The Robots Are Dancing

For the past several weeks, a robot has been dancing at the Palais de Tokyo. Wrapped up in its own private ballet, the sixteen-and-a-half foot tall metal behemoth has gambolled and gyred through an elegant choreography, deep in the bowels of the Parisian art institute. For the robot, this must have been a very strange experience. We’re not talking about Sony’s agile QRIO androids or some shimmying extra from an episode of Soul Train. Before British artist Conrad Shawcross got hold of it, this particular robot, scarcely more than a giant metal arm, would have done little more than paint-spraying and tack-welding in a car factory. “It would move along, it would go bzz. It would move back, it would go bzz,” says Shawcross, who programmed the graceful arcs traversed by its looming steel joints. “I think if the company who originally built it saw this robot they would be pretty horrified.” The music it’s been dancing to was composed especially for it by Holly Herndon.

Herndon spent a week in Shawcross’s studio in Hackney, living upstairs while spending her days singing to the robot in the sitting room, sweeping microphones across its engines and composing on the fly in response to its elegant seesawing movements. Shawcross’s co-curator Ken Farmer points to the way Herndon’s work traverses “composition, and sound design, with playing at Berghain” as one of the elements that drew them to her for this project. “She’s able to turn the computer into a performative instrument rather than something you kind of hide behind,” he adds. But Herndon is only one of a number of female composers to be commissioned to create new work in response to Shawcross’s robot. The first was London sound artist, Beatrice Dillon, and in the near future more works are expected from Mira Calix, and from Tamara Barnett-Herrin of the Freeform Five, among others.

Read the rest of this article on Conrad Shawcross & Ken Farmer’s ADA Project at Fact Magazine.

10/08/13 at 11:37am