Clever, yes... but is it really sculpture when it has no physical presence, when the sum of the parts is only an illusion in 2 dimensions? The idea is cool, and has a lot of potential if the artist continues to develop and improve the tech side of things.

Right now, to me at least, it feels more like a magic lantern show--fun and interesting in its own right, and yet intrinsically missing something. One of the reasons I think that the images are unnerving is because on some level, you realize that there's something not quite honest about things, but its hard to put your finger on what's wrong. Part of it is hidden by the poor image quality, but more than that, I think the problem for me is that it's driven more by a graphical than sculptural sensibility. Sculpture is by nature interactive--physical, sensual,emotional and intellectual. One's experience of a sculpture is constantly informed and renewed by changes in the surrounding environment and by your own changes in positioning around it. There's tremendous potential here to create an entirely new art experience, and it will be interesting to see how (and if) it grows.

Cool web find, and thanks for giving others the opportunity to see and think about it.

Celia, I appreciate your comments and I'm going to play devil's (?) advocate here for a moment...

If we define sculpture as art that exists in three dimensions and, as you say, physical, sensual, emotional, and intellectual, then if a sculpture ceases is temporal does that mean it is no longer sculpture?

What this artist is doing is playing with our concept of time. The sculpture does exist in frames of time, even if we cannot access those frames of time simultaneously physically, do they still not exist in this recorded form?

I think what is provocative about this is exactly how it plays with our sense of continuity.

I rather expected you would take up the challenge, Lawrence. :-)

“If we define sculpture as art that exists in three dimensions and, as you say, physical, sensual, emotional, and intellectual, then if a sculpture ceases is temporal does that mean it is no longer sculpture?”

If the only experience you had of Cary Grant was from a still photo taken of him at age 80, would he cease to have been an actor? Of course it wouldn’t affect who he had been in time and space, but it would most definitely affect your understanding of him. Could you guess his place in our cultural memory from that one static view? Your perception of Cary Grant would be as 2 dimensional as the photo itself.

You might as well take the question a step further…If a sculpture exists only in the artist’s mind, is it still a sculpture? Perhaps within a very, very narrow definition that takes into account the artist’s imagined experience with his yet-to-be creation, but would you call a preliminary sketch for a sculpture a sculpture in its own right? I don’t think so. It’s still art, but it isn’t sculpture.

If I take a photograph of a Rodin bronze, my creation isn’t the sculpture itself, nor is it a sculpture in its own right. It’s a 2 dimesional representation of the sculpture filtered through my point of view, and it may well represent my aesthetic sense as much or more than that of Rodin. If that sculpture is subsequently destroyed, my photograph would in no way take the place of the original. It may not cease to *have been* a sculpture, but I do believe that it would certainly cease to *be* a sculpture at the moment of its destruction.

“What this artist is doing is playing with our concept of time. The sculpture does exist in frames of time, even if we cannot access those frames of time simultaneously physically, do they still not exist in this recorded form?”

I won't dispute that the concept is intriguing (and yes, I understood it), but I think the execution is lacking. It works best in the video clip, precisely because the time/space relationships are made clear, and even if the viewer cannot interact directly with the work, seeing the artist doing so makes it "feel" more sculptural.

In contrast, unless you know what the artist has done, there really is no sense of the temporal in the static photos. In fact, looking at the one you have up on your page, it could just as easily have been drawn entirely in a graphics program and pasted onto the background. The flat lighting and poor image quality leaves little (if any) sense that even any *part* of the sculpture was ever actually present in the environment. There are no shadows where there ought to be, there is nothing visually anchoring the elements to the background. I’d even go so far as to say that by effectively removing all sense of time’s passage in the photo, all the life and energy one feels in the video has been sucked out of the concept. It’s reduced to a matter of how much of the lie are you willing to believe?

To me, what I see in these photos and video is a sketch of sorts, for a vision yet to be fully realized and waiting for the technology and capabilities of the artist to advance sufficiently. Perversely perhaps, given some of what I’ve said thus far, I don’t believe that this needs to have any sort of true physical form to be considered “sculpture”—but I do believe it needs to mimic the experience of a physical encounter more closely. It needs more a sculptural sense, rather than a true presence. Just as we feel we know more of the life and spirit of Cary Grant when we watch his movies than when we just look at a photograph, because in the movies we can hear his voice and observe movements and mannerisms, interactions and nuances that a photo alone can’t possibly convey, the more time, space, and movement can be incorporated into the “time sculpture” experience, the more real it will seem to the viewer. Imagine something along the lines of what you see in the video, but recreated in an immersive visual experience where you move around and through the images as they were being created, where you could perhaps even take control of the process to some extent—altering details of the environment, the speed at which time passes, the transparency of the objects, or even add to or remove parts of the construction with a wave of your hand. That’s the sort of potential I see, and perhaps why I rather quickly lost enthusiasm for what I saw as it was presented.

Hey, thanks for the chance to exercise my brain a little tonight! On that level, at least, the artist is succeeding at inspiring dialog--at that in itself IS something important.