decke und auf dem Boden und wird zu einem Protokoll der Bewegungen.

So machen der Raum und der Ballon, die Begrenzung und das frei Bewegliche zusammen diese Installation aus. Hinzu kommt die Zeit, die Dauer des Auftritts, mit der Smigla-Bobinskis Objekt eben auch zur Performance wird. Unkontrollierbar ist für jeden einzelnen Teilnehmer, was am Ende entsteht. Und doch ist die Zeichnung an der Wand auch kalkuliert, das bezeichnete Feld durch die Raumgrenzen vorgegeben.
ADA hat auch etwas von einem Globus, einer Weltkugel. Und ist tatsächlich seit einigen Jahren weltweit unterwegs. In London, in São Paulo und Belo Horizonte, im Silicon Valley, in Moskau, Slowenien und Japan war die interaktive Installation zu sehen, oft mit großer Begeisterung berührt und beobachtet.

Eine «post-digital drawing machine» zu sein, gibt Karina Smigla-Bobinski ADA als Kennzeichnung mit. Ende der 1950er-Jahre entwickelte der Schweizer Künstler Jean Tinguely die bis heute bekanntesten Zeichenmaschinen. In seinen «Métamatic» warf man Geld ein wie in einen Automaten, ratternd sprang die Mechanik an und zeichnete vielarmig auf ein Blatt Papier, während am anderen Ende der Arme Scheiben und Segel aus Metall auf und nieder schwenkten. Deren spielerische, tänzerische Bewegung war der Clou, die Zeichnung, die man mitnehmen durfte, zweitrangig. Tinguely öffnete damit den Prozess der Kunstproduktion, lud zur Teilnahme ein, eine demokratische und befreiende Geste, die am Beginn einer langen Geschichte der Selbstreflexion der Künste stand.

Auch Choreografen haben schon Bewegungsprotokolle erzeugt, wie ADA sie hinterlässt. Für «Human Writes» ließ William Forsythe vor zehn Jahren Tänzer an Zeichentischen arbeiten, mit Kohlestiften an Händen, Füßen und anderen Gliedern. Sie beschäftigten sich mit den Buchstaben des Textes zur Erklärung der Menschenrechte, schrieben und zeichneten auf die Tische mit ganzem Körpereinsatz. So tritt ADA in einer Tradition der Berührung und Durchdringung von bildender Kunst und Performance auf.

An jedem Ausstellungsort beginnt ADA von vorn, in einem leeren,  weißen Raum. Die Geschichte wird auf null gestellt, alles ist möglich. Auch den Atem anzuhalten und den Moment hinauszuzögern, wieder aufs Neue die Fäden des Lebens dicht zu verweben. Ein Augenblick von Erhabenheit.

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How does a large inflatable ball embedded with oversized charcoal drawing sticks get included in a major exhibition titled “Robots and Avatars” ? What is more, why was this work one of the most popular artworks of all the technologically future-gazing works exhibited at FACT in Liverpool?

This work of all the robots and avatars, best tested our relationship to cybernetics.
It is a contrast to works that stand in awe before technology, as many first generation media artworks of the nineties did, incorporating a modernism still celebrating technology.

Despite employing high technology, the significant practice of David Rokeby through the eighties and nineties took an early critical look at cybernetic systems and their relationship to people via surveillance. Foretelling serious concerns on privacy, data and technology. Yet many media works then and since have not moved beyond augmenting the experience with complex ‘interaction’ which if anything removes the experience further from the viewer. However ADA enacts an innate understanding of thought, cognition, mechanical action and effect. ADA asks us through play and tactility to engage directly in creating movement and mark making. Just like a hightech computer she is both art and instrument in one, and although she is a kind of a slave to our play, she escapes all voluntary action into unforeseeable movements. It is good art and like much of Smigla-Bobinskis art, performative and participatory.

ADA is a haptic drawing machine. A slave to our desire to move stuff about. Adept and accidental in making beautiful marks that might appear to have been produced by a computer. The origin of the term Robot, is derived from Slavic and Czech words denoting labour, serf-labour and slave.

