Subject:  Viridian Note 00005:  Viridian Aesthetics

Key concepts:  Viridian aesthetic; distributed networks; 
mobiles; Alexander Calder (1898-1976)

Attention Conservation Notice: This is art criticism.  
There are over 900 words of it.

Sources:  an original composition

Links:  www.sfmoma.org/EXHIB/calder.index.html
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/caldwel.htm

There are two approaches to the problem of establishing a 
Viridian aesthetic:  the top-down approach, and the 
bottom-up.  The top-down method consists of issuing 
historical analogies, broad statements of principle,  
sweeping aphorisms, and so forth, and trawling these 
verbal devices over the landscape in the hope that they 
will net something useful.

     The bottom-up approach relies on assembling specific
examples, whose aggregate might suggest an  emergent
future sensibility.

   Since we Viridians have an expiration date looming, we 
will try both approaches at once.  Our first candidate for 
specific analysis, the first tree in our Viridian forest 
as it were, is the "mobile," invented  by twentieth-
century artist Alexander Calder.  

    Following  our "underside-first" principle, we will 
start by listing  the aspects of Calder's mobiles which 
are NOT of a  Viridian sensibility.  Only then will we 
relate the  aspects which seem to have promise for the 
early 21st century.

NON-VIRIDIAN ASPECTS OF CALDER'S MOBILES

Alexander Calder is by no means a contemporary artist.  He 
was born a full one hundred years ago and  died  in the 
1970s.

Mobiles have two basic elements: colored cut-out shapes, 
and the jointed network of stiff wires that attach them.  
Calder's shapes are flat and metallic, and generally 
painted in Mondrian-like, industrial, primary colors.

Calder sometimes employed gimmicky, dated shapes 
reminiscent of bad Space Age coffee-tables.

Calder sometimes attached mobile elements to 
representational objects, such as wire-framed fish and 
performing seals. Compared to the eerie majesty of the 
best abstract mobiles, this overly cute, toylike practice 
gives one a cloying sensation.

Desktop and floor-mounted "stabiles"  are much less 
visually effective than air-swarming, ceiling-hung 
mobiles. Unless that is, the stabiles are built on a 
monumental scale, so that they can loom astoundingly
over the viewer.

The movements of mobiles are determined by laws of gravity 
and local air currents, rather than some more 
sophisticated interchange among the moving elements.

As art objects, mobiles are somewhat difficult to assess, 
because they are both sculpture and performance.  They 
present different visual experiences under different 
environmental circumstances.

VIRIDIAN ASPECTS OF CALDER MOBILES

They were invented and built by a world-class avant-garde 
artist with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Calder mobiles are strongly biomorphic in both shape and 
motion.

They are thriftily built of cheap, recycled materials.

Mobiles move silently and tirelessly through the use of 
ambient, renewable energy.

Mobiles are sensitive indicators of local environmental 
conditions.

Mobiles scale up well, although the truly colossal mobiles 
require some modest aid from electric motors.

The term "mobile" was coined by Marcel Duchamp, a rather 
sphinxlike, timeless figure.

Thanks to Calder's iterative balancing technique, a 
mobile's simple network contains a great deal of subtle 
embedded judgement.  Thanks to this, the movement of a 
mobile is not mechanically repetitive, but pleasantly  
lifelike and unpredictable.

Calder mobiles are distributed, collaborative networks in 
action.

Although mobiles can be quite large in volume, even 
monumental, they are very sparing in their use of 
materials.  They are dependent on open space, voids, and 
transparency; less mass, more data.

Mobiles have a life-affirming sense of humor.  It's hard 
to imagine a grim, fanatical mobile.

CONCLUSION.

There has been little formal innovation in Calder mobiles 
in recent decades.  They remain well-known as one of the 
few art forms invented by an American artist (though he 
had to go to Paris to do it).  Mobiles have always enjoyed 
a cult following, but in terms of technique they have 
become a Modernist backwater.

    However, there exists the possibility of profound 
advancement in the design and  construction of mobiles.

    Calder himself built his mobiles with string and 
tinsnips, snipping a bit here and there and shortening 
the wire until he felt he had the balance right.  It would 
not  seem difficult to automate this hands-on process 
through computer-based balancing algorithms.  This offers 
the attractive prospect of monumental CAD-CAM mobiles 
containing hundreds or thousands of perfectly balanced, 
interacting elements.

    Mobiles could become vastly more sensitive and 
responsive if they abandoned the wire and sheet-iron of 
the 1930s. Thermosensitive wire and polymer might change 
color and movement with temperature.  Humidity-sensitive 
plastics might be useful.  Ultralight mobiles of foam and 
cellulose might be colorful and sturdy, yet almost float 
in air.

    In near-term cultural conditions, mobiles could 
profoundly change their meaning. Our society is obsessed 
with networks and their internal balances and struggles, 
while Calder's era was analog, mechanical and pre-
cybernetic.  Mobiles make far more sense today than they 
did in the 1930s.  The "network aesthetic" of mobiles 
suggests a Viridian equivalent for the Modernist "machine 
aesthetic."

     A Viridian mobile made of silicon circuit-plates and 
data wiring would be an objective-correlative for the Net.   
Such a device could be built to any scale, and could 
display any number of sophisticated responses to various 
aspects of its environment ==  it might, for instance, 
move in response to passing network traffic, rather than 
air currents.  A 21st-century silicon mobile might compute 
its own changing internal states of balance while 
simultaneously absorbing and deploying solar power.  There 
are a host of possibilities here, for this art-device 
would have all the protean capacities of a digital 
network.

     Such a mobile could be programmed to behave in 
sophisticated, unprecedented ways, simply impossible 
during the twentieth century. Calder's mobile would 
no longer be a Modernist art object, but rather a new 
medium.

Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com)