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Federico Díaz's 'Geometric Death Frequency-141' Assembled by Robots

by Matthew Zuras on September 17, 2010 at 06:30 AM

'geometric death sequence-141'
It's rare that the New York contingent of the Switched crew says, "I'd rather be somewhere else," because our smog-filled city of schizophrenic hobos and narcissistic fashionistas is also home to some of the best art in the world. (Also, our bagels rule.) But an upcoming installation at MASS MoCA has given us pause to wonder whether or not we should pull up stakes and head up to the Bay State.

Federico Díaz, an artist based in Prague, will install a giant wave-like sculpture, composed of black balls that's dubbed 'Geometric Death Frequency-141,' at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams next month. The title of the piece may seem morbidly sensational, until you take a look at the concept rendering of the work itself. Díaz took a digital photo of the courtyard in which the sculpture will appear and converted the pixels into basic 3-D volumes with the aid of specialized algorithms, says FastCoDesign's Suzanne Labarre. He then turned the volumes into a foreboding swell, using the laws of fluid dynamics.

But it gets better. Each point in the 3-D image will be manifested by a black ball -- milled by one of our favorite gadgets, a CNC machine -- in order to render the sculpture in the museum's courtyard. But attaching little oil-black blobs must be a terrible headache for a human, so Díaz is employing computer-assisted robots to manufacture the sculpture in situ, essentially making an entirely technology-assisted installation from start to finish. The sculpture will continue its transformation while on view, as a single robot will continue to add the spheres throughout the duration of the show. We can't imagine that the art handlers will take this mechanization lightly, with their work having gone to the 'bots. First they come for our jobs, and then the world!

Tags: cnc, cnc machine, CncMachine, FedericoDiaz, installation, MassMoca, sculpture, top

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