Aluminum tubes, DC motors, strings, elastic bands, custom electronics, and Geiger-Müller tubes, 189 x 23 2/3 x 70 7/8 inches
Interface I investigates the boundary between two separate interacting systems. Motors on the top and bottom pull strings, playing tug of war, and the points where the strings meet are coupled to their neighbors by elastic bands. Unpredictable signals, taken from Geiger-Müller tubes, detect the natural ambient radiation of the earth and determine the pulling strengths of each motor. The graphic shape of the red elastic mesh expresses the complex emergent behavior of the many interacting elements, and patterns develop from the contingent negotiation of individual random inputs. In Baecker’s words, “this is the beauty of chaos: it offers the potential for change.”
Ralf Baecker is a German artist working at the interface of art, science, and technology. Through installations, autonomous machines, and performances, he explores the underlying mechanisms of new media and technology. His objects perform physical realizations of thought experiments that act as subjective epistemological objects, posing fundamental questions about digital technology and complex systems and their sociopolitical entanglements. His projects provoke new imaginaries of the machinic, the artificial, and the real. His practice is a radical form of engineering that bridges traditionally discreet machine thinking with alternative technological perspectives and a new understanding of self-organizing principles.
Support for this presentation of Interface I comes from The Beall Family Foundation and Getty. Additional support was provided by NOME Gallery, the Graduate School of the University of the Arts, Berlin, and the Einstein Foundation.
Panoramic video installation, 5.1 surround sound, 47 minutes Narrated by Juan Mancias
The Teaching of the Hands overwrites colonial history with Native cosmology, consciousness, and resistance against ongoing forms of erasure and exploitation. Narrated by Juan Mancias, Chairman of the Esto’k Gna/Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, the film layers oral histories, scenes of environmental violence, reenactments, archival footage, and archeological artifacts, weaving thousandsof years of regional history. The Teaching of the Hands is part of the artists’ larger body of work, The Blessings of the Mystery, which intersects environmental memory with Native Peoples’ agency.
Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa. Lead support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and VIA Art Fund. Major support was provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation; and Kevin Sherman. This presentation of The Blessings of theMystery is supported by The Beall Family Foundation and Getty.
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, Measuring the Immeasurable, 2020. Hanging sculpture, vintage and contemporary surveying tools, and artifacts, dimensions variable. Installation view from Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented by the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, 2024. Photo: Will Tee Yang. Courtesy of the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology.
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, Measuring the Immeasurable (detail), 2020. Hanging sculpture, vintage and contemporary surveying tools, and artifacts, dimensions variable. Installation view from Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented by the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, 2024. Photo: Will Tee Yang. Courtesy of the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology.
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, Measuring the Immeasurable (detail), 2020. Hanging sculpture, vintage and contemporary surveying tools, and artifacts, dimensions variable. Installation view from Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented by the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, 2024. Photo: Will Tee Yang. Courtesy of the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology.
Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas Measuring the Immeasurable, 2020
Hanging sculpture, vintage and contemporary surveying tools, and artifacts, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artists
What is lost through the process of reducing Grandmother Earth to straight lines, numbers, and economic value? Measuring the Immeasurable addresses this question by examining the US Public Land Survey System (1785). This ordinance appropriated and divided Native territories into private plots, forcing the Original Peoples of this country from their homelands. In the artwork, vintage and contemporary land surveying tools float above visitors’ heads like a “wrongful collection of useless relics.” Measuring the Immeasurable is part of the artists’ larger body of work, The Blessings of the Mystery, which intersects environmental memory with Native Peoples’ agency.
Carolina Caycedo is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her practice and research focus on the future of shared resources, environmental justice, energy transition, and bio-cultural diversity. Through contributing to community-based construction of environmental and historical memory, Caycedo seeks ways of preventing violence against humans and nature.
David de Rozas is an artist-filmmaker and educator based in Los Angeles. His interdisciplinary research advocates for social and environmental justice by exploring the politics of memory as an embodied method and affective medium to conjure forms of collective resistance and restitution.
Juan Mancias, the Tribal Chair of the Carrizo Comecrudo in Texas, was born in Dimmitt and raised in Plainview. Today, he uses his own indigenous knowledge to focus on decolonizing both tribal people and others.
Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa. Lead support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and VIA Art Fund. Major support was provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation; and Kevin Sherman. This presentation of The Blessings of theMystery is supported by The Beall Family Foundation and Getty.
