Don't say we never give you anything interesting to do on a weekend: how about two new exhibitions at a very special museum in a trendy part of London?
We've been very excited about science-technology-art crossovers this year, we've seen some extraordinary things that are just the start of a golden era of completely new and wonderful things - we hope. And Kinetica is exactly the sort of place to keep pushing things forward and keep multi-disciplinary art works in London's arts scene.
Kinetica is the first ever museum of kinetic art - basically anything that combines art and technology, electronic art and kinetic art. If it needs to be plugged in, if it needs space to move, if it is art but also science it can be featured at Kinetica which will eventually be a collection of historical and contemporary cutting-edge work. Kinetica opened in October 2006 so it's still very new; with this and Wednesday's opening of BFI Southbank, you've never had it so good.
The new exhibitions opening today and running until 30 March are worth a look, as you get two for the price of one and can see two different artists in two different spaces. Jim Bond is a sculptor whose mechanical works range from fragile skeletal frames to hybrid electronic moving pieces; his aim is to explore relationships and tensions between "balanced, moving and resisting components." His exhibition at Kinetica in the Lower Gallery is Sound Bites and the Untuned Eye which features common objects deconstructed, fragmented and generally taken apart then reassembled to create an "elaborate installation of perfunctory hybrid structures." Mechanically reproduced sound is played over all this and what sounds like extremely skilled and complicated engineering makes unites the various sculptures ineract with one another through a series of gears and engines. The functionality, rationality and efficiency of hings we commonly take for granted are explored in this exhibition where randomness, confusion and disorder replace the uses of things we rely on for a smoothly run day.
Ray Lee in the Upper Gallery is all about sound sculptures. As a sound artist, Lee focuses on "noise machines." That sounds great. (Did you see what we did there?) His Circles of Ether exhibition for Kinetica is an "elaborate system of electro-mechanical sound generators, spinning oscillators, and noise machines." Expect lots of whirring, spinning, screaming machines and the chance to see things that make sounds and vice versa.
Jim Bond, Ray Lee at Kinetica until 30 March 2007. For more information, go to the museum's website here.
Image courtesy of Jim Bond for Kinetica
