Arthur Ganson "Machines and the Breath of Time"

I attended Arthur Ganson's talk, "Machines and the Breath of Time," presented by the LongNow Foundation at Fort Mason.

It was beautiful, each piece so elegantly engineered. Ganson's exquisite mechanical art was matched only by his zen-like explanations: "all of these machines are self-portraits," "[I don't make machines that are utilitarian, I make] machines that are contemplation."

His wire machines, like line drawings in motion, play with repetition through time and space. They create complex poetic paradoxes and parables of immateriality: of infinite speed and fractional gravity. My favorites are Machine with Concrete, Margot's Cat, Cory's Yellow Chair, and Machine with Wishbone.