Text by CLOT Magazine
Arts Santa Mònica is a former Renaissance convent in the heart of Barcelona’s La Rambla, converted into a multi-disciplinary art centre with a special focus on the culture around digital media. Until September 2nd the auto-màtic exhibition explores the implications of automation in architecture and the limits and potential of generative drawing by exploring how the Automation Revolution is shaping the work of architects, designers and creatives.
Edouard Cabay has curated the exhibition following the framework of his project Machinic Protocols, which he has been working on since 2015. Edouard Cabay is an architect and professor of architecture. Founder and director of Appareil, an experimental architectural office in Barcelona, he also teaches, as senior faculty, at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, where he also co-directs the Open Thesis Fabrication program. He has taught experimental design studios at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris, and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
The exhibition gathers over 120 drawings that have been developed over the past three years by more than 80 contributors from fields including computation, arts and design. Raising questions on automation, reproducibility, and creative experimentation, two installations complete the exhibition: First, an electronically controlled array of eight fans blow towards the centre of a page, where a pen attached to a sail moves in the wind. The second one is an experiment of 10.000 droplets of ink falling onto a moving canvas from a height of 15 metres. The mobile canvas moves at the rhythm of the falling drop to form an orthogonal grid.
Tinguely satirised the mindless overproduction in advanced industrial society with his sculpture machines. Taking this as starting point, Cabay himself explains ‘the title auto-màtic is a homage to Jean Tinguely’s Méta-matics, the series of machines that produce artwork and that investigate the forceful intrusion of technology in our society”.