Archival pigment print on canvas, 46 1/4 x 33 1/2 inches, Courtesy of The Harrison Studio and Various Small Fires Los Angeles, Dallas, and Seoul
Making Earth and Art Park, 1970
Video with sound, 34 minutes 44 seconds, Courtesy of the Helen and Newton Harrison Family Trust
These two works serve as “book-ends” to The Harrisons’ life-long work together—one from very early in their career and the other, Newton’s final work.
Epitaph, two large tablets that appear much like the Ten Commandments, is a testament to Harrison’s late wife and question to what he calls the “web of life.” He asks how humans can humble themselves and the response is a set of rules—or commandments—for our behavior, particularly towards the environment. The “web of life” conveys how nature is a vast network of entangled ecosystems that must be respected, not controlled. At the end, it says: “Learn from your companion species how to join me.”
Accompanying Epitaph is a video interview with The Harrisons about an early work, Making Earth and Art Park (1970), providing insight into how their individual talents coalesced into their unique and sustaining collaborative process. With Newton’s background in art, math and science and Helen’s in language, education, and social psychology, their practice became an ongoing dialogue with each other and their myriad collaborators across disciplines.
“With their research-based, collaborative practice, the Harrisons have influenced generations of artists, including those in this exhibition,” says curator David Familian. “Working on complex problems across a broad range of disciplines, their artistic process mirrors the intent of Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty: to reveal and explore the interconnections between various complex systems.”
“Working on complex problems across a broad range of disciplines, their artistic process mirrors the intent of Future Tense: to reveal and explore the interconnections between various complex systems.” —David Familian, Curator of Future Tense
Sketches of Sensorium at the AlloSphere, 2024, Courtesy of AlloSphere Research Facility, University of California, Santa Barbara
Sketches of Sensorium, 2024
Directed by Josh Harrison, with a script by Kai Reschke and Dr. Petra Kruse; Produced by Dr JoAnn Kuchera-Morin and Dr. Gustavo Alfonso Rincon, Department of Media Arts and Technology, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure; Courtesy of The Harrison Studio and the Helen and Newton Harrison Family Trust
For this exhibition, Newton Harrison wanted to premiere Sensorium for the World Ocean, a multi-sensory immersive installation that sets out to directly address the survival problems the world ocean faces as temperatures continue to rise. Sadly, he passed away in 2022, so we could not realize the project for this exhibition.
Sketches for Sensorium, interpreting core elements of Sensorium for the World Ocean, is on view at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) as a satellite to the Beall Center’s PST Art exhibition. Following Newton’s wishes, it is presented with an original spatialized composition and an interactive data world in UCSB’s AlloSphere, a three-story, echo-free metal sphere with a large, dynamic, digital projection.
“In the two years I worked with Newton, he always framed potential solutions to the enormous global problem of climate change through the lens of systems thinking,” says curator David Familian. “In this methodology, one must look holistically and simultaneously at multiple aspects of a dynamic, constantly shifting system, from the microcosmic to macrocosmic. Both Newton and Helen live on the memories with those fortunate to have worked with them.”
View Sketches of Sensorium at The AlloSphere Research Facility (621 Elings Hall, UC Santa Barbara) on 2nd Thursdays (5:30–7:30 pm), 4th Saturdays (1:30–3:30 pm), and Monday—Friday afternoons by appointment only. For queries email allosphere@ucsb.edu and book your preferred exhibition date via the reservation form.
“In the two years I worked with Newton, he always framed potential solutions to the enormous global problem of climate change through the lens of systems thinking.” —David Familian, Curator of Future Tense
Helen Mayer Harrison (1927–2018) and Newton Harrison (1931–2022) were leaders of environmental art or the “eco-art” movement. The Harrisons collaborated for more than 40 years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners, and other artists to initiate dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions that support biodiversity and community development. Their works take the form of research-based installations and interactive environments. Equally micro and macro-focused, their close examinations of subjects unveil larger apparatuses of political, economic, and social powers that exert their influence on the environment. The Harrisons’ ongoing legacy informs a global movement of contemporary artists, activists, and thinkers.
Special thanks to Josh Harrison, Director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure and The Harrison Studio and the Helen and Newton Harrison Family Trust.
