Italian version
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31.03.04 The Sculptural User Interface, language's scultures.
Undoubtely, this artistic project by Michael Rees, based on the mix of sculpture and new media, looks very ambitious. His site contains texts on the relation between art and technology, interactions with photographic material, Flash movies and three-dimensional sculptures. Some of his works are on display in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Edelman Foundation in Luzern and the Science Museum in London. His most important work is the Sculptural User Interface (SUI), an application which allows to model physical structures, language and media at the same time using a software. This software, in its latest version (beta 0.1.6), connects the act of typing on the keyboard to the generation of three-dimensional structures based on simple grammatical rules and according to the typical virtual reality technology. This way, it's possible to implement an installation made of modular connectors which progressively link, like a rhizome, mechanical and human parts, succeeding in mediating the languages of the different assembled parts composing the work. Rees compares the growth process of this rhizome - which looks like a plant with a horizontal system of roots, like 'Menschenpflanze' ('Human Plant', 1923) by Paul Klee - to the development of the knowledge of an Internet user. His sources of inspirations span from the thoughts of Linus Torvalds on Open Source to Duchamp's conceptual art to Kosuth and Beuys and the studies on artificial intelligence by Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy and Jaron Lanier. The complexity of some reflections emerges which proves the temporary inadequacy of the hypothesis of an intelligent machine and its realization.
Eleonora Calvelli