Ken Feingold: Figures of speech

The American artist Ken Feingold started work in media art in the beginning of the 1970s with experimental 16 mm films. At the same time he developed his interest in drawing, sculpture and video art. The last two have become a permanent part of his creative spectrum, also becoming a vital aesthetic component of the interactive digital art Feingold has been involved in since the early 1990s. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s Feingold created and exhibited his video tapes and installations widely at the most important festivals in both Americas, Europe and Japan as well as in museums and art centres around the world. Some of the works have become part of many recognized collections.

In 1991 – 92 his first interactive installation The Surprising Spiral came into being and soon after that, in 1993, he launched a series of works in which he used talking figures – the heads of string puppets and effigies, familiar from ventriloquist shows. However in Feingold’s works they gained a new animatronic character.

Two of the works displayed at the exhibition FIGURES OF SPEECH: The Animal, Vegetable and Mineralness of Everything (2004), and Hell (2013) belong to this thread. The third work displayed here – Interior – is a perfect example of Feingold’s multimedia art combining interactive aspects, sculpture and video art. By sculptural aspects I mean the substantial objectiveness of the works.  Rather than being created, the objects appearing in the Feingold’s works, originate straight from the real world or are subject to transformation.

All three works displayed at the exhibition are interactive – not only the Interior. However, different strategies are being employed by the artist. Interior is an example of, what one might call, classical interaction. The public is given an interface enabling the manipulation of a stream of designed images. In the remaining two works, interaction is internalised, developing within the structure of the works: the selected figurative elements of the composition enter a conversation. In all three works, which involve the viewers in different ways – the interaction develops in real-time.

In The Animal, Vegetable and Mineralness of Everything and Hell as in many other works by Feingold in the same stream, computer  programmes involving artificial intelligence were employed together with the speech synthesisers which allow Feingold’s animatronic sculptures to lead endless improvised conversations. These utterings reveal the spectrum of issues that are indispensable in the interpretation of his creative activity: the body-mind relationship, perception and cognition, the subjectivity and identity, difference and otherness, psychological projection and the architecture of mental spaces.

Tackling the issue of artificial intelligence Ken Feingold is actually directing a reflection of ourselves, our own condition both as individuals and as a species, of humanity, its transformations and transgressions.

Transhumanism thus becomes one of the key interpretation frameworks of his artistic creation.