Movement Surprises

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Its only around 1964 I could buy my first micro-engine; at the start of my experiments knowing I could find solutions towards my financial possibilities, and economic reasons had prevented me from such investments. Although facing problems above my possibilities, the solution was never too far to reach to make me stop a project or to have the alibi to stop my work. As soon as got the micro engine, I realized some testes as well as many experiments; while the spectrum of Tinguely was always present in my work, very quick I saw the possibilities to gather some of those experiments and submit them to a static viewer who could by surprise switching a button and realised the change operated by a sudden movement which always was followed by a sound.

The participation of the viewer was not limited by a switch. The surprise prorogued a melting in his traditional attitude, generally with more respect towards Art, and forced him to keep his distance here, there was a familiarity between the ensemble of the movement-surprise and the viewer, which enabled him to have an active and multiple behaviour. This was possible because of the buttons and the different themes and also the fact that he could make them functioned, one after the other or all at the same time.

The experiment “mirror in vibration” is attached to the same series; it’s about a suspended polished aluminium slate of 2 x 0,5 m which reflects when static, an image of the viewer. When he switches on the button on the slate, an engine moves it and distorts it, concave or convex, so the reflection of the viewer is alternatively reduced or increased; this doesn’t fail to prorogued hilarity while other viewer are deformed too after they saw the first distorted images of the one who press the button!

In parallel, other games with manipulation were realized with no engine; the viewer himself started the movement while vibrating some small suspended balls, or made a black and white canvas turned, or threw a suspended red ball on a spring on an black and white screen; In the later case the one who follows the ball with his eyes has visual distortions because of the background but if it follows the screen, it was the ball which creates distortions.
Those elements and other have been used in different manners, and the game room realised by the GRAV, whose first step were already presented at the Biennale at Paris in 1963.

In the game room was presented what we call elements to be experienced, like the spring chairs /sort of bench set on a huge spring which under the weight of the surprised participant, ended up on the floor!; a dozen of “glasses with other visions”, distorted the view of reality, fractioned it, surimposed it, multiplied it, inverted it, collared it, etc….

The mirrors like glasses include the surrounding reality. This game of mirror starts from a normal reflections of the image, which slits and multiplies gradually. "The shoes of different steps” are asking a more physical involvement of the viewer and he must adapt his way of going, stopping, being a viewer but also the elements to be looked at.

On the same principal of physical participation were made more games such as: unstable ground, balance game, game of rope with spring, this latest in memory of Savary’s show. Those elements without use are without interests. The only phenomenon I could see when there were presented was the viewer who without any given orders could find themselves how to use those games. Sometimes they invented collectively a special relation between them and the given elements.
At the start of the “ensemble to make noise” is a little experiment, I did with Morellet and Stein in 1964 for the exhibition ”Nouvelles Tendances” in Paris: I placed a suspended metallic slate in a little box, from who the viewer could only see a little handle hanging from a string out of the box; when pulled, the slate starts to vibrate and make a sound of thunder. In early 1969, in a game room for a personal exhibition, I presented a set of elements to produce sounds, the public could uses freely, combining or not the noises. There was a microphone which gathered all the sounds and then broadcasted them or amplified them, with the collaboration of an electronic musician; the whole sound was retransmitted with a second of delay with different frequencies.