Pittsburgh
Wood Street Galleries
“Hysterical Machines,” the title of Bill Vorn’s recent exhibition, applies an expression of extreme emotion to insentient devices. This juxtaposition reveals, in part, the artist’s conceptual interest. Three of his featured installations presented embodiments of artificial intelligence, revealing the human tendency to assign emotions to lifeless mechanisms. Based in Montreal, Vorn has worked in the robotics field since 1992. He creates each work as part of a larger research project that he calls “Aesthetics of Artificial Behaviors.” Unlike the human replicants of Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi narratives, Vorn’s experiments bear no resemblance to humans, nor do they manifest any human-style movements. Instead, Vorn points up our tendency to anthropomorphize by denying his machines fur, feathers, flesh, or scales. …see the entire review in the print version of December’s Sculpture magazine.
