Back to 1945

Dawn (2019)

Next - Luminous

As Dawn interacted with the balloon, unknown to her, Stephen shot this single clip. In this video, he ran the clip twice. With the responsive of the balloon and Eden's haunting violin playing, Dawn's quiet exploration seems to express her gentleness, kindness and patience. WE thank both artists for their beautiful work and their permissions to use their work in this short piece. Click on their links above to see more about them.

More about ADA

Similar to Tinguely's «Méta-Matics», is "ADA" an artwork with a soul. It acts itself. At Tinguely's it is sufficient to be an unwearily struggling mechanical being. He took it wryly: the machine produces nothing but its industrial self-destruction. Whereas «ADA» by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, is a post-industrial "creature", visitor animated, creatively acting artist-sculpture, self-forming artwork, resembling a molecular hybrid, such as a one from nano biotechnology. It developes the same rotating silicon-carbon-hybrids, midget tools, miniature machines able to generate simple structures.

«ADA» is much larger, esthetical much complexer, an interactive art-making machine. Filled up with helium, floating freely in room, a transparent, membrane-like globe, spiked with charcoals that leave marks on the walls, ceilings and floors. Marks which «ADA» produces quite autonomously, although moved by a visitor. The globe obtains aura of liveliness and its black coal traces, the appearance of being a drawing . The globe put in action, fabricate a composition of lines and points, which remains incalculable in their intensity, expression, form however hard the visitor tries to control «ADA», to drive her, to domesticate her. Whatever he tries out, he would notice very soon, that «ADA» is an independent performer, studding the originally white walls with drawings and signs. More and more complicated fabric structure arise. It is a movement experienced visually, which like a computer make an unforeseeable output after entering a command. Not in vain « ADA» reminds of Ada Lovelace, who in 19th century together with Charles Babbage developed the very first prototype of a computer. Babbage provided the preliminary computing machine, Lovelace the first software. A symbiosis of mathematics with the romantic legacy of her father Lord Byron emerged there. Ada Lovelace intended to create a machine that would be able to create works of art, such as poetry, music, or pictures, like an artist does. «ADA» by Karina Smigla-Bobinski stands in this very tradition, as well as in the one of Vannevar Bush, who built a Memex Machine (Memory Index) in 1930 ("We wanted the memex to behave like the intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain"), or the Jacquard's loom, that in order to weave flowers and leaves needed a punch card; or the "analytic machine" of Babbage which extracted algorithmic patterns.

«ADA» uprose in nowadays spirit of biotechnology. She is a vital performance-machine, and her patterns of lines and points, get more and more complex as the number of the audience playing-in increases. Leaving traces which neither the artist nor visitors are able to decipher, not to mention «ADA» herself either. And still, «ADA‘s» work is unmistakable potentially humane, because the only available decoding method for these signs and drawings, is the association which our brain corresponds at the most when it configures itself.

© ADA - analoge interactive installation by Karina Smigla-Bobinski written by Arnd Wesemann