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Professor Wortzel Reconfigures Robotic Toys to Portray Folly of Blind Obedience
Reconfigured robotic toys performing military maneuvers in rigid choreographed formations are featured in a new artistic work, “A Re-enactment of The Battle of the Pyramids,” by New York City College of Technology’s (City Tech) Adrianne Wortzel, to be presented on Tuesday, March 3, 7:30 p.m. at Light Industry at Industry City (www.lightindustry.org), 220 36th Street, 5th Floor, Brooklyn. Admission is $7. For more information, the public may e-mail awortzel@citytech.cuny.edu.
Wortzel, a professor of entertainment technology at City Tech, created this performance installation as a testimony to “the tragic consequences of imperialism and the dangers, follies and sadness of a rationale for blind obedience that makes victims out of warriors,” she says.
The work features clusters of Elmo TMX robotic toys (stripped of their red furry coats) snapping to synchronization in response to a call to arms, their movements emulating the rigid and postured fighting strategies of Napoleonic warfare. “These strategies, employed in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, were particularly idiosyncratic in Egypt where they were persistently performed without consideration of either the desert environment or the fighting strategies of the enemy,” Wortzel explains.
The City Tech professor initiated this work in her recent artist's residency at Eyebeam Atelier (http://eyebeam.org). Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation.
Wortzel is known internationally for her interactive web works, robotic and telerobotic installations and performance productions. They explore historical and cultural perspectives by coupling fact and fiction via the use of new technologies in both physical and virtual networked environments. The works reflect her immersion in the sciences, often with direct collaboration.
The National Science Foundation, Swiss Artists-in-Labs Program, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory-University of Zurich, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, PSC-CUNY Research Foundation and Greenwall Foundation have supported Wortzel’s recent projects. These include: archipleago.ch, a video in progress depicting a "galapagos" in which indigenous creatures are the robots created by researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Eliza Redux, an interactive collaborative work (http://elizaredux.org) where a physical robot offers virtual psychoanalytic sessions, and The Veils of Transference, a video where a robot and a human engage in a psychoanalytic session where slippage occurs between their roles as analyst and analysand.
Wortzel's telerobotic installation Camouflage Town was exhibited in Data Dynamics at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001). In addition to teaching at City Tech, she is a member of the doctoral faculty of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an adjunct professor of mechanical engineering at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
2.20.09
