Photography / Photograms / Kinetic Interactive Sculptures / Sculptures

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In bed with Lucy and Dolly - Photograms

Mapping the temporal balance between water and air in the form of unique bubbles - which emerge as a result of dynamic systems that do not follow linear and hierarchal patterns of organizational behavior - Fried charts the fundamental economy of networks in nature. In varying chromatic tones, Fried depicts strictly non-biological membranes that evoke a strong resemblance to primordial living cells or biotech test-tube creations, and reminds us of just how fragile, yet adoptive the architecture of life is.

Fried creates large gaseous vesicles in a totally darkened room using infrared goggles. At the decisive moment before they fall, he photograms them onto grainless color sheet-film by triggering a colored point-light source above. He captures the shadows of these fleeting objects to make an image on a photosensitive support using only light and the light sensitive material. No camera or lens is used. What we see in his enlarged C-prints are the latent shadows and spectral aberrations of these transparent forms caused by the membrane’s curved surface. The object itself becomes the lens, subtly bending the light and altering its own image.

The title refers to Lucy (the early hominid “Mother”), to us (the “Myth”), and to Dolly-the-Sheep (what Fried ironically calls the “Missing Link”) in a dialogue that seeks orientation in a world in which man has moved from adapting to and controlling their environment, to designing life itself to fit it’s environment. With this work, Fried involves our sense of orientation in a world that has taken a biomorphic journey from the Cambrian Sea to the Sea of Science and it’s playpens of genetic engineering.

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C.C.: Would you please explain your reference in the title of the photographic works to Dolly, the first cloned sheep?

D.F.: With her arrival (Dolly), a media star was born. Suddenly everyone knew a barrier was shattered between mankind's practice of altering his environment, and mankind's attempts at re-inventing himself. Man has always looked for what separates himself from other species. For me, Dolly became the missing link, fulfilling man's need to be supreme. On the other hand, Lucy, an ancient hominid, is a woman of more uncertain origin. Although we can clearly interpret her physiological nature, the question is still posed, "How intelligent was she really?" Well, at least clever enough to eat, sleep and reproduce biologically, which is more than I can say for our predecessors. So we find ourselves in bed with our own past and future, trying to orientate ourselves to this "brave new world."

Christopher Chambers is an artist, critic, and curator based in New York City.

INTERVIEW full text - English / German:

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Self Organizing Still-Life (SOS)

Acoustically stimulated Interactive Sculptures

David Fried's "Self Organizing Still-Life" (SOS) is a series of interactive, sound-stimulated kinetic sculptures, which reveal his exploration into the inherent qualities of networked and emergent systems operating far-from-equilibrium intrinsic to nature, individual psyche, communication and social relationships.

Whatever the scale or materials used for the SOS, they all consist of solid hand-made spheres, which are stirred into motion by ambient sound on a predetermined level object. Audible sound is transformed live into waves that silently stimulate each of the spheres into motion. The resulting action of the individual spheres and their interactions with one another are undetermined. They rearrange themselves in continually new patterns of elegantly fluid choreography. Some kiss, some spin off alone, while others race head-on only to meet with a soft embrace, or swerve around one another, often changing the path and destiny of each other without physical contact, as each sphere is able to sense one another.

No two spheres are alike -- each is composed of either solid stone, or synthetic polymers layered with organic materials such as marble dust and rare earth, with no moving parts. The artist infuses them with unique bipolar qualities, and an ability to interact with each other in inimitable and unexpected ways on an elemental level, rather than a mechanical one. Fried is therefore able to give each sphere an individual personality, allowing them to respond and behave differently to sound, and with each new artwork, create an entirely unique interdependent family of individuals that we can influence, but not control.

Like two people would dance differently to the same music, the individual spheres interact in a unique and live choreography directly initiated by its environment.

As we simultaneously influence and trace the movements of the spheres, our attention becomes increasingly focused on the non-linear dynamic relationships that unfold between them, effectively shifting the emphasis away from the individual objects themselves towards a highly subjective glimpse of a more complex individual picture.

Creating a complex live visual experience, Fried‘s interactive sculptures are compelling by their symbolically provocative simplicity, as the viewer is moved to forge perspectives on relationships, life and the universe of thought.

