Arts Santa Mònica is a former Renaissance convent in the heart of Barcelona’s La Rambla, converted into a multi-disciplinary art centre with a special focus on the culture around digital media. Until September 2nd the auto-màtic exhibition explores the implications of automation in architecture and the limits and potential of generative drawing, by exploring how the Automation Revolution is shaping the work of architects, designers and creatives.

The exhibition has been curated by Edouard Cabay following the framework of his project Machinic Protocols, a project in which he has been working on since 2015. Edouard Cabay is an architect and professor of architecture. Founder and director of Appareil, an experimental architectural office in Barcelona, he also teaches, as senior faculty, at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia where he also co-directs the Open Thesis Fabrication program. He has taught experimental design studios at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, at the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris and at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

The exhibition gathers over 120 drawings that have been developed over the past three years, by more than 80 contributors from fields including computation, arts and design. Raising questions on automation, reproducibility, and creative experimentation two installations complete the exhibition: First, an electronically controlled array of eight fans blow towards the centre of a page, where a pen attached to a sail moves in the wind. The second one is an experiment of 10.000 droplets of ink fall onto a moving canvas from a height of 15 metres. The mobile canvas moves at the rhythm of the falling drop, in order to form an orthogonal grid.

Tinguely satirised the mindless overproduction in advanced industrial society with his sculptures machines. Taking this as starting point Cabay himself explains ‘the title auto-màtic is a homage to Jean Tinguely’s Méta-matics, the series of machines that produce artwork and that investigate the forceful intrusion of technology in our society”.

Text by CLOT Magazine (Twitter @clotmagazine)

More info at www.artssantamonica.gencat.cat/en/detall/auto-matic 

(Photo: Plots 02_Machinic Protocols, credit and courtesy of Xavier González)