ARTIST STATEMENT

My interdisciplinary media art installations look to the intersection between natural and technological systems. Integration of the organic and electro-mechanical elements asserts a confluence and co-evolution between living and evolving technological material. I am fascinated and encouraged with human kinds struggle to evolve technological systems that move toward intelligence and autonomy which are modeled from our current conceptions of the natural. My art works are influenced by theories on living systems, artificial life, interspecies communication and the underlying beauty and pattern inherent in the nature and organization of matter, energy, and information. While I find hope and fascination with our techno-cultural evolution, many of my works express concern for ecological issues, which are often not considered within the realm of technological and cultural progress.

I have chosen interactive art in particular because it encourages active, self determined relationships with a work of art and points to a co-evolved coupling between human, machine, nature and culture. The branching and joining of physical forms in my work echoes the behavioral flow and multiple directions an interactive piece may take in the act of self-organizing. I am compelled by open structures that define form but do not close the form off to the viewer. I use exposed electronics and mechanics as part of the aesthetic in proposing structural relationships between wire, circuits and natural structures. I believe it is imperative that technological systems acknowledge and model the evolved wisdom of natural living systems, so they will inherently fuse, to permit an emergent and interdependent earth. Symbio - technoetic can describe this philosophy.

Ken Rinaldo 2004