Alan Rath
from Alan Rath Robotics, exhibition in SantaFe

[25, p5]
essay by Louis Grachos, director and curator
Rath manipulates electronics as both formal and metaphorical elements to create inventive sculptures that comment on the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines and that relationship's implications on our present and future. While Rath's education and background are solidly grounded in engineering, his work transgresses science to become art. He employs eniscerated, diliberately physical machine components and anatomically integrated electronics to create his sculpture."

"Members of his species have varying degrees of perceptual ability: the simplest have no knowledge of the environment; others are able to sense their companion species; and the most complex interact with visitors to the exhibition."


[25, p18]
Murray Gell-Mann
"A Rath device has its food, in the form of electrical energy, supplied through a fixed plate in the floor. When, in the course of its wanderings, the sculpture returns to its feeding pad, it can take up energy and be ready for further adventures. Watching as it just misses the pad time after time and then finally reaches it, we feel the kind of sympathy we would normally extend to a living creature."

"All are programmed to follow a course that is partly deterministic but affected by random perturbations. In that way they illustrate the prevalence, in virtually all kinds of systems, of a combination of regular patterns and randomness."

"Alan Rath's splendid creations are a powerful reminder of the ubiquity of regularity and chance variation."

Murray Gell-Mann is Distinguished Fellow and Co-Chair of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology


[25, p34]
born Cincinnati 1959
BS Electrical Engineering from MIT
spent time in CAVS, Visual Language Workshop, Architecure Machine Group 
Otto Piene advisor at CAVS
after MIT, assistant to Milton Komisar (computer light sculpture)

first solo show at Works Gallery in San Jose in 1986


[25, p46]
on his Robotic Sculpture by David Ebony
"His machines are not aggressive monsters, nor are they passive or subservient beasts. While their movements hint at human behavior and social interactions, they are not anthropomorphic. Elements in these complex pieces dance together in sensuous rapture or duel without touching in intense mock battles, but they always act in accord with their own cyber-sensibilities."

Robot dance, Five on Wall = gesture wildly
Inchworm, One Track Minds = graceful strides, spastic thrusts

[25, p46]
"Rath's sleek, silvery machines are neither futuristic nor nostalgic, Instead,the artist aims for a kind of timeless classicism; he strives to create a machine of perfect balance, proportion, and line."

One Track Minds - built in motion sensors

Five on a Wall - high-kicking, gyrating elements have been likened to the precision line dances of the Rockettes

Friends and Acquaintances
"...is an intricate and wildly exuberant work in which Rath perhaps most convincingly conflates the human, organic, and mechanical. The five elements in the piece -- three freestanding tripods and two wall-mounted metal boxes -- interact with each other in a say that hints at sexual activity and verbal communication. Revealing brightly lit, warm-red interiors, the boxes open and close in response to other elements in the sculpture. Long, rolled-up metal tongues unfurl and protrude in a comic, though rather lurid way to penetrate the open boxes attached to the wall. No lubricating fluids pass from one machine to another, so the implied sexual activity in apparently "safe." Yet, an issue or robot morality is suddenly called into question"

Rover
"In Rover,the artist's most recent robotic sculpture, motion sensors allow interaction with visitors. The squat, wheeled vehicle emerges from beneath a canopied recharging station as guests arrive. An eye on a small CRT screen at the end of a long rod inspects the intruder like a suspicious watchdog. But there is no sense of menace to this creature. In this piece and in all of this other works, Rath conveys a technological world that is inviting rather than fearful. He has gone to great lengths to counter the technological alienation described by Leo Marx, who wrote "To satisfy the imperatives of technological society, men are called upon to endure an intolerable curbing of their spontaneous, erotic and personal selves."

"Neither utopian nor dystopian, Rath's visionary art encompasses technology as a cohesive language, one whose subtlety and expressive power matches that of any other art medium."

interested in experimental machinery not yet "corrupted" by decoration