Positive Technology Journal

Via the Presence-L Listserv

By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer

For his mid-career survey exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Tim Hawkinson has suspended wires and electrical cords high overhead throughout the capacious ground-floor galleries of the Anderson Building. The wiring is there to provide power for the machinery and computers that operate his often kinetic art. Think of it as a homemade power grid — a replica in miniature of something vast on which we all rely but about which we pay little attention until it's not there. Hawkinson's art is sort of like that too. As a garage band is to a philharmonic orchestra, so Hawkinson's technological tinkering is to science and industry. His art speaks to social experience and human mortality. But part of the work's attraction is the way it peels back its systems of operation like layers of an onion, displaying them for your contemplation.
Take "Emoter," a self-portrait of the artist as a young cyborg. A cut-up inkjet print showing the artist's face is mounted on a panel of plastic and foam core, which hangs on the wall. Electrodes fastened to the face are connected to mechanical components, mounted like a high school science project on a nearby stepladder. There, light sensors are affixed to a television monitor, and they send random signals in response to the broadcast program.
Walk up to Hawkinson's portrait and, accompanied by soft buzzing and whirring, his face begins to change expressions. Eyebrows rise. Nostrils flare. Lips part. Some expressions are familiar, some freakish.
While you're puzzling over the portrait's apparent reaction to your presence in the room, and how the goofy effect is accomplished, it suddenly dawns that grins, a furrowed brow and other bemused expressions are washing over your own face too. Who's the real "emoter" here? Hawkinson or his audience?
Who is responding to what — the picture to you or you to the picture? Is the title a pun for e-motor — that is, an electronic motor, which reacts mechanically to outside stimuli? Does the flickering TV tube reside at the heart of this emotional circuitry? How mechanical (or preprogrammed) are our own responses to experience?
"Emoter" also puts you in mind of multi-user computer programs, the kind that run over the Internet and allow multiple users to participate in role-playing games. In virtual reality, "to emote" is to indicate the performance of an action, usually with a facial expression of emotional state. Hawkinson's theatrical self-portrait represents the face of a new world — familiar and freakish, but one we all now inhabit... READ THE FULL ARTICLE

More to explore

Tim Hawkinson's interview and works

Art:21 Film on Tim Hawkinson

Tim Hawkinson essay and images

Tim Hawkinson art books (Amazon)