Meyers Springs, Pecos River Site 2, Pecos River Site 14, Presa Canyon Vaquero Shelter, Rattlesnake Canyon,and Seminole Canyon Shelter 4, 1935-38
Watercolor paintings on paper, 16 x 20 inches each, framed; Courtesy of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, the University of Texas at Austin
As part of The Blessings of the Mystery, Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas have installed six watercolors by Forrest and Lula Kirkland from a series of 120 created during the 1930s. The artists documented pictographs painted by Indigenous People in the rock shelters of limestone cliffs in Texas, which were threatened by weather, vandalism, and looting. Juan Mancias, Chair of the Esto’k Gna/Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe, describes these pictographs as 4000-year-old prophecies of the coming of “new buildings and new monsters.” The hieroglyphs are seen to represent cranes, power lines, and towers, foretelling the region’s urbanization that has ravaged the land and continues to oppress Native Peoples.
Forrest Kirkland (1892-1942) made his living as a commercial art illustrator in Dallas, Texas. As a hobby, he began sketching the cave paintings around Texas and New Mexico on family outings. Kirkland believed that the existing Native American art works were being vandalized rapidly and he wanted to document them for posterity. Working with his wife, Lula, also an artist, he started making watercolors. After 10 years, they had documented all the rock paintings in Texas. A book of their watercolors was first published by the University of Texas Press in 1967 and was reissued in 1996.
Support for this presentation of watercolors by Forrest and Lula Kirkland comes from The Beall Family Foundation and Getty.
Mycelial networks, living organisms, wood growth rings, glass vessels, soil, water, bio-sensors, custom electronics, lights, iron supports, and visualized AI on monitor, 50 x 53 x 49 inches
Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado) is an artwork-as-ecosystem that performs complex interactions between the planet’s living beings. “Hyphae” references themycelial filaments that fungi use to communicate. The sculpture has pods that host microorganisms which are connected to each other through respiration and are mediated by sensing technology. A vessel of water generates humidity in response to the CO2 produced by fungi and by viewers, triggering changes in bioelectric signaling within each pod. Embedded lights pulse in response to these changes, while an artificial intelligence studies bioelectric signals from each organism, looking for emergent behavioral patterns.
→ Behind the Science
Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado) investigates ecological relationships at different scales—as interspecies exchanges and as part of planetary respiration. The artwork was produced in conversation with Kathleen Treseder and researchers at the UC Irvine Treseder Lab, which studies fungi’s role in ecosystems and global change. Live specimens included in the artwork were sourced from the mountain ecology surrounding Escondido, California. The project asks, if our technology were modeled from nature, might we begin to think of ourselves as nodes within a community of organisms?
“The whole planet is connected, and the behavior of one entity can dramatically affect living beings in other parts of the world. If you spend enough time with the sculpture, you will see on its screen how the CO2 you are breathing is changing the behavior and signaling of the microorganisms.” —Cesar & Lois
Cesar & Lois, Photo documentation of artists sensing the habitat, 2024. Digital image Courtesy of the artists
Cesar & Lois, Concept drawing for Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado), 2024. Sketchbook page Courtesy of the artists
Cesar & Lois is an art collective that probes humanity’s relationship to the planet by interweaving technological, biological and social systems. Their practice layers living networks, like mycorrhiza, over human technologies in order to challenge anthropocentric thinking and move the future of technology towards embodied planetary (and plant) intelligence. Cesar & Lois’s artworks often propose artificial intelligences based on those living networks, imagining machines that learn from Earth’s ecosystems. Formed in 2017 by Lucy HG Solomon (California, US) and Cesar Baio (São Paulo, Brazil), the collective has received numerous international awards for innovations in media art, BioArt, and the usage of AI.
Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado) was made possible with support from the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology, The Beall Family Foundation, and Getty. Institutional backing includes additional support from California State University San Marcos, UNICAMP, and FAPESP (2023/10966-1). The Treseder Lab at UC Irvine supported the project materially and through research contributions.
Interactive inflatable robotic sculpture, Tedlar fabric, pneumatics, computer control, terracotta, and turquoise; site-specific installation, dimensions variable; Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by the Beall Center for Art + Technology’s Black Box Projects residency program, with major support from Creative Capital
Dual Pneuma is a soft-robotic performer evoking a humanoid body. Composed of inflatable, high-tensile fabric muscles, the artwork is capable of assuming a wide range of human, animal, and insect-like positions. The robot’s movement is directed by feedback loops between bend sensors in its joints and pressure sensors in its feet, which allow it to respond in real-time to the complexity of live scenarios. Alongside the robots is a series of ceramic works cast directly from the robotic figure. Compressed air is channeled through the ceramic sculptures to produce whistling sounds, which reference the water and wind-based huaco instruments of early Mesoamerican cultures.
