SUMMAH 2000, nyc, photo by Dennis seckler

FOXNEWS ARTICLE
June 14, 2000

Man and Machine
Art Collective SEEMEN creates amazing metal contraptions for live performances

By Carly Berwick FOX NEWS

New York-Late last Friday night, in the future home of the Museum of Art and Technology, machines were wreaking controlled havoc in Manhaten's burgeoning new art center of Chelsea.

Ominous sculptures and ingenious inventions spouting huge flames waited in the shadows for their turn in the spotlight.

An air powered Angel of fire swung up and slammed into a steel cage a young woman volunteer was standing inside, she presses her back against the rear bars and…… laughs joyously.

"I'm addicted," said Sarah Jacobson, 28, afterwards. She had seen the machines of the art collective SEEMEN perform many times in San Francisco, where the group is based. "But this time I got the nerve to volunteer to operate these incredible robots and I will never ever forget it!" "Of course I was scared, but that's what makes it fun."

SEEMEN is a San Francisco collective of "art drop-outs" headed by Kal Spelletich, who has been presenting avante-garde performances since 1980.

A regular at the annual Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert, Spelletich crafts machines designed to both terrify and enlighten at once. Most contain fire and when operated, noisily and menacing-like actions transpose for their operators/volunteers. Until recently Spelletich and his collection of fantastically modified, customised and improvised spectacular inventions have been primarily a West Coast phenomenom. But in the last year and a half, he's made two visits to New York and the east coast to spread his machine-as -art message.

The son of a construction company owner from Iowa, Spelletich, 39, makes art that looks like it might please both Mad Max, and the pitchfork weilding couple from American Gothic (painted in Iowa no less) at once. But it is based on a long tradition of performance and kinetic art that objects to the passivity of wall-hung museum art.

For several years in the early 90's Spelletich worked with Survival Research Laboratories (www.srl.org) in San Francisco, he cites them as forunners in the scene and a heroic inspiration, they are a group of artist cum-performers who have been propelling handmade machines at each other in performances since 1978.

Spelletich's twist however, is to include members of the audience in the shows. "I see an opening for art looking into the abyss, looking at your mortality, " says Spelletich. "It's fun to give people the opportunity to do something so far out of their ordinary lives and people are literally screaming for these opportunities."

For many of those in the art and technology underground who come to his performances, these heaving contraptions are not about violence or the ascendance of machines over people, but just the opposite.

"I think of it as therapeutic," says Spelletich of his performances. "A repressed society needs release." Audience members volunteer to operate or be placed inside the machines. Though every attendee had to sign a waiver releasing the sponsors from any responsibility for bodily harm, the warehouse space was crowded to the rafters with exuberantly eager participants.

The first machine performance of the evening featured a volunteer guided by Spelletich operating an ingenious Pantographic Robotic Arm that fed a huge mechanical flower that snapped open and shut with lightening fast speed, grabbing and flaming anything put in reach of its razor sharp chomping petals. The duo operated both much to the shrieking crowd's delight.

Then the robotic arm thrust its gift of a tree branch far inside the venus flytrap type flower knocking it over, flaming, into the throng of an audience sending them gleefully scrambling. A local group of "SEEMEN Cheerleaders," dressed in fishnets, hot-pants, and platform boots, chanted, "BURN BABY BURN!"

Josh Goldburg, 30, a student at New York Universities Interactive Telecommunications program, was the volunteer running the robotic arm. "Once I got the hang of it, it definitely felt like power, it was incredible!" he said. "I have never operated heavy machinery." Asked how his exprerience might be different than operating a backhoe on a farm, for example, he answered, "The fire elemant makes it a lot more exciting and I was onstage in front of everyone, like a movie star."

Though Spelletich say's he's never had to actually use the waiver signed on entry, part of the art's point is to "Flirt with danger, to challenge your mortality, to make you feel
alive." "You let someone operate a machine that could kill them, it gives them power," he says. Though the advent of computers is extending the shelf life of the brand of his technological art-the show was webcast-Spelletich remains hesitant about incorporating computers into the shows. I am not interested in giving people a virtual moment," he said.
"I AM interested when a computer can give one of my machines, reasoning, feelings, a soul, cunning."

The imposing roaring, clanging and banging industrial heft of the SEEMEN machines stands like a belated challenge to the electronic age's claim on the popular imagination.

Spelletich himself doesn't have any desire to stray from his "gearhead" roots and the visceral thrill of puppetteering real machines through live audiences and performances.

His day jobs as a welder, machinist and occasional film set designer allow him to hold onto his art-machines for years, "I haven't ever sold my work, not that I haven't been asked, " he says. "These are my babies, you wouldn't sell your babies would you?"

This performance was made possible by the generous support of http://www.franklinfurnace.org/
And
THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT 2000, made possible by the faith and foresight of Jerome Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc., the Heathcote Art Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts' Technology Initiative, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology.