TIM HAWKINSON: It’s something that emotes
and it’s motorized and it is an emoter.
I can’t make most of these faces myself.
It’s using my face because that’s readily available and
I have exclusive rights to my face.
It seemed I guess honest to just use my own face.
I just took my digital camera and held it out.
Just took a bunch of shots.
I took it into the developer and he put it on a screen
and we Photoshopped all the features.
We blanked out the mouth and the nostrils and the eyes.
So I had just this egghead, this, with no features, just thinking that I’d…
I’d want to start with a blank face.
And then I’d overlay the, the features
and the other three kind of donor photographs.
The brain of the piece, or the driver,
is just picking up the light and dark patterns on the television
and there are nineteen of these little suction
cups that have little light sensitive switches in them.
So when a certain area of the screen is dark,
it triggers these different mechanisms.
It actually triggers a motor in the face.
Sometimes the manipulations are very slight,
Depending just on what’s coming through the TV channel.
When there’s a sporting event with lots of activity, the face can be pretty emotional.
I use my image or my body in a lot of the work as a jumping-off point,
but usually the end result is so abstracted that I…
I don’t really feel so identified with it any longer.
It’s not about my identity, but it’s about our identity and our experiences
within our bodies and our bodies’ relationship to the external world.
Sometimes we do get rain in L.A.,
and a lot of us aren’t really prepared for rain.
So it was really great, just walking into the studio one time,
and there were buckets around, all catching the, the drips.
It just had a great sound in the space.
So I was interested in using dripping water in some way.
And I didn’t want just random drips, I wanted something that you could dance to.
Something kind of choreographed-sounding.
So I ended up making this I guess it’s sort of– it’s sort of a drumming machine.
The signal is sent from the mechanism over here to, to this cable.
To the different valves.
And then the water is collected in these buckets.
So I put in these little pie tins which create sort of a resonator, really give a nice loud drip.
The signal originates with these gears.
Each gear has a little knob on it, a little bump.
Each gear also is paired up with a switch.
Different switches come in contact with the bump on the gear and give it a different pulse.
It’s not even electronics. I don’t know what it is.
It’s wiring, I think what it is is just making circuits.
The copper tape represents all the different possible
permutations of three combinations of gears.
Some of these pieces have become a little more complex and they’re trying to do more things.
And then it’s sent through, I think this cylinder here.
Those are the main aspects of the work that end up having problems and breaking down.
So, maybe I need to go back to school or actually take a course in it.
I was just thinking of this sort of creature
that’s allowed to grow in a zero gravity environment.
And now it’s being hung out to dry.
This form kind of grew out as a three-dimensional kind of expansion out of some drawings
that I was working on.
Actually using a drill to spin a pencil around.
You can see that the pencil lead was spinning around.
And I was able to open and close the diameter of the spin while
it was in motion. And so I was able to
create drawings that were almost kind of reminiscent of intestines or worms.
There’s a certain freshness in a drawing where
you’re seeing something for the first time and,
so in my work I, I tried to maintain some of that freshness
and keep shifting what it is that I’m looking at to see it differently
or creating a different process of looking at something
that gives me a new kind of interpretation.
I don’t use preliminary drawings for pieces. I, well maybe I,
I can’t think that far in advance and really visualize the piece in a finished state.
I find it much freer to go right in and start making the piece.
I just said that I never make preliminary studies
or anything but I did make models of balloons.
That process involved being approached by MASS MOCA
and they wondered what I would do with a space
that was basically the size of a football field.
I just came up with this idea of using inflatables.
I think I was just a little nervous about filling fifteen thousand square feet,
I didn’t want to get caught short handed.
So I felt much better seeing these little models in the space.
It was going to have a real strong physical presence,
but I felt like it needed to also have this audible component.
There was a great moment when it was finally up and, and playing.
For me it was just like hearing the first horn.
I was really concerned that we would have enough air pressure
to activate the reeds to really get a good tone out of them
but that we wouldn’t like pop any balloons.
Something that large really does have to be under
a tremendous amount of air pressure to get, you know, a sound out of a reed.
I used fishing net and tailored that around the balloons
and I was able to further define and cinch them in.
It was neat—it really was a quick way of controlling a huge amount of volume.
MASS MOCA was one big long kind of narrow space.
The gallery in New York was divided into like six rooms:
one gigantic room and slightly smaller rooms.
I was afraid that the sound quality might be lost,
but in the end I was really happy with the sound.
Each whatever note this is just plays one on the Uberorgan…
There was a time when he made folk musical instruments for instance.
He took banjo lessons and that was, he was probably about 12 or something.
I’ve been interested in music for most of my life I guess.
At one point I thought maybe I would be a musical instrument maker.
I’d made a, a mandolin and a guitar.
The keyboard consists basically of these photosensitive switches.
So by covering one of the switches, blocking out the light, you’d trigger one of the notes.
So you can stop it at a blank space and play it like a piano.
It’s all based on a score that I put together using lots of old church hymns
and Sailor’s Hornpipe and Swan Lake.
So I grew up hearing these old Protestant hymns,
and some of them are really beautiful and they have strong connotations,
and also, you know, reflect faith.