This creature, ADA, amplifies our impulses and actions, it is a slave to our thoughts like many devices and tools, however this is an artwork intrinsically binding the audience, and in the process creates a spectacle for those observing the artwork being performed. When ADA is not played with, dormant, the audience focuses further on the marks, which over time become a continuous surface or pattern. With the mark-making ball absent and without video documentation present, the audience might struggle to work out how these marks were applied. By hand over a long time as an abstract fresco? Or by a computer assisted machine drawing algorithmically, across floor, ceiling and walls. And as with any “non-interactive” work, we, the audience, are left with our thoughts and ability to make our own meaning and draw our own conclusions. The cause of how the marks were made might seem irrelevant within the ontology and imagination of an artwork. But here the process, as in interaction between ADA and the visitor, the drawings on the walls and the ball itself merge into a transient state of art. It is an art-work in its most basic meaning: it is being worked on continually, from the creation of the ball to the last stages of ADAs life, when she rests used up by all inter-actors, surrounded by what they had produced together.

As John Dewey says in the Art of Experience, we know that without prior knowledge of art history or intellectual abstraction, art audiences can witness and be part of an artwork. As in everyday life we take meaning, where cognition and experience meet through direct interaction. Ontology here is this direct interaction, and the viewer, who is able to draw and be part of the production, becomes what we might call a pro-sumer (producer-consumer).

ADA is just one of Smigla-Bobinskis works which is perfectly well located in time based practice. Bridging kinetic art, drawing, installation, performance and sculpture, her works contain the method of their making, they are direct art, which foregrounds the material, movement through time and affect in mark making.

This is not to say that all artworks require a relationship with a third party to be complete, however, when a consumer is actually partially producing the artwork, through direct participation, completion is more avert. We see ADA in different states pumped up and buoyant – ready to bounce against clean walls – and tired, deflated after several weeks of ab-use from over enthusiastic kids. This image is as powerful as the work in motion. Kinetic and latent energy. And the beautiful drawing. The documentary photographs are explicit in showing the pleasure most of the audience found in the work, but maybe not all. Like clowns, for some this level of activity is obtrusive and crude, art might be viewed as a reflective mirror of inner quiet. But for an institution, it is gold dust, bringing together engagement, collaboration, participation and wonder, one that is social and democratic.

Prof. Mike Stubbsis the Director of FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, the UK‘s leading organisation for the commissioning and presentation of film, video and new mediaart forms. Jointly appointed in May 2007 by John Moores Liverpool University he is Professor of Art, Media and Curating.Encompassing a broad range of arts and media practice his arts management, curating and advocacy has been internationally acknowledged, he is currently leading a newcapital development, Ropewalks Square forming a creative and digital hub for the city of Liverpool around FACT. In 2010 he chaired the International Academic Media ArtHistories Conference, Re-Wire. He is honorary Professor at Liverpool University and the University of Technology, Sydney.Mike established the ROOT, Burning Bush and AND festivals and commissioned and produced over moving-image based exhibition programs and artworks, including: WhiteNoise, Stanley Kubrick, Pixar for ACMI, Australian Centre for Moving Image and SkInterfaces, Pipilotti Rist and Hsieh Teching, as part of Liverpool’s European Capital ofCulture 2008, the Liverpool Bienalle and the FACT programme. He is currently co-curating short films for Channel 4’s Random Acts series.An award-winning and respected moving image artist in his own right, Mike Stubbs‘ work encompasses film, video, installation and performance. He has won more than adozen major international awards including first prizes at the Oberhausen and Locarno Film Festivals, and in 1999 was invited to present a video retrospective of his work atthe Tate Gallery, London. In 2002 he won a Banff Fleck Fellowship and had solo shows at the Baltic Art Centre, Newcastle and EAF, Adelaide.

