2019, Wood, metal, plastic, cloth, electronics, robotics, sound
Nurture engages in mind control vernacular, utilizing audio based on institutionally marketed educational media. The primary objective of the installation was to invert the power dynamic between a traditional interactive object and a viewer within a gallery context, inducing a biological response in the spectator through sound and movement—what I term an induction—via voluntary or unconscious influence. While media culture often draws individuals into digital spaces, Nurture seeks to ritualize this experience within a physical space, incorporating vocalized confusion induction hypnosis techniques.
The installation performs spoken phrases accompanied by robotic movements, generating physical sounds when spectators are close. Its graphical layout, mounted on the wall, reimagines the human vocal tract as a schematic representation and an arrangement of musical instruments dispersed throughout an acoustic environment. The speech mechanism is divided into distinct interdependent components. The robotic percussion follows the consonants and syllables of the texts, while a mechanical valve modulates the resonance of a chamber to mimic vowel sounds. As viewers are engrossed in the kinetic deconstruction of the auditory performance, a subliminal process is simultaneously occurring. Beneath the synchronized layers of mechanized tones and percussion, the original unaltered spoken text can be discerned, with one of the speakers reciting passages from phonics recordings interspersed with “autosuggestive” lines from Napoleon Hill’s 1937 positive programming self-help book, Think and Grow Rich.
Special thanks to the Contemporary Austin Crit Group