Sculpture: Tech Style

The newest working materials for sculpture are electronic gadgets—solid-state circuits, cathode tubes, transistors and photoelectric cells. The results are intriguing thingumajigs for a technological age. The New York season has introduced two newcomers whose machines have all systems a Go-Go, invite human participation in their antics, and in return produce cacophonies akin to electronic music.

Madcap Circuitry. James Seawright’s spidery electronic sculptures could be Paul Klee’s fidgety drawings turned into robots. New York’s Modern Art and Whitney museums each snapped up one of the beasts from the tech stylist’s first one-man show at the Stable Gallery. “For the artist to ignore the possibilities of technology would be utter folly,” says Seawright, and he seems to have ignored few. His Watcher took 6½ months to produce; its tiny lights flicker in programmed sequences, photocell-tipped antennas bob about like tentacles, seeking the lights, and a speaker tweets and squeals to the pulsing of the circuitry.

Because of their photoelectric cells, Seawright’s machines respond to one another and to the presence of people. When Searcher beams light from its circling radarlike dishes, Scanner’s flailing arm picks up the beacon with its light sensors; then Captive, impelled by a motor, skids and twitches about on a mirrored platform. “The machines process information,” says Seawright, 30, an Ole Miss grad who instructs at Manhattan’s Electronic Music Center (run by Princeton and Columbia). “Their cells and sensors collect information on light and sound, and they behave accordingly. My aim is to produce a kind of patterned personality. Just as a person you know very well can surprise you, so can these machines.”

144-Eyed Wurlitzer. François Dallegret’s La Machine is a far heftier entree. A Frenchman, now designing for Montreal’s Expo 67, Dallegret has designed a device that looks like a giant metal steeplechase hurdle, weighs half a ton, and is priced at $27,000. It consists of two slender beams of anodized aluminum, 30 ft. long by 2 ft. high, braced between uprights. A cool piece of pure structure, the object has all the contemplative imagery of an I beam, but it has an inner electronic life. The narrow six-inch gap between the aluminum beams is brightly lit by hidden sodium-vapor lamps that shine on electric eyes staring up through pencil-sized holes in the bottom beam.

When the adventurous art lover at Manhattan’s Waddell Gallery inserts his hands into the gap (disposable plastic gloves are provided to lend a sense of formality), they break the light beams, thus activating eight loudspeakers that, hidden in the uprights, rumble and reverberate like a blighty Wurlitzer. Each of 144 electric eyes paired in opposing scales from high to low along the length of La Machine controls a musical tone. It was possible to pick out Féere Jacques on the gizmo; impromptu boiler-factory blues was a far simpler tune to produce.