#interactive sculpture

My latest sculpture is done! I blew the glass myself, and made ferrofluid, and put this whole thing together. The little wooden stones have magnets in them to manipulate the ferrofluid.

Of course all I can see are the bits that I wanted to be different, but I'm trying to be proud of what I made. This was my first time ever blowing glass, and my first time making ferrofluid from scratch. Getting the holes to actually be the right size for the irregularly sized glass objects was SO HARD.

It's probably best seen in action:

[ Copper Observatory Tower ]

Joshua DiFabio

The Visit (2017)

Concrete, glass, steel, mahogany, and neon mercury-filled tubing

I made a new sculpture! I'm terrible at naming things so this one is called BASIN.

As usual, this piece is really hard to document. There's action that happens! Water flows from the glass vessel, through the concrete, across the metal plate, and down.

Here's an excerpt from my artist's statement:

I'm interested in hands as the producers of a kind of topology of the universe — everything we see, we touch, we push on, we look at, we shape in some way or another. We move through the world and change it, in big ways and small. Not all of these impacts are clearly legible. They don't look like objects or even hands. Instead they're nudges; shapes; spaces left behind. What are ways of making that kind of push and pull visible? How can we read the residue and signals of something that has happened — a person who was here and who did something and who is now gone? How does someone decipher those signals?

I'm a journalist, and my job is to do that kind of work — piece together what happened and why it matters after the fact. My job is to enter a story and talk to people who have been made and remade — who have made choices, and reacted to other people's decisions, and been forced to change whether they want to or not. Sometimes they remember everything vividly. Other times they can barely recall a thing. Sometimes they remember the small details — the color of the wall, the song that was playing on the radio, the name of someone's dogs — but they core elements are hazy. How do I, as a reporter, wade through and understand all those nuances?

Not only am I meant to answer that question. I'm also meant to do so while remaining invisible. I'm supposed to work through a story and leave nothing behind. To flow through, unseen, while I capture it all to communicate to the audience.

The concrete basin — shaped by pushing and pulling and grabbing and punching and pinching — contains stories. I'm the water, moving through that basin, trying to touch every corner. I flow through the concrete, trying to remember what I learned from the basin as I move across the metal plate and eventually create my own version of the story via the pile of dry concrete waiting on the ground. Each rock that is produced is a kind of retelling — a version of the basin. Of the story. It's imperfect. Incomplete. A ghost of a ghost.

But of course, reporters are people too. We influence the stories with our perspectives, and we are influenced in turn. The water leaves behind a kind of topology of its own. Each time the I flow through a story, I leave behind a little bit of myself. I am changed, and eroded, and built up all at once.

Old televisions and clock radios are given a second life in the interactive sculptures in Emily Francisco‘s exhibition, Alchemical Signal Flow at The Delaware Contemporary. The exhibition also includes videos and documentation of some of Francisco’s other projects, and a few cyanotype prints.

From the museum:

What is a signal? We often think of cell phone reception, or a message sent through a digital app. A signal means many things in this exhibition, it references the transfer of physical data and digital data (ones and zeroes) that happens within technology. A signal can also be social, like how you dress, what brands you buy, or what you throw away. Emily Francisco combines old and new technology to help us rethink how we live with new and changing technology. To many, the mechanics of a harpsichord (a keyboard instrument) and organ are as magical as an MP3 player. Francisco embraces that magic and makes alchemy of blending old and new, low and high tech. Francisco uses cheap everyday technology and discarded, obsolete (or no longer produced) devices. By doing so, she disrupts signal flows from user to speaker. This action challenges our expectation of call-and-respond and challenges our sense of time. Someone once owed every piece of discarded tech. One could have even been yours. She asks us to think about what these personal objects mean to us at the end of the day. What do they mean to us? Through her work, she brings together the memory, nostalgia, and aspiration these objects hold, attempting to give them new purpose.