Dutch artist Christiaan Zwanikken creates kinetic works of remarkable ingenuity from found animal skulls and bones. He transforms these parts into moving mechanical sculptures and installations. Their composite natural and mechanical make-up gives these figures their own unique character. He breeds these new species in a 400-year-old monastery located in a remote village in Portugal. He also works in Amsterdam and New York.
His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally and can be found in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Gasunie collection, Netherlands Media Art Institute and numerous other public and private collections.
Zwanikken’s installations are like interactive Wunderkammers, configurations of hybrid, techno-animalistic figures, that come to ‘life’, responding to the viewer and to each other. Zwanikken plays nature – against artificial – against viewer removing any authoritative role: his hierarchy is governed by a different order. Due to the unpredictability of the computer-aided elements, it is not certain who responds to whom, and who is looking or being looked at.
By making technology seem to be ‘out of control’, Zwanikken ironizes the hype around interaction in media art and the illusion of smooth-running communications. As a rule his installations demonstrate human or animal conduct and thus serve as a handle for investigating and critiquing nature and behavior. His fusion of organic and inorganic materials mashed with interactive technology demonstrates the evolution and de-evolution of sculpture in the twenty-first century.
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