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Halfway through her painting course Karina Smigla-Bobinski gave up the two-dimensional media in order to experiment with light and video installations. From then on space has been her favourite place in which to realise her art. She recognises the great potential of an active audience and thus designs the places where she works into collective spaces for active and creative participants. She regards her art as a medium of communication. Her works are materialised events springing from her observations and thoughts in the border area between art, science and philosophy. Karina Smigla-Bobinski lives in Munich. Anyone who wants to contact her will be more likely to meet her at one of the many art festivals in one of the forty countries and five continents in which her works are shown.

Why did you choose the installation as an expressive medium?

At the beginning of my artistic way I was a Painter. I used to work on 2D canvas surface, but very quickly I came to questions about color and form, as well as their movement on the surface and in the depth – the illusion of space. But what is color? It is a spectrum of light that reaches the human eye. And why should I simulate space when I can use the real one? So I decided to move from 2D to 3D and to use the light and public, theatre or exhibitions space as my space of art. On this way I came to installation. Working on this field I wanted immediately to involve the visitors because I saw its great potential and enrichment for my work. So that I transformed “my” space to “our” space, where all of us should be an active part of it. And I mean really active … not only to be present, but to use your body to get the idea of being a real part of it. Lot of my artworks are developed so that visitors complete the work of art. Prof. Mike Stubbs, the Director of FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool says that for an institution like FACT „it is gold dust, bringing together engagement, collaboration, participation and wonder, one that is social and democratic“.

From Jean Tinguely I learned that art should be IN the society and not outside of it and that the temporary factor and the big size of artworks protects against the annexation by the closed community of art dealers and collectors, who understand art as an investment. (This way almost all artworks disappear in the dark cellars of Art Depots.) So for me as an artist, it exempted me from the concerns about art market ranking and so on and allows me to make art, as I want to do. Art is my communication medium which opens me an access to direct exchange with wide audience. It is very important for me that the entrance into the practical experience of art is possible for everyone and that visitors may decide how far they dip into the art experience according to their ability or will. I dig a hole to Wonderland … but jumping into it? This, you need to do by yourself.

For example in my installation ADA I like the fact, that visitors are able to work with the intuition and use their body to explain how it works. The globe put in action by visitors fabricates a composition of lines and points, which are incalculable in their intensity and expression. The signs on the walls are recorded memories of the movement and thus the characters of the visitors. But ADA does not follow 100% “programs” or commands of people. However hard the visitor tries to control ADA, to drive her, to domesticate her, he would notice very soon, that ADA is an independent performer and sometimes she just works away.

Where do you get the inspiration for the creation of your installations?

My artworks are materialized stations or results of my thoughts. I’m an artist and my primary perception is a visual one. I think in pictures, and so I articulate myself in this way. It is logical that my (communication) medium is a visual one.

We live in this world and I try to understand what is going on outside of the black box of our body. Sometimes, I set my view to the outside and position myself in relation to the others. Sometimes, I set my gaze inward and examine our perception and awareness. Therefrom, I create art to get in dialogue with the others. The interactive artworks create an unhesitating connection, where information flows not only in one direction (artist > artwork > visitors), but influence each other and create something new, when meet in the artwork (artist > artwork < visitor).

Is there an artist who has inspired you?

There are a lot of them! … and not only artist! There are scientist, philosophers, writer, theatre makers … exactly, for example last week I saw ‘barbarians’ by Hofesh Shechter at Berliner Festspiele … He shows us what means human condition, honesty, synesthesia of body, music, movement … wow!

What is your favorite art work?

Art works are not trophies that I collect in a showcase. Art is not a competition! Art enters into a dialogue with people and meanwhile they can fight against each other or in turn build on each other, support, or influence one another, quote from each other… but never ever wants to be your favorite one! This do works that have been made to be sold … but those are more products than works of art.

Size intrigues when it appears atypical. The greater the distinction, the stronger the magnetism, forcing us to hold our eyes on to that something to assimilate the particulars, make sense of it and have it lodged in our minds. Profiling 40 artists known for their monumental sculptures and installations put up around the world, OVERS!ZE investigates how size functions as a delightful tool to make a statement, break the routine or shrink us — taking us back to a time where everything else was much larger than us. In the INTERVIEW section, we speak to some of the world’s most active big thinkers, to find out how they perceive space, public space and the merits of scaling up art.

