Biography

Alan Rath is one of the best known artists employing new technologies as a means of exploring the uncertain terrain separating humans from machines. Rath’s robotic sculptures utilize computerized machines to enable us to understand the significance of technology in contemporary society, and to organize the search for deeper meaning in our increasingly mechanized world. His work often focuses on humans’ tendency to create machines in their own image, thereby reflecting their foibles and failings, strengths and weaknesses. He does not use pre-existing machines but rather fabricates his pieces by hand, generating images with his own digital electronics that transmit information and ultimately serve as extensions of the human body.

As a boy growing up in the Midwest, Rath was fascinated by electronics. He studied engineering as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and found that he had a great deal in common with the students in the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the Architectural Machine Group, and the Visual Language Workshop, in that they all delved into the intersection of technology and aesthetics. After graduation Rath took a position with a firm near Boston, which he held for less than one year before quitting and turning away from commercial engineering and toward the discipline’s more experimental, artistic applications. Upon moving to Oakland, California, in 1984, Rath found work as a technical assistant to light sculptor Milton Komisar, whose work employs computer controlled lamps in combination with solid acrylic rods. Soon after, Rath began making sculptures out of artfully arranged electronic components, capitalizing on the abundant and inexpensive materials he readily found in the Bay Area, thanks to the burgeoning computer industry that would evolve into today’s Silicon Valley.1

Info Glut II has a critical edge that enriches the work and draws attention to its deeper meaning. Vaguely anthropomorphic by virtue of its three small video screens, two side screens feature digitized images of hands framing a central screen with digitized footage of a woman’s mouth silently forming words. The screens are connected via wires and components that may suggest an industrial version of a human circulatory system. The two screens with hands communicate in American Sign Language. The left hand provides factual tidbits such as the artist’s height and weight (“Alan is seventy-four inches tall and weighs one hundred seventy pounds”), his birth date (“November twenty fifth, nineteen hundred fifty nine”), and little else of substance. In fact, the script is dominated by the repeated phrase “blahdy blah blah.” The right screen repeats Rath’s vital statistics, but is largely given over to phrases found on product labels, signs, instructions, and forms. As a body of information presented without reference to a particular object or situation, it is devoid of meaning. Expressions such as “keep out of reach of children,” “your results may vary,” and “keep away from heat” possess potential significance when applied to certain scenarios, however when jumbled together in no particular order, the artist’s message emerges from the flood of useless information.

Rath urges viewers to consider how the information and modes of communication that surround them can serve to inhibit their understanding of anything more substantial than facts. Viewers are encouraged to wonder whether their ability to communicate with each other via phone, fax, email, and instant messaging has enabled them to communicate more efficiently, or has simply obfuscated their ability to discern the difference between extraneous and germane input. Rath’s work bridges art and science, dwelling on questions about technological progress and its impact on contemporary society, presenting the viewer with ethical dilemmas for which there are no easy answers. —J.N.

1. David Ebony, “Body Language: The Art of Alan Rath,” Alan Rath: Robotics, exh. cat. (Santa Fe: SITE Santa Fe and Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1998), 38.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)
Alan Rath lives and works in Oakland, CA.

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