Ken Rinaldo, shown here with robotic sculptures from the installation Autopoiesis, specializes in interactive art.   By Jo McCulty

Art comes to life under Rinaldo's direction

The little brick building that houses Ken Rinaldo's art studio and office doesn't show up on most campus maps, although it is sandwiched between Hughes and Hopkins halls. To find the Fergus-Gilmore Annex, a visitor must leave the West 17th Avenue sidewalk, turn into an alley near the east end of Hopkins Hall, and enter the annex on the left through a heavy door with two small windows.

Rinaldo's artwork is no easier to map. The assistant professor of art and technology describes himself as a "transdisciplinary artist." The term is about as specific as possible for someone who creates installation art that integrates theories and principles of biological modeling, computer science, communications, electronics and art. His art is created by sculpting natural materials like branches, metal and glass, artificial life programming techniques, and electronics.

His work has been known to make small children squeal with laughter and adults step back in consternation when mechanical sculptures hanging from a museum ceiling come swinging in their direction, stopping inches from their faces while whistling happily like a telephone. The art has also inspired delighted smiles from observers as they watch two Siamese fighting fish swim their way through a gallery in robotic fish bowls they control or two metal plates gently collide and separate to finish "chewing" stretchy wads of gum, pulled over glass sugar-molecule forms.

"The kind of interactive art I'm involved in is unplanned and nonlinear, where nothing is pre-programmed," Rinaldo, 43, said recently, sitting in his narrow office/studio space in the Fergus-Gilmore Annex.

For Autopoiesis, an installation commissioned in 2000 by the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Finland, 15 robotic sculptures suspended from a ceiling interacted with one another and with visitors through motion and sound. The installation won Rinaldo first prize out of 61 submissions in Avida 3.0, an international artificial life and art competition held in October in Madrid, Spain.

The sculptures are constructed of cabernet sauvignon grapevine, separated by brightly colored plastic joints, with wires running the full length. Each arm comes equipped with four infrared heat sensors on a disk at the "shoulder," which allow it to pinpoint the location of human visitors, and one active infrared sensor at the tip of the arm that senses when to stop the arm before it touches an observer. A custom-built mini-computer on each arm processes the information for its individual movement, and also sends messages to a central computer, which guides group behavior.

A video of the installation shows 15 arms gracefully swinging in side-to-side a

rcs in unison when no visitors are present. As people enter the space, individual arms break free from the group to swing toward the person nearest them. Lipstick cameras at the tip of two of the arms "observe" the people, and the images captured are projected live onto the gallery walls. (To see video clips of Rinaldo's installations, visit www.arts.ohio-state.edu/Art/faculty/ken/ken.html.)

Exploring the ways in which technological systems can learn the evolved wisdom of living systems drives many of his installations, Rinaldo said.

Referring to Autopoiesis, he said, "The sculpture only really comes to life with human beings."

And in turn, the humans enjoy the attention.

"I think people like to interact with art. They like to be acknowledged," he said. "As opposed to work that keeps your attention for a few seconds, interactive art really engages people. If you can get the viewers' attention and keep it, you have a chance to get your message across."

Rinaldo appears to have no shortage of messages to explore.

His studio, which he wryly refers to as his "tree fort" and as "home," is crowded with pieces and parts of past, current and future works.

A desk, several worktables, a couple of computers and a storage loft compete for space with a wood scaffolding forming an open canopy over much of the studio. An arm from Autopoiesis hangs from the scaffolding; a framed X-ray of a hand with a branch stretching out beyond the frame is tucked into a back corner; and a piece of steel shaped like a unicellular organism, with bubbles of blown glass emerging from holes on its surface, is sitting on a counter. Circuit boards, screwdrivers, plastic molds, saws and books cover the space's walls and surfaces.

For the artwork Flickering Signifiers, Rinaldo examined materialism and the seductive nature of television light by creating large glass forms that housed rewired color televisions and projected the flickering lights of the TVs without the pictorial images. Children's toys and plastic forks and knives hung from the ceiling and tickled viewers' heads as they walked through the gallery. In Mediated Encounters, he explored the impact of technology on nature by creating robotically controlled fish tanks. The tanks allowed Siamese fighting fish, bred to be hostile, to interact without killing each other.

Electronic communication is the subject of a work in development, with the Department of Art's glass program, that will use glass and copper to create large-scale abstract representations of diatoms, unicellular organisms. Red, green and blue lights flashing through the glass will allow the organisms to communicate with one another and with human observers.

As the son of two artists and grandson of a French painter and a Scottish electronics inventor, Rinaldo's interest in art was cultivated at a young age.

In his teens, he studied ballet and biology, but chose to major in computer science for an associate's degree.

"I did that because, at the time, I thought it would be the practical thing to do," he said. "Everybody knew computers were becoming a major force in our culture, but when it came down to it, I did not enjoy business-oriented programming."

He went on to earn a bachelor's in communications, but still hadn't found his calling. After stints as a computer salesman and singing telegram messenger, he found work at a gallery in San Francisco. He spent hours in the galleries, making sketches and absorbing the images of Pablo Picasso, Juan Miro, Yves Tanguy and other Modernists.

"I decided at some point I wasn't going to be a practical bread-winner but that I wanted to be an artist," he said. "I was most happy just making my work."

The Conceptual and Information Arts MFA program at San Francisco State University, with its emphasis on "concepts as a driving force for making art," proved to be a good fit for Rinaldo, and allowed him to combine previous computer science experience, communications research and art. His work in artificial life as an art form, which he began as a graduate student, has led to commissions and exhibits in Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, Korea and Canada, as well as upcoming exhibitions in Austria and Brazil, and has received international media and scholarly attention.

In the three years since Rinaldo came to Ohio State to direct the Department of Art's new art and technology program, it has become the fastest growing program in the College of the Arts. Nearly 60 students this year in the undergraduate and MFA programs have found their way to the Fergus-Gilmore Computer Studio, creating conceptually driven art works of their own in the state-of-the-art computer studio Rinaldo designed and constructed, just down the hall from his office.

"From all the strange jobs I've had, I never thought I would be a professor," he said. "It's certainly a great way to make a living, while being able to pursue creative research and maintain artistic freedom."

Several students already have been asked to participate in international symposiums with projects completed under his supervision in undergraduate and graduate courses.

"The students are such an inspiration," he said. "I really can't begin to tell you how exciting it is to get a student that is just beginning to think and see as an artist and to watch them develop and bloom. Nothing could be more gratifying."

A few minutes later, he ushered his visitor out. A student was waiting at the door, and it was time to get back to work.

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