Michael Rees ATC Lecture at UC Berkeley

About

"Michael Rees' conceptual art defies category, combining sculpture, animation, performance, video, installation, and computer software programs to express his interest in the body and its connection to mind and spirit. Rees' work references surrealism and other movements in art history, as well as western analytic science and eastern metaphysics. Rees is a self described ""pataphysician"", a maker of imaginary solutions and an investigator of the truth of contradictions and exceptions.

Rees will present recent works and the conceptual framework surrounding his investigation of mind, body and spirit. The ""body"" refers to his Monster Series and its attendant animations. These are concerned with the manipulated body and with multiple consciousness folded into an animate constructed body. The ""mind"" refers to his Sculptural User Interface with its parallel attendance to tendencies in conceptual art and computer science (the readymade, an extension of Joseph Beuys' notion of social sculpture and open source software as a ""ready made made ready"".) And finally the ""spirit"": Rees' Ajna Series is a conflation of western analytic science and eastern metaphysics with a special blend of surrealism from Bataille's Visions of Excess."

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