Elektra is in full swing. I’ve been overwhelmed. Must start small and work into the core of what has been presented here.
Zimoun’s elegant installation at Push Galerie has been on my mind since seeing it on Wednesday. Here, a series of 216 dc motors – each strung with a strand of 1.0m wire – hung in a horizontal row on a white wooden ‘canvas’ that stretches the length of the gallery. As the motors spin and twirl the wires against the once pure surface behind them, they fill the gallery with the sound of rain shower, drops pelting concrete. Whisking against the surface behind them, they scratch and scuff against the once pure paint, leaving behind subtle, graphite-like markings, traces of themselves that will no doubt become darker and more apparent as the installation continues to operate. This is technology used for poetry, absorbing without being immersive, minimal without being alienating, sonic and ultimately quite beautiful.
This is work that is familiar to me, a place for me to enter into Elektra, an ironicly analog introduction to a festival of digital arts. However, Thought One that has emerged from Elektra is the idea of history repeating itself, of looping itself, or cycling in waves, in this case, between the digital and the analogue. Is the analogue r(e)merging? If so, how? What is it about analogue technologies that make them so different, so appealing at this moment in time. Is this even the case? Do some of us just crave being less attached in a wired sense, and being more sensuously engaged with the world again? Is there a way technology can make this possible? Does it really need to happen?
