This Thursday evening, Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts (FOFA) gallery is hosting a vernissage for Bill Vorn’s show Red Light. Behind the black curtain is quite an impressive scene: enter a smoky room with dim red lighting with robots hanging from the ceiling. They seem to be checking us out, when the robots detect our presence, bursts of smoke emanate from the corners of the room and bright flashing lights overwhelm our senses.
This interactive piece is much different from what this genre usually features. It does not simply react to the viewer. These robots seem to have the power of choice.
Presently teaching electronic arts at Concordia, Vorn is also in charge of the A lab, Hexagram’s robotic research lab. Working in the field of robotic arts since 1992, Vorn has acquired many awards over the years, including the Life 2.0 award and the Leprecon Award for Interactivity.
“I didn’t really have any plan for it, and then suddenly I started to work on a structure and then it turned into an arm robot,” Vorn told The Concordian, ” Then I made a few of them, and it became this installation.” We caught up with him a few days before his vernissage.
It’s kind of a creepy installation, in the sense that, well, it’s alarming. There are these lights flashing and these arms staring at you.
Well, I would say that my main goal was to create a perceptual effect on people, it’s not really about understanding anything. It’s just like you get into the space and then all your senses get overwhelmed by what’s going on: the light, the smoke… The idea is to facilitate the believability of the robots. Because they’re quite abstract, they’re really machines and the idea is to try to make the viewers think that there’s really some kind of life in them. It wouldn’t work that well if it was a bare environment with white light. So I have to transform the environment. Of course, there’s an aesthetic choice to make, and yes, I prefer dark, sort of industrial types of environments for that.
A lot of your pieces have names like Hysterical Machines and Le Proc