OVERS!ZE – The Mega Art & Installations by Katherine Wong, Interview for “OVERSIZE” book project by Victionery based in Hong Kong 

K.W.: What was ADA originally produced for?

K.S-B.: ADA is a result of my thoughts and inquiries about the fundamental idea of ‘computer as a machine’ that can remember and create works of art, such as poetry, music, or pictures like an artist. I have developed ADA without a client. After she was finished in 2010, curators Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto invited ADA, as the first, to FILE Festival 2011 in São Paulo, Brazil. Then came FAD Festival in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), FACT Foundation in Liverpool (U.K.), FILE Festival in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and ZERO1 Biennial in Silicon Valley (U.S.), GARAGE Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow (Russia), etc..

K.W.: What kind of influences do Ada Lovelace and Jean Tinguely have on you?

K.S-B.: I did the same by looking at “machines” today as an artist and building a post-industrial and post-digital “creature” that resembles a molecular hybrid (such as one from nano biotechnology) with the ability to produce artworks through an open source method. In connection to copy-right debate, there appears a very interesting question too — what is exactly the work of art? The balloon, the drawings on the wall or both? 🙂 On the other hand, Jean Tinguely was an artist who disapproved the commercialisation of art and had built kinetic artworks out of industrial age machine parts, of which some are generative, like Métamatics that could draw on its own. Some other of his artworks were designed to be self-destructive, which he described as “under destruction”, a creative force and structural transformation. I developed the idea of Jean Tinguely, where a kinetic artwork expanded itself by the action with which I entrusted the visitors. The visitors thus became the driving force responsible for the expansion of ADA. From every aspect, Jean Tinguely paved the way for me.

K.W.: With ADA, what kind of experience did you intend to bring to the public and the exhibition space?

K.S-B.: The normal, traditional way of viewing art is to go to gallery and look, but the participation is confined to looking and nothing more. All reactions occur inside the viewers’ head instead of physically to the piece. Interactivity in art stands out as a way to connect with the audience. This contact between art and the public creates a relationship that involves the viewer personally in the project. The best part of interactive art installations is when you can use your body which then turns you into a part of the art piece. When we talk about interactivity, we imagine it as a digitally-created, non-physical experience which computers and electronics have very often forced into the foreground. But ADA as a post-digital artwork does not need programming because ADA is an analogue interactive kinetic sculpture. Same as my other works, it is very important for me that the entrance into the practical experience of art is possible for everyone and that visitors may decide how far they dip into the art experience according to their ability or will. I like the fact that visitors are able to work with the intuition in my installations and use their body to explain how they work. Here, as ADA is put in action by visitors, she would then fabricate a composition of lines and points which are incalculable in their intensity and expression. By exerting control on ADA, constantly visitors would fall into some kind of a trance as they try to govern ADA’s drawing path. Sometimes people forget where they are and that ADA is balloon vulnerable to damages. They might sometimes get a little bit too rough with her.

K.W.: Do you consider ADA a machine or a being?

K.S-B.: ADA is constructed to have her own will. Once you set her into motion she just works away. What ADA produces is very humane because she seems to respond to some of a human instincts. The only method to decode these signs and drawings is to understand them as the intuitive association of our jazzy dreams and thoughts. It is a good feeling of having created a piece of art that is autonomous and that it would not be complete without visitors. Within the balloon-space-people relation, visitors are obliged to respond. That was my intention when I built ADA for the first time, but the reality got beyond my wildest dreams. Perhaps it is an intuitive reaction of the body that provokes us to stretch our hands to catch or push the ball and not let it drop. It floats weightlessly in the air and changes the perception. The more she is handled by visitors, the blacker she gets from the charcoal and thus seems more “alive”. Even I, who built her, sometimes get the illusion that she is a living thing. Already at her first public appearance in São Paulo, visitors asked where ‘uma bola com carbon (a ball with charcoal)’ was as they looked for ADA. But after they interacted with ADA, they referred to ADA using the name or “she”, so did the many English visitors at FACT Liverpool. So it happened that I use “ADA” or “she” now, too. Anyway the concept of ADA is a temporal “under destruction” artwork with her lifetime equal to the duration of an exhibition. Her age will progress with the number of people who visits her, their temperament and the galleries’ supervision on site.

