Studio visit with alan rath biography

From there, it was a natural move to MIT. There, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering before moving to the West Coast — not for employment, but for easier access to the electronic parts he needed to make art. Throughout his career, music remained a strong influence. During a studio visit at which he demonstrated a self-made Moog synthesizer, we talked about the musicians he admired.

Listening sessions and email exchanges soon followed. Some of what Alan liked I found grating e. So, too, does a just-released memorial celebration, which you can view online here. His legacy lives not only in memory, but in museum collections throughout the U. David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder. Oh no! I never knew him, just his work.

Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in art, film, and video games. Tauris, , considers video games from a visual culture perspective, examining how they are deeply entangled with contemporary political, cultural and economic conflicts. A Conversation with Alan Rath. Oakland, February 4, David M.

Alan Rath : I grew up in suburban Cincinnati with my brother, sister, mom, and dad. It was the outer edge of suburbia, so just beyond our backyard were miles of woods that I used to explore as a little kid. I spent a lot of time bicycling along quiet roads in the area. My bicycles were some of the first machines I got to work on. My dad was a salesman and he was one of those people who really didn't do anything with his hands, but he did enjoy taking photos with his Leica and was quite good at it.

My mom was an artist and she was very good with her hands. She sewed costumes for theater groups and she ran that out of our home. One of the more interesting things she did was to install walls and create rooms in our unfinished concrete basement. She did it all herself when I was about nine years old. She could imagine how to carve up that space and could do all the sawing and hammering, too.

I ended up wiring a couple of light fixtures for the finished space. So you were already interested in electronics. When I was around 10 or eleven I was trying to build a circuit that was published in Popular Science. There was a schematic in the magazine for a strobe light. I was fascinated by flashing lights, and I wanted to build that circuit.

But it was hard to buy parts back then, to get hold of transistors. You probably had to consult the classified ads in the back of the magazine…. Was this a precursor to the lighting system that you later built for a concert? I remember we spoke about that earlier. With a friend we did the lighting for an outdoor three- day rock concert out near where we lived, and that was when I was about But I wonder how that worked.

And it's only because of my older brother that I was exposed to all that great music. Otherwise I was too young. A friend of mine had a big brother who saw Jimi Hendrix play at the Cincinnati Gardens. He showed us photos he had shot. We were too young to go. What else were you listening to? Emerson Lake and Palmer was the one of earliest bands that I heard that was using a synthesizer— [the song] Lucky Man in about There were other bands, too, like Yes and Genesis.

I was fascinated by the idea of electronic circuitry making those sounds. A pivotal decision was going to MIT. What drew you there? I heard about MIT because friends of my family had a son who was four or five years older who ended up going there, and he was a quirky nerd kind of guy who did some interesting things — that's how I heard about the place.

Did you see yourself on any particular career path? Not really. I started in the physics department and I quickly figured out that I would need to stick around to get a PhD to do anything, and I didn't feel like waiting that long, so while I was a freshman I switched over to electrical engineering. What did you envision yourself doing? I wasn't thinking about what I would do as a job; I was just thinking that I wanted to learn better how to build circuits because that's what I had been trying to do when I was in high school and things kept on exploding and shorting out — it was a lot of trial and error.

I had no idea of what engineers do. And it was while I was there that I started to see what the applications were for the technology, what people were doing with it. When I graduated in , I saw that it was also commercially a very viable career at that time. Can you describe, briefly, what were these programs were about? It was mind-expanding to see how these people were thinking.

Joel Slayton executive director Zero One, was one of my teachers there. It was interesting as a contrast with the kind of thinking that I was doing over in the engineering department. It was involved in in print typography and design — a different approach to problem solving. I'd be taking engineering courses and math all day long and then go over to these art domains where problem solving is a lot more open-ended.

It was more focused on communication. The Architecture Machine Group was the precursor to the Media Lab that just happened to be in the architecture department.

Studio visit with alan rath biography

They were involved in using computers to do all sorts of cool multimedia stuff that nobody dreamed of outside of MIT, really wacky stuff that only in the past few years has made it out into the public. You would actually see demos that you just didn't think were possible; it seemed like magic. He taught a course I remember well. I used to call it.

His thoughts were so organized. He would talk about very, very abstract things, which I found interesting. Synesthesia as in sensory blurring? Sound into light. Pressure into light. Touch into light. I was using all these different means of input to control the lights, one sense going in, vision coming out. I know that Piene was involved in light sculpture.

Alan Rath Untitled Alan Rath Bumper II On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled. Alan Rath — Wikipedia entry Introduction Alan Rath — was an American electronic, kinetic, and robotic sculptor. Alan Rath has always been fascinated by computers. He even makes his own parts.

However, he has combined his electronic genius with an undeniable artistic talent to create witty and often damning statements about technology gone berserk. Also, in the short span of 10 years he has built an impressive reputation as a sculptor. Rath often makes the computer chips needed to power his pieces. His work, however, is more concerned with the impact technology has had on society.

At the base of technology is a very primal search for a warm, secure place to sleep.