Discusses the moving art works of a group of kinetic sculptors

Kinetic art not only includes movement but often depends on it to produce an intended effect and therefore fully realize its nature as art. It can take a multiplicity of forms and include a wide range of motion, from motorized and electrically driven movement to motion as the result of wind, light, or other sources of energy. Kinetic art emerged throughout the twentieth century and had its major developments in the 1950s and 1960s. Professionals responsible for conserving contemporary art are in the midst of rethinking the concept of authenticity and solving the dichotomy often felt between original materials and functionality of the work of art. The contrast is especially acute with kinetic art when a compromise between the two often seems impossible. Also to be considered are issues of technological obsolescence and the fact that an artist’s chosen technology often carries with it strong sociological and historical information and meanings.

Get Your Move On! In Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists, you'll learn how to successfully build moving mechanisms through non-technical explanations, examples, and do-it-yourself projects--from kinetic art installations to creative toys to energy-harvesting devices. Photographs, illustrations, screen shots, and images of 3D models are included for each project. This unique resource emphasizes using off-the-shelf components, readily available materials, and accessible fabrication techniques. Simple projects give you hands-on practice applying the skills covered in each chapter, and more complex projects at the end of the book incorporate topics from multiple chapters. Turn your imaginative ideas into reality with help from this practical, inventive guide. Discover how to: Find and select materials Fasten and join parts Measure force, friction, and torque Understand mechanical and electrical power, work, and energy Create and control motion Work with bearings, couplers, gears, screws, and springs Combine simple machines for work and fun Projects include: Rube Goldberg breakfast machine Mousetrap powered car DIY motor with magnet wire Motor direction and speed control Designing and fabricating spur gears Animated creations in paper An interactive rotating platform Small vertical axis wind turbine SADbot: the seasonally affected drawing robot Make Great Stuff! TAB, an imprint of McGraw-Hill Professional, is a leading publisher of DIY technology books for makers, hackers, and electronics hobbyists.

This book explores the ways in which artists use technology to create different perceptions of time in art in order to reflect on contemporary relationships to technology. By considering the links between technology, movement and contemporary art, the book explores changing relationship between temporality in art, art history, media art theory, modernity, contemporary art, and digital art. This book challenges the dominant view that kinetic art is an antiquated artistic experiment and considers the changing perception of kinetic art by focusing on exhibitions and institutions that have recently challenged the notion of kinetic art as a marginalised and forgotten artistic experiment with mechanical media. This is achieved by deconstructing Frank Popper’s argument that kinetic art is a precursor to subsequent explorations in the intersections between art, science and technology. Rather than pandering to the prevailing art historical assumption that kinetic sculpture is merely a precursor to art in a digital culture, the book proposes that perhaps kineticism succeeded too well, where movement has become a ubiquitous element of the aesthetic of contemporary art. If, as Boris Groys has recently suggested, installation has become the dominant mode of art in the contemporary age, then movement in real time with the viewer is used to aestheticise and explore the facets of our peculiar time.

An examination of the ways human movement can be represented as a formal language and how this language can be mediated technologically. In Motion and Representation, Nicolás Salazar Sutil considers the representation of human motion through languages of movement and technological mediation. He argues that technology transforms the representation of movement and that representation in turn transforms the way we move and what we understand to be movement. Humans communicate through movement, physically and mentally. To record and capture integrated movement (both bodily and mental), by means of formal language and technological media, produces a material record and cultural expression of our evolving kinetic minds and identities. Salazar Sutil considers three forms of movement inscription: a written record (notation), a visual record (animation), and a computational record (motion capture). He focuses on what he calls kinetic formalism—formalized movement in such pursuits as dance, sports, live animation, and kinetic art, as well as abstract definitions of movement in mathematics and computer science. He explores the representation of kinetic space and spatiotemporality; the representation of mental plans of movement; movement notation, including stave notation (Labanotation) and such contemporary forms of notation as Choreographic Language Agent; and the impact of digital technology on contemporary representations of movement—in particular motion capture technology and Internet transfer protocols. Motion and Representation offers a unique cultural theory of movement and of the ever-changing ways of representing movement.

Doris Chase has achieved international stature as a pioneer in the field of video art since she moved from Seattle to New York City in 1972. An artist of remarkable and continuous creativity, Chase now divides her time between her video headquarters in New York and a Seattle studio where she works on new projects in painting and sculpture. Beginning as an innovative painter and sculptor in Seattle in the 1950s, Chase created sculpture that was meant to be touched and manipulated by the viewer. Chase then developed large-scale kinetic sculptures in collaboration with choreographers, and her art was set in motion by dancers. In New York, her majors contribution to the evolution of artists' video has been her work in videodance. On videotape, dancers and sculpture evolve into luminous abstract forms which represent some of the most sophisticated employments of video technology by an artist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Chase began working in the nascent genre of video theater. In these productions, she uses the imtimacy of the video screen to achieve a new synthesis of visual and dramatic art. Her video theatre compositions present multicultural and social commentary, utilizing scripts by writers such as Lee Breuer, Thulani Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn in the "Concepts" series. Collaborating with actresses Geralding Page, Ann Jackson, Roberta Wallach, Joan Plowright, and Luise Riner in the "By Herself" series, she focuses on the viewpoints and experiences of older women. Today, coming full circle, Doris Chase in Seattle is exploring a renewed interest in painting and sculpture as well as in the modernist aesthetic she never really ceased pursuing, even during her most adventuresome multimedia years. This profile by art historian Patricia Failing is both a celebration of a distinguished artists and a historical summary of the development of video as an art form from the early seventies to the present day. The making of Chase's widely acclaimed filmdance, Circles II (1972), is discussed within the context of her own artists evolution and also as exemplary of an artistic milieu shaped by McLuhanism and a growing interest in multimedia experimentation. An entire chapter focuses on the institutional and theoretical working environment for video artists in the 1970s, outlining the circumstances under which New York became the best-endowed center for the production of artists' video. Attention is also paid to the specific manner in which Chase learned to employ video technology, the mechanisms of exhibition and distribution of independent video art, and the theoretical and practical issues raised in collaborations among artists from different art forms. Centering upon first-hand commentary by Chase and her colleagues, Doris Chase, Artist in Motion is an accessible introduction to a pioneering artist and her milieu. The Foreword by noted critic and teacher of video art Ann-Sargent Wooster adds a valuable dimension to the volume. Doris Chase, Artist in Motion is illustrated with representative examples of Chase's work and includes selected lists of her videotapes and films as well as her works in public collections. It will appeal to students of video art as well as to those intersted in women artists and feminist performance.

The nine essays collected in this volume are based on the papers presented at the Forty-second International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2007.