Ned Kahn
Location
Sebastopol, CA
Mediums
Aluminium, Stainless Steel
Artist Info
Kahn’s works also provide insight into contemporary society. On the one hand, he has a strong commitment to making projects that respond to their environment and to individual viewers. On the other hand, he seeks out natural complexity, and he knows intimately how natural turbulence can develop in technological systems. His technologically intricate installations are premised on a desire to present natural systems to human viewers. These hybrid constructions, in effect, revise the assumed definitions of technological, natural, and social systems by showing their interdependence. As Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist says, “In our own lives, in our social environments, we see fluctuations and instability, many choices and limited predictability. Non-equilibrium physics has developed similar notions of ‘unstable systems’ and the dynamics of ‘unstable environments’.”
Kahn brings unpredictability and turbulence into a social context, and uses scientific and aesthetic strategies to make natural complexity vivid, comprehensible, and beautiful. Art and science both encourage – if not demand – keen observation of the natural world. Artists and scientists alike use empirical methods in their research, to test hypotheses and, ultimately, to produce results. That these results often get swathed in disparate interpretations, depending on varied artistic or scientific contexts and on the perceived boundaries of institutional settings, such as an art museum, an educational science centre, or an engineering facility, does not undermine the validity of the observations. To quite the contrary, Kahn’s projects exemplify contemporary tendencies to defy institutional and disciplinary categories, to invite public participation, and to integrate scientific and artistic aims. His is an aesthetic of turbulence.
- nedkahn.com
Spotlight
new york aquarium facade
2018
Medium
Aluminium & Stainless Steel
