Biomimicry
There is no brain here, no spark of intent; there is only a single motor driving a crankshaft, pulling at strings. Bio-mimicry possesses a grace that feels uncomfortably alive. This cephalopod is made up of over 1,200 individual elements in the arms alone.
Through this mechanical articulation, three-dimensional movement is born. As the tentacles arch and coil through a full 360 degrees, the viewer’s fascination inevitably curdles into a quiet, creeping discomfort. We watch plastic metal and string replicate the liquid heave of life with such startling fidelity that the boundary between the biological and the built begins to dissolve. It forces a haunting reflection: if such complex, evocative movement can be summoned by a collection of reactions to a motor’s pull, what, then, are we? Are we more than a series of responses to stimuli, or is our own humanity just a finer weave of the same mechanical tapestry? In the sway of a synthetic limb, the mirror is held up to our own autonomy.
Hall Of Mirrors
The world is often a blur of passing shadows. A fragmented mirror where we catch only glimpses of our own transit. In Hall of Mirrors, that fragmentation is suspended, creating a space where the inanimate awakens to the pulse of the living.
Constructed from ACM and mirrored acrylic, the architecture of the piece belies its hidden fluidity. Within its frame, seventy-two servo motors act as a mechanical nervous system, governed by micro-controllers and Touch Designer. As the viewer approaches, the piece does not just observe; it inhales the viewer’s presence. A camera traces the arc of a hand, the tilt of a chin, translating these fleeting gestures into a choreographed symphony of shifting light and reflection.
Thirty-one mirrors rise and dip like the surface of a tide, tilting in unison to catch the viewer’s light, holding them in a singular, crystalline focus. For a brief, suspended moment, the chaotic noise of the city outside falls away. Through this dialogue between human movement and kinetic response, the viewer is no longer a ghost in the machinery of the everyday. Instead, they are rendered the luminous centre of a private universe, reflected and reaffirmed by the very air they displace. It is an invitation to be seen, to be the pivot upon which the world turns, before the mirrors settle and the moment dissolves back into the stream of time.
X Site
Concept: Javid Jah
Fabrication of Mechanism: Studio Kotte
We worked closely with the artist Javid Jah to bring X site to life. The project involved developing a large scale mechanism that allows the user to spin a flywheel , using human power to spin a 6000lb shipping container. X site uses the movement of the containers to follow specific constellations while projecting sacred geometry and frequency matching the planets movements in the sky.
Curious Part one: Ashes
Concept: Alexis Knipping
Fabrication: Studio Kotte
Ashes examines how the doctrine of purity haunts the body and the imagination. Cherry wood with its dreamy reddish hue whose warm intimacy stands in for the old injunctions: the hymns and whispers that mark a woman as whole or tainted. Its charred surface, achieved by shou-sugi ban, is not merely blackness but memory made skin, burnt grain like the scorched ledger of a confession, an echo of witch fire and the long, patient machinery that punishes a woman's desire.
At first glance the object is a pew: black and austere, an architecture of silence. A secret button, a small, almost conspiratorial nudge, lifts the lid and reveals, with a kind of private theatricality, a single flogger of black leather. The flogger is not a mere prop; it is a narrative compressed into an object. It is the instrument of penitence transposed, by the strange alchemy of upbringing, into an implement of appetite. What was meant to suppress is folded back upon itself and becomes the very locus of the yearning it sought to extinguish.
Thus the piece holds, like a darkened chapel, both accusation and confession. It asks how punishment, ritual, and reverence conspire to render desire obscene and, by that very prohibition, luminous.