Chris Eckert: Mechanical Parables

Currently on view at the Museum of Craft and Design is Mechanical Parables, an exhibition of mechanical sculpture by San Jose-based artist Chris Eckert. Ten of Eckert’s works are housed in a single small exhibition room, and each stands alone as an individual experience. While each piece is a reflection of skillful engineering and craftsmanship, and all possess a high level of autonomy, they also demand human presence in order to be fully functional. 

A machine with a single eyeball that follows a nearby viewer shakes an old can with a few coins inside. Gimme (2012) speaks to the artist’s experiences with panhandlers in the Bay Area and his own time spent looking for donations. Through participatory experience, this work, like many of the others, adds a new visitor-oriented dynamic to the white-walled room.

Chris Eckert and Martin Fox. Babel, 2015; polychromed metal, microelectronics; set of 20; Courtesy of the Artists and The Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco. Photo: Samuel Abhaya.    

The majority of Eckert’s machines are wall-mounted around the exhibition’s centerpiece, Auto Scribe (2015), a calligraphy machine that produces copies of Biblical gospels in scroll form. To complete the machine’s internal engineering, Eckert works with precise measurements, an exactitude mirrored throughout his works. Auto Scribe replicates classic gothic typography almost flawlessly, but intentionally imperfectly. Eckert humanizes the robotic writer with the use of a motion sensor. Each time a viewer passes, the machine is forced to make mistakes and changes that it did not make in previous copies. A symbiotic relationship between human and machine, design and labor, is thoroughly embedded in the construction of Eckert’s works.

An impressive show of calibration, Babel (2015) is a set of twenty machines mounted in a row on the wall that reproduces human handwriting. Remarking on different cultures, the machines create and print notes written in various languages. Just like Auto Scribe, the Babel machines are imbued with human-like qualities. The written script reveals clues about the particular machine’s country of origin, while the shifting nature of the script hints at individual personalities. Endless streams of paper create an overflow on the floor below, and in time, the lists will engulf the very machines that created them. Eckert makes clear that a relationship between human and machine is inescapable. His work allows viewers to contemplate the ways in which machines and humans reflect one another, while also considering the place of machines within fine art.  

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Matt Kelly is currently working toward his BFA in Sculpture at the California College of the arts.  He enjoys cooking for groups and dancing until sunrise.  Kelly is originally from New Jersey and is based in Oakland.

Chris Eckert: Mechanical Parables is on view at Museum of Craft and Design, in

San Francisco