Sometime in January, I saw an excellent episode of PBS’s Nova: Science Now. It had a story about Mirror Neurons (which we use to respond to other people’s facial expressions), a profile of an MIT AI guy who obsessively — and hopelessly, according to his girlfriend — tries to schedule his own life down to the second, a piece about sand dunes that sing in the wind, and a tiny little clip about an artist that makes moving sculptures.
The clip started on a closeup of a wishbone walking across a white ground. It had a teetering sauntering gait and was attached to a metal armature. After a series of close ups of rotating flywheels and oscillating springs, the camera pulled back to reveal the entire contraption. At first glance it looked like the wishbone was pulling a gigantic Rube Goldberg device more than five times its height made up of spindly bicycle wheels. After watching it for a moment I realized, that the machine was, in fact, generating the motion, pushing the little bone along and causing its teeter and saunter.
The film and sculpture both turned out to be by an artist named Arthur Ganson; the particular piece on display was called Machine With Wishbone. Ganson is both a brilliant machinist and an eloquent poet of motion, especially walking. He tends to use large and complex mechanisms to produce naturalistic, often human-like motion in small organic or mundane objects. The baroquely intricate workings of his handmade contraptions are as beautiful in their absurd and artificial complexity as the resultant organic motions are in their simplicity and familiarity. This combination makes for a compelling result every time, avoiding the common trap of art that uses the organic/machinic juxtaposition to take sides.
Ganson neither laments the dominance of the thoughtless machine over the living soul nor celebrates the augmentation of the mortal body by omnipotent technology. Instead he sets the two to dancing together, as partners.