Colmena

Duration: 3 minutes and 43 seconds

Country: Spain

Language: English

License: CC - Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives

Genre: Documentary

Producer: Pau Waelder

Director: Pau Waelder

Views: 109 (4 embedded)

Posted by: pauwl on Jul 2, 2010

Under the heading Colmena [Hive], artists Martina Höfflin and Pascal Glissmann, the winners of the Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby’s Award in 2009, present at the Pilar i Joan Miró Foundation (Mallorca, Spain) the evolution of their celebrated project Electronic Life Forms, a series of robotic critters that cast doubt on our perception of life and our relationship with new media. The video includes an interview with the artists and several views of the installation.

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The Electronic Life Forms project started in 2004 by a workshop with Ralf Schreiber and Strudel.org where we worked on analog robots
at the Academy of Media Art in Cologne
So then we started to think about electronic life forms, artificial life
what is artificial life, how can you build artificial life and what's important
and what are important principles for artificial life.
So we started to solder little robots, which are really simple
analog creatures and circuits
they produce sound and movement
and are totally fed by solar light
so they are autarkic in a way
that they start when the sun goes up and they stop when the sun goes down
The Colmena project will be about 100 creatures, handknitted
handknitted wire in cylindrical forms
this will be the nest of the creatures and keep them protected from the weather
the solar cells will be outside
and catch the sunlight, and underneath there is a small motor
that creates the movement of the electronic circuit
and there are some piezo speakers coming outside of the creatures
or the nest, which recreate the sound of the creatures.
so we will hang them underneath trees
in the whole park, and there will be two big swarms
a big one and a smaller one, and some solo creatures in some other spots in the park as well
so it's kind of an invasion of the creatures of the Miró park.
When we received the invitation to participate in this award competition
we started to do some research about the work of Miró
and our work, and found some parallels
of course, we have been familiar with his paintings
and his graphical work, but less with his sculptural work
So that was very inspiring for us to see
and also to learn what he thought about his work
that he had these pictures in his mind
that maybe at night they would start living, they would explore the nature
and he was very interested in the idea of merging his sculptural work and nature.
So this is pretty much what we thought
could be a nice new edge within the ELF project
so our ELFs are inspired
by his paintings in a formal way
We have an organic, but kind of geometric shape
and at the same time these creatures are very autarkic,
they live by themselves,
so there is no human being involved to make them alive
and this is what we think was in Miró's mind
when he was thinking about his sculptures and his work.