Man Versus Machine:
Geoffrey Hicks and his Robotic Arm Project by Holly Wall The Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition’s exhibition Art 365 will open at [ArtSpace] at Untitled in Oklahoma City in March 2011. Five artists each receive a $12,000 honorarium and one year of interaction with curator Shannon Fitzgerald. Visit www.Art365.org for more information. Since January of last year, Geoffrey Hicks has been storing an 800-pound robotic arm in his home studio in Tulsa. Next spring, he’ll debut it at Art 365 in an installation that hasn’t yet been titled but that Hicks refers to as “Robotic Arm Project.” Hicks bought the arm, which was manufactured sometime in the 1980s, on eBay without knowing just what he wanted to do with it. “Usually I come up with ideas kind of organically,” Hicks said. “I like a technology or a piece of technology and I buy something. If you think of a wood sculptor, a wood sculptor might go out and get some logs. They don’t really know what they’re going to use them for. They set them in the corner of their studio and they work on stuff and then they go look at this log and eventually it speaks to them. They think, ‘Oh, I want to go make that into a chair.’ But when they get the pieces, they have no idea what they’re going to use them for.” For “Robotic Arm Project,” Hicks plans to mount a digital camera onto the end of the arm and equip it with face detection software that will enable it to find and capture images of patrons’ faces as they view the exhibit. The facial images, as well as time-lapse images of the gallery, will then be displayed on screens behind the robot. “I’m still a few months away from knowing exactly what it’s going to do,” Hicks said. “It may end up with a Facebook page it uploads photos to. People can tag themselves or something. And that challenges the notion: Is it a person? Is it an entity that takes photos?” Geoffrey Hicks with the robotic arm that will become a part of his Art 365 project.
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