Félix Luque Sánchez & Vincent Evrard
Félix Luque Sánchez & Vincent Evrard present DWI: Clones Mechatronic installation, 2013, in the Contemporary Artists Room (originally conceived together with Damien Gernay)
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Clones are represented as identical mechanical machines (inverted pendulums), that using human behaviors, fuzzy logic, drift to find endlessness equilibrium.
“D.W.I: Clones” uses two identical inverted pendulums: based in a motorized mechanical system, the pendulums are mounted with the pivot point on a cart that moves horizontally. This movement makes the pendulum swing, and once the pendulum rotates to its inverted vertical point, an algorithm takes control of the movement of the cart and tries to find equilibrium against gravity. The artist explores the expressiveness of the system, using human size heavy pendulums, capable of generating enough inertia to generate self-rotation. He also tries to humanize the system in a game of failures and successes.
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“ … these two mechanised pendulums share a human scale makes it easy to empathise with them, to almost share their suffering. Their task is almost Sisyphean in its pointlessness, and its doomed-to-fail nature. Employing fuzzy logic, another gift from the science of chaos, the machines strive to maintain the pendulums in a vertical position, against the force of gravity – and logic. Such a machine would always be expected to fail, a basic experience of physics informs us that gravity will always eventually topple everything. Yet the work demands to be watched in awe in case the impossible happens. The presence of the machines, their recognisable gestures, draw the viewer into their movements and their experiment takes on ever more significance. Once more the presence of a sublime science fiction entity is made tangible, one striving to realise its function, endlessly and against the odds. What would happen if they actually manage to maintain equilibrium in Prigogine and Stengers' non-equilibrium universe? Do they open a portal to infinity or do they just start again?"
from “Different ways to infinity” by Mónica Bello