INTERPLAY is a grouping of four interactive installations, including Neil Mendoza’s Robotic Voice Activated Word Kicking Machine, Iván Navarro’s Reality Show (Black), Robert Rauschenberg’s Eco-Echo, and Camille Utterback’s Untitled 5. Activated by the body, each installation creates situations that enhance, disrupt and alter perception, calling attention to the dichotomy between art and technology.

The role of the audience is unique to the ever-changing composition of each art piece, creating an interdependent relationship between artist, artwork and viewer. This exhibition informs and engages audiences through sound, movement and bearing witness. Some artworks prompt physical gestures from the body, while others challenge the mind—illuminating how the animate controls the inanimate and vice versa. These works playfully explore curious and amusing perceptions of human reality, particularly how we interact with technology.

Neil Mendoza’s The Robotic Voice Activated Word Kicking Machine, 2016, is an exploration of language and our strange relationship with talking to machines. We talk to these devices, from customer-service bots to “intelligent assistants,” as if they were our friends, ignoring the trail of data that we leave behind. The piece combines projection and robotics to blur the line between the physical and the digital. Viewers speak into the hanging horn. Their words are then converted into text and launched into the virtual world. They accumulate there, sometimes kicked by a robotic foot and sometimes funneled back out into the world as sound through the horn on the floor.

Iván Navarro’s Reality Show, 2010, lets viewers feel the mind-bending illusion and sensation of stepping into infinity, although they have only stepped into a simple telephone booth with glass and mirrors. Surrounded by an infinite tunnel of light, viewers are disorientated, unable to grasp a sense of reality. Interestingly, those outside the booth can see the expression of the person inside, but, due to the enclosure’s one way glass, the participant is unable to see outside the walls.

Robert Rauschenberg’s Eco-Echo,1992-93, is a part of a series of windmill-like structures that Rauschenberg began fabricating at Saff Tech Arts in Oxford, Maryland, upon his return from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Of particular concern to Rauschenberg were that these works should not waste energy and that the viewer should play an integral role. Thus, these sonar-activated sculptures respond to the presence of a viewer moving nearby and stop when no one is directly in front of them. Donald Saff oversaw the mechanics and construction of the aluminum and Lexan fan blades, onto which Rauschenberg applied silkscreened imagery and paint. Rauschenberg created the Eco-Echo series to illustrate how viewers are complicit in electrical-energy production, its global industries, and our environment.

Camille Utterback’s Untitled 5, 2004, invites visitors’ movements in the gallery space; the movements are run through computer software written by the artist, which translates them into an animated digital painting that constantly evolves. Although thoroughly contemporary, Untitled 5 builds on a rich lineage of artwork that records or transforms human movement, including the abstract expressionists Utterback considers her creative forebears.

THANK YOU

Support for Interplay was generously provided by Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Collection.