MAKING A MOCKERY OF MIMESIS
As a child I found spirograph disappointing. I liked the pictures on the box, (produced by highly skilled artists, no doubt), but I’d always mess it up by slipping off the little wheely gears. The round ones weren’t too bad, but I had to stick close to the center. Those long tongue-depressor shaped gears were fucking impossible! There is no way you can make that thing go around without slipping off the wheel, making a jagged pencil gash across the paper, totally ruining everying. So the only spirographs I could produce were boring wavy circles. I knew from an early age I would never be a spirograph artist.
Maybe it’s my lack of coordination. I still remember in kindergarten we had to trace these squiggly maze patterns, and I couldn’t follow the lines properly. I got in trouble because the teacher thought I wasn’t taking it seriously, but I was. That’s right: I flunked tracing.
All these painful spirograph memories came rushing back to me after visiting Kinetoh (courtesy of Rhizome). Kinetoh is a generative art project. Generative art just means that instead of making images yourself, you’re building mechanisms and rules, analogous to spirograph gears, which are used to produce images. You don’t even have to hold the pencil in the little holes!
Kinetoh is a contemporary update to this activity, using a computer, (a Mac, no doubt), to simulate the plasic gears, assigning them chaotic properties which transcend the physical, modernist periodicity of spirograph. Or something.
Perhaps Manik of Rhizome can explain it better:
Kinetoh dismantles the models of the last avant-garde by creating the simulacrum of such from software programs capable of imitating, nearly perfectly, those materials that belong to classic art, like pencil, charcoal, and watercolor. These images stand as the mimesis of art that is inherently non-mimetic.
What sort of a crazy kaleidoscope of avant-avant-garde boundary-interrogation have we stumbled into?! I feel dizzy!
Or, also, the virtual reconstruction of the end of high Modernity. Instead of targeting a movement well-established and recognizable, like Abstract Expressionism or Conceptualism, Kinetoh’s strategy is to examine the second line and not so well-explored spaces in Modern Art.
Can I get a “subversive”?
Just because of this, they maintain subversive potential.
HEYO!