STANDING FOR SOMETHING
Artist Wit Pimkarnchanapong on his latest surprise: a kinetic sculpture
There is one thing you can always expect from Wit Pimkarnchanapong’s works: the unexpected.
The 41-year-old artist has dabbled with a multitude of art forms: video art, motion graphics, audience-participation experiments, installations, architecture and even stage production — and there’s always surprising little gimmicks or tricks within each one. He’s a pretty big deal, with his artworks exhibited at the Torino Trienniale, the Sharjar Biennale, the Singapore Biennale. He also has permanent works in the Singapore Art Museum and the Queensland Art Gallery.
Having worked with a multitude of mediums, Wit’s latest obsession has been kinetic sculptures — or in layman’s terms, moving sculptures. His newest piece, named Habiko was commissioned by Sansiri Public and stands tall at their Habito community mall on On Nut 1/1. It’s a hard piece to miss. Sitting on a metal stand is a spherical, porous metal structure with hundreds of antennas sticking out from it. Whirring inside the sphere is an orange robot arm, slowly and carefully pushing each antenna up and down to create whatever shape it has been programmed to make. It’s almost a meditative experience to watch the robot slowly doing its work. Wit doesn’t expect anyone to stay until the shape is finished though, as it takes on average three to four hours to take form.
“Is it exciting? No,” said Wit bluntly. “It’s deeper than that. One day it’s one form and the next day it’s another form. I feel like we’re addicted to this ‘wow’ factor. We’re satisfied and we go find something else that’s ‘wow’. It’s like searching for a new drug.”
Habiko was created to be slower, to last longer and to have viewers think about the relationship between the form and the space it occupies.
“Once the shape is changed, the light [from the sky] is changed as well. It’s like waiting for the low tide and high tide. Once it’s a pyramid shape, you get a certain feeling, once it’s a spherical shape, it’s another feeling,” explains Wit.
It’s the first time in the world, claims Wit, that this specific type of robot is part of a piece of artwork. “The Kuka is a tool,” he said, talking about the brand of the robotic arm. “When you talk about kinetic sculptures no one thinks about this robot. They think about how to move each individual piece — but we don’t have to think about that any more, because I have this robotic arm now.”
The concept is quite new, and yet quite old. The first robot in the world created in the 19th century featured a man hidden in a box manipulating a puppet to move.
“What I’m doing is making fun of it and critiquing that,” said Wit. “That was a person in a robot. This is a robot in a robot. Shell in the shell, not ghost in the shell.”
Having an intelligent robot, however, doesn’t mean that this project was easy for Wit. It took two years and reportedly four million baht for him to finish.
Due to the Kuka’s extreme accuracy, Wit had to design the antenna placements with absolutely perfect precision. The spherical shape of the structure makes it even harder to build. “No construction company agreed to do the sphere for us,” said Wit. “And I changed engineering teams twice. I ended up having to do everything myself.”
But in the end, it was worth it. “If you talk about trends, every building has a media facade,” he said. Every mall doesn’t have a standout landmark.
“There’s an LED screen and people would crowd around like moths to a flame. But what we’re doing is skipping all that to go to an area no one has explored yet. And I have to give credit to the commissioner [for letting me do this].”
Is it exciting? No. It’s deeper than that. One day it’s one form and the next day it’s another form