K.W.: What was it like creating and building ADA? How did ADA conceive its unique form and look?

K.S-B.: While Ada Lovelace’s idea of a machine laid the grounds for ADA, in the new post-industrial age where the Web is born of a desire for speedy and open access to information and nanotechnology comes from a desire for speed and miniaturisation, ADA becomes the common ground for both nano-switch networks and human brains, which explains how she generates marks like when a switchnetwork configures itself to create “quick routes”, in the structure of a synapse. If, in this very serious scientific world, we could follow the White Rabbit and fall into the world of art, we might imagine that it makes no difference whether ADA is alive or not when we consider ADA as a nano creature. As Scottish physicist James Gimzewski concluded, together with Masakazu Aono, the creator of the first nano-switch, and Argentine neurologist Dante Chialvo, the basic mechanism of the brain is the same as the basic dynamics of nano-switches. Knowing this and inspired by Ada Lovelace’s poetic way of thinking, I took the idea of the nano-machine which then I manipulated on the scale against the standards with silicone, helium and carbon. I created an art machine, an independent creature capable of claiming the whole room for itself and eventually along with visitors.

K.W.: How do size and scale matter to ADA?

K.S-B.: Size and scale decide our perception and how we deal with the interactive artwork. The relation between our bodies and the artwork is crucial. If the artwork is smaller than we are, then it is subjected to us and thus, be absorbed or rejected. And if it is equivalent to our size, then it will mutate into a counterpart which we have to act toward. But when the artwork is bigger, much bigger than us, then it will become a superordinate which we are compelled to absorb and be subjected. We would have to respond to it, arrange ourselves or leave it. For ADA, the last two conditions apply. Relatively equivalent in size, visitors would perceive ADA as their counterpart. As for the drawings which covered the entire gallery space, the lines would exert influences on the visitors, whom simultaneously become part of the work.

K.W.: What do you expect the audience to take away after interacting with ADA? Is it necessary for them to understand why you built ADA?

K.S-B.: In all exhibitions with ADA, I observed and spoke with the visitors (ranging from children to NASA employees). To those who reflected on this work, their ideas seemed to go with my thoughts. This is like a controlled free fall into the hole of the White Rabbit. Similar, for example, to the experience of the still life paintings from the 17th and 18th century, the concern of a painter was on the one hand to grasp the nature and objects of everyday life in their beauty and play, and convey a hidden message or a mental content on the other hand. To read these coded messages (then as now) you have to dip deep into the art experience. However, those that remain on the surface, they also can find satisfaction in the aesthetics of visual experience (beauty of the presentation). There were also those who ignore all that and create his own reading mode and meaning. In this case, it was interesting for me to know their thoughts.

K.W.: Where would ADA go after the exhibitions?

K.S-B.: After the ADAs are back, they remain in the boxes in which they are returned to me. ADA is “under destruction”, meaning they will not be washed or repaired. For a new exhibition, I build a new ADA and each ADA has only one life. I will rather continue to drive the destruction as I have in mind the decomposition of ADA into its individual parts and the parts might create small documentary sculptural objects as mementos of the interactions.

K.W.: Among all the interactive projects you’ve been involved, which one do you enjoy most and why?

K.S-B.: The first artwork that comes to mind is ADA because it is the current project, but also ALIAS which can be understood as a metaphor for the dependency of art — without a viewer or visitor it is trapped in an incomplete existence. The visitor are alienated in an intimate situation. The strange confrontation with the personal shadow and the appearance of a stranger inside creates a tension between individuality conceived within one’s own silhouette and the presence of an image of somebody else.

* Victionery is a design book publisher workshop based in Hong Kong that focuses on visual communication.  > more

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