→ Behind the Science
The Dual Pneuma project explores how living creatures maintain balance and evolve their movements. It builds on MacMurtrie’s earlier work with “soft machines,” which are inflatable robots designed to mimic natural movements. The project combines traditional programming and robotics with more user-friendly control systems. The project is additionally informed by MacMurtrie’s exploration of fluid creatures that merge across the US-Mexico border. Its hybrid form speaks to Gloria Anzaldúa’s understanding of the mestiza object, or spiritual crossbreed, speculating beyond binaristic border politics and criticizing larger systems of technology and power.
“The machine transitions between states of crawling and walking. When it seems to be falling over, it transitions into a different posture. It has this morphing ability to go from one thing to the next.” —Chico McMurtrie
Chico MacMurtrie, Dual Pneumas at the U.S. Mexico border, 2023. Charcoal and watercolor on paper Photo: Luise Kaunert Courtesy of the artist
Chico MacMurtrie, Dual Pneuma (prototype II), 2024. High tensile Tedlar fabric, pneumatic technology, electronics, software Photo: Hector Bracho Courtesy of the artist
Since the late 1980s, Chico MacMurtrie has explored the intersection of robotic sculpture, new media installation, and performance. His work investigates organic life from deep within, finding geometry in all living systems. MacMurtrie and his interdisciplinary collective, Amorphic Robot Works/ARW, have received numerous awards for their experimental new media artworks and have been presented in major museums and cultural institutions around the world.
Dual Pneuma was made possible with support from the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology, The Beall Family Foundation, Creative Capital, and Getty. Collaborators include Bill Bowen, Fabricio Cavero, Hugo de Souza Kolsky, the UC San Diego Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab (Michael T. Tolley, PhD, and his students Shenglin Yan and Allyson Chen), and the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Integrated Design and Media (Professor Luke Dubois, and his student Checo Cadena).
Copperplate etchings with engraving, drypoint, sugar-bite and aquatint, 19 × 21 5/8 inches framed Edition of 35 plus 7 artist’s proofs (AP 1/7); Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
Julie Mehretu is known for her meticulously layered gestural paintings, often thought to visualize the architecture of modern systems. As in her paintings, Mehretu’s Landscape Allegories etchings employ multiple techniques to produce images which are dually abstract and representational. The plates suggest images of wind turbulence and other weather phenomena intersecting with the ghostly scaffolding of human infrastructure. Tension is evident between the rigidity of architecture and an unruly “nature.” Landscape Allegories was produced during the same year as Mehretu’s widely known Stadia II painting, suggestive of the artist’s timely interest in systems of power and their widespread effects.
Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian-American artist who lives and works in New York City. She has been at the forefront of contemporary art for nearly three decades exploring subjects of history, the phenomenology of the social, and the psychogeography of space. In her large-scale landscapes and abstractions, Mehretu builds up layers of acrylic paint along with photographs, media images, architectural plans, and maps. These reference points are transposed onto her canvases to depict the cumulative effect of urban histories and socio-political changes. Within this unique visual vocabulary, she captures the dynamism of contemporary experiences and various systems in her work.
Support for this presentation of Landscape Allegories comes from The Beall Family Foundation and Getty.
Multi-media installation with film and graphic components, dimensions variable; Courtesy of the artist; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; and Bridget Donahue, New York
Hershman Leeson’s Logic Paralyzes the Heart follows a cyborg (played by actor/filmmaker Joan Chen) who has just turned sixty-one. Her birth year, 1960, is when the term “cyborg” was coined to describe the human enhancements that enable extraterrestrial survival and travel. In this film, the cyborg details the history of cyborgian technology, from its early intention as a tool for human liberation to the ways in which this technology has produced a break between ethical human advancement and exploitation. She ultimately meets her human avatar, and the pair meditate on the current troubled relationship between humans and their world, the climate and extinction crises, and the potential for future evolution and change. The artist asks, how can we transform weapons into tools of survival?
Lynn Hershman Leeson is internationally acclaimed for her art and films and is recognized for innovative work that investigates issues including identity, surveillance and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Her practice includes producing one of the first interactive video art discs, an artificially intelligent web agent and coding her work into DNA. Awards include: Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and Honorary Doctorate from Pratt. Her work is in The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Tate Modern and other private and public collections.
Support for this presentation of Logic Paralyzes the Heart comes from The Beall Family Foundation and Getty.
