Art's Birthday: Mawhrin-Skel

Description:

This exhibition was programmed as part of a multi-day celebration of Art’s Birthday that coincided with the 100th anniversary of radio. Local and international artists used sound, video, robotics, poetry, images, and performance to celebrate and deconstruct utopian ideas of network, radio, and places.  

This exhibition was a continuation and remount of the work and research produced from an artists residency that ran Oct 2005 to May 2006 at Western Front. This project brought together a group of Vancouver-based artists who worked in new media, electronics, sculpture, installation and performance. The residency culminated in a performance and exhibition. 

Robots were created by Deanne Achong, Kate Armstrong, Joelle Ciona, David Floren, and Matt Smith, with help from Dina González Mascaró. The artists’ robots were reactive to their environment and could communicate with each other. The works were shown as both performances and installation. The robots included: a spinning top that winded up threads, a glass globe that used hardware voice recognition to react to conversations in the space, a crow that saw the world through multi-faceted eyes, an instrument that measured cellphone and WiFi traffic, a long nosed creature that drove around and emits high pitched tones, and a set of chart recorders that outputted levels of data-streaming activity from the robots.