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World Premiere - Part of the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts

Country of Origin: International

The development of contemporary art is intertwined with that of the machine, technically and conceptually. One of its highlights was the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, a 1960 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It involved a self-constructing and self-destroying mechanism with remains that the audience could take home, alluding to an urban cycle of energy that entails perpetual rebuilding.

Machine Culture introduces a group of young artists equally fascinated by the mechanical. The kinetic qualities of gears in motion and motorized moving parts produce both ironic and amusing results, operating with varying degrees of autonomy and control, function and dysfunction, and sometimes generating unpredictable results. Like Tinguely’s absorption with building up and breaking down, these artists orchestrate and transform bits and pieces of discarded industrial objects and post-consumer technology, reconfiguring them into “objects of fascination.”

Artists: Henrik Menne, Zoro Feigl, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Samuel St Aubin, Kristoffer Myskja, Ali Miharbi, Oz Malul, Keny Marshall, Ujoo & Limhee Young and Peter Flemming

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