Mechatronic installation with ladder, stepper motors, electronic control, software, wheels, boots, synthetic hair, batteries, distance sensors, wooden arrows, and speaker, dimensions variable; Courtesy of the artist and Gaga Fine Arts, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Los Angeles
Huitztlampa, a mechatronic installation of everyday objects, is computer programmed to move in response to live weather signals from Los Angeles. Palma Rodríguez lives in a Nahua agricultural region outside Mexico City and wants his work to provide a heightened sense of urgency about both climate change and labor issues. In the pre-Hispanic Nahuatl creation story, four cardinal points are each associated with a deity: Huitztlampa, the south, is embodied by a hummingbird and the sun in the blue winter sky. This title and the objects (ladder, boots) also reference migrant workers, who must float like hummingbirds and move with the sun.
Fernando Palma Rodríguez (Mexican, b. 1957) combines his training as both an artist and an industrial engineer to create robotic sculptures that utilize custom software to perform complex, narrative choreographies. He lives and works in the agricultural region of Milpa Alta outside Mexico City, where he runs Calpulli Tecalco, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Nahua language and culture. His practice is focused on indigenous ancestral knowledge as part of contemporary life and as a way of shaping the future as he responds to issues facing his community, such as human and land rights, violence, and urgent environmental crises.
Support for this presentation of Huitztlampa comes from The Beall Family Foundation and Getty.
Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Huitztlampa (detail), 2023. Mechatronic installation with ladder, stepper motors, electronic control, software, wheels, boots, synthetic hair, batteries, distance sensors, wooden arrows, and speaker, dimensions variable. Installation view from Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented by the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, 2024. Photo: Will Tee Yang. Courtesy of the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology.Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Huitztlampa, 2023. Mechatronic installation with ladder, stepper motors, electronic control, software, wheels, boots, synthetic hair, batteries, distance sensors, wooden arrows, and speaker, dimensions variable. Installation view from Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented by the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, 2024. Photo: Will Tee Yang. Courtesy of the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology.Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Huitztlampa (detail), 2023. Mechatronic installation with ladder, stepper motors, electronic control, software, wheels, boots, synthetic hair, batteries, distance sensors, wooden arrows, and speaker, dimensions variable. Installation view from Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented by the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, 2024. Photo: Will Tee Yang. Courtesy of the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology.Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Huitztlampa (detail), 2023. Mechatronic installation with ladder, stepper motors, electronic control, software, wheels, boots, synthetic hair, batteries, distance sensors, wooden arrows, and speaker, dimensions variable. Installation view from Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented by the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, 2024. Photo: Will Tee Yang. Courtesy of the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology.Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Huitztlampa (detail), 2023. Mechatronic installation with ladder, stepper motors, electronic control, software, wheels, boots, synthetic hair, batteries, distance sensors, wooden arrows, and speaker, dimensions variable. Installation view from Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented by the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, 2024. Photo: Will Tee Yang. Courtesy of the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology.Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Huitztlampa, 2023. Mechatronic installation with ladder, stepper motors, electronic control, software, wheels, boots, synthetic hair, batteries, distance sensors, wooden arrows, and speaker, dimensions variable. Installation view from Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented by the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, 2024. Photo: Will Tee Yang. Courtesy of the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology.
Oil on panel, 64 x 56 inches; Courtesy of Orange County Museum of Art with purchase funds provided by The Visionaries and Cheryl and Bruce Kiddoo. Acquired by OCMA as part of its Sixtieth Anniversary Initiative, 2022.012
In 2022, following the COVID-19 pandemic, painter Clare Rojas made a series of paintings about “the edge” of environmental collapse, of political disarray, and of the anxiety produced by both. This included Circle of Infinite Chaos, depicting a woman lying beneath a sphere with intersecting loops and floating objects. Perhaps it is a metaphor for synapses firing in Rojas’s brain as she tries to make sense of chaos? As she notes: “I think my work has always teetered between chaos and the opposite of chaos. Serenity, maybe…I’ve always been searching for that balance, and the magic is somewhere in the middle.”
Clare Rojas is known for paintings with idiosyncratic personal narratives and abstractions. After relocating to San Francisco, she became associated with the Mission School in the 1990s, which drew heavily from narrative and folk art forms. Her flat, geometric style often references a quest for harmony among universal elements and represents relationships between humans and nature. Many of her paintings are seen to reference cycles of life between birth, death, and re-birth.
Support for this presentation of Circle of Infinite Chaos comes from The Beall Family Foundation and Getty.