Visited: Kinetica Art Fair @ p3

This was quite a while ago now but I went to the Kinetica Art Fair.

'Kinetica Art Fair is produced by Kinetica Museum and is the first of its kind in the UK. It provides collectors, curators and the public with a unique opportunity to view and purchase artworks from leading contemporary arts organisations and artists specialising in kinetic, electronic, robotic, light, sound, time-based and interdisciplinary new media art.'

Link here.

My favourite piece of work (shown above) was this robot that drew people's faces. First a camera took a picture of the person's face and then the mechanical arm holding a pen jerked across the piece of paper to reveal a line drawing of the face. It seemed to draw an outline of the face and then fill in the detail later on. I found it quite weird that the robot seemed to have its own style of drawing, but of course it had been programmed to construct the image in a certain way.

I also quite liked this mechanical drawing machine. People's heads had been cast in plaster, then as a head rotates a marker follows the 3D form of the head, spiraling down, which are then converted into a contour drawing of the head from above.

Some of the pieces were quite exciting but you could tell most of the work was created by artists and their main focus was for aesthetics or effect. It was interesting for me to see the work produced but imagine alternative applications for the technology and programming they had used.