The SOS premiered at Art Forum Berlin in 1998. Since then, his sculptures have been in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions in Europe and the USA.

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C.C.: Your SOS objects invite you to "communicate" with them too. Why did you choose to explore sound as the stimulus?

D.F.: Sound and communication play a major roll in the development of many species and their social spheres. The acronym SOS itself stands for more than communicating a distress call. It indicates belonging to an unwritten social contract simply by being a human. To integrate this I thought the stimulus should be something that we all depend on, but also be something that can be interpreted very differently. Like you and I would dance very differently to the same music, so do the SOS spheres. I give each sphere a different individual character. They also affect one another's path by their individual actions, and even cause feedback through the production of their own sounds of clicking, and so on. The sound sensor allows the SOS to be a Still Life when all is quiet, and a moving object when dialogue occurs. Of course, it can also be stimulated by other sounds that occur when people are active. The SOS can be "tuned" so that it may only hear the very loudest of sounds, or allow it even to hear a whisper. Another aspect is that the use of sound as a stimulus allows the artwork to extend beyond its own borders, integrating itself in a dialogue with its environment.

Christopher Chambers is an artist, critic, and curator based in New York City.

full interview English / German

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Rainscapes - Photography

At first glance, the colorful arrays of countless water drops in Fried’s Rainscape photographs appear to be falling galaxies - clusters of dripping light painted on the night sky. On closer inspection one sees that they are actually photographs of pure falling Rain.

Fried captures strongly individual patterns of rainfall on large format color film. Rich chromatic variations are revealed by the prismatic effect of light passing through each individual raindrop, evoking a spacious cosmic look. Fried’s large-scale Rainscape photographs exude a quiet replenishing quality that unloads poetically within the viewer.

Observing what gives rise to civilizations, or may ultimately lead to their demise, Fried sees freshwater as problematic in the 21st century. Since ancient times, with prayer and ritual - to science and its methods, humans have wished to influence the weather, and although the collective human pursuit has undoubtedly had profound affects on the ecosystem, we are luckily still unable to control bigger systems such as the weather. Rain still falls freely through the world’s trees, and harvesting hands before completing it’s cycle. However, access to - and usage of - clean water is being moved into increasingly privatized hands, servicing industry more than local needs and down river ecosystems. Fried’s Rainscapes portray sweet water at its birth and invites us to contemplate its worth as we become its temporary custodians.

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Stemmers - Sculptures

Fried has coined the term “Stemmer” as a personifying name for stem cell creations. Currently the stem cell is the most promising yet controversial programmable self-reproducing building block on a cellular level, which in the hands of the genetic engineer has become the absolute malleable “bio-porcelain” of choice at the turn of this century.

His newest three-dimensional works titled Stemmers are a series of geometrical sculptures that portray his vision of stem cell creations with a kind of prepubescent innocence. They look like young or undeveloped beings, easy to personify and almost friendly in appearance. Although there is a clear association to organic cell clusters, Fried actually follows a basic law of economy found in complex bubbles to hand-build and facet the sculpture’s surface. The sharp-networked angles formed by intersecting spheres of varying size result in dynamic bubble shapes that in spite of their clean mathematical origin appear biological, and possess an abstract yet curiously personal character. Each Stemmer sculpture contains several “faces” when viewed from different angles, which easily suggest multiple abstract personalities.

If Fried’s Stemmers are perceived as statues of premature invitro creations, then one must think: what might they grow up to be? Life-savers like skin or liver? Patented spare parts or estranged new breeds? His Stemmers also appear to have gender, which is enforced through their intended resemblance to figures from the stone age such as the “Venus of Willendorf”, which depicts an anatomically exaggerated female form, or other phallic icons found in many Paleolithic cultures. As in many of Fried’s other works, the artist presents us with minimalist symbolic imagery that suggests a fundamental shift from mythological to scientific beliefs, and calls attention to the manipulative processes that are now deeply rooted in our cultures. By resurrecting and modernizing humankind’s oldest fertility icons - in an era whereby applied technologies are trumping the oldest form of reproduction and evolution - with fertility icons of a synthetic nature for future generations, Fried confronts us with our desire and ability to alter nature’s course, and perhaps our future evolutionary process.

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