Tim Hawkinson in "Time" - Season 2 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.