Mechanical Tide
Mechanical Tide Video
2007
video: Steve Summers, Jesse Seay
(click on gray triangle to play video.)
From the catalogue of "MultiXply", at A + D Gallery, written by Annika Marie, Ph.D., curated by Friedhard Kiekeben.
"...Similar aspects of rhizomatic multiplicity also describe the general project of the audio, video and kinetic artist Jesse Seay. Often she will lay out parameters to frame a certain type of activity, event or recording, and then waits to see what will take place, what connections will be made, what the effects of feedback will be, and the rhizomatic poetics of the "trace of an intensity." She plays up the rhizomatic features of previous avant-gardist tactics, namely the found object, chance. In listening to her pieces, aural figure and ground vie, sometimes graying out to the monochromatic, at other times squeaking, rumbling like insistent passages of epic code. The work presented in this exhibition is a good example of this becoming-figure and becoming-ground. In "Mechanical Tide" (2007) the parameters are a wooden table that is gently rocked up and down through a robotic mechanism programmed to a set, regular rhythm and upon which many ball bearings roll back and forth. There's a calming repetitiveness, evenness to this wave-like process, a quality that is pointedly underscored when every now and then balls collide, even fall off the table. Sometimes whole trains of balls cascade down the table in unison, whilst at other times it seems every ball has a life of its own..."