From a distance, Elko Braas's installation looks like a minimalist sculpture: two lines that seem to float in space at a fragile angle. Up close, however, the seemingly simple joint turns out to be an elaborate mechanism, at the center of which a stone keeps its balance – or is kept in balance.
The fragility of the construction takes on a new dimension when one notices the joint mechanism's occasional trembling. It is not only the laws of statics and the properties of the materials that work together in this balancing act, but actuators and reactors – an intelligent, computer-controlled system of six motors. Elko Braas's thoughtful works are based on technical ideas that, in their absurdity and in the interplay of analog and digital components, develop a poetic depth. He succeeds in negotiating questions of immaterial digital space on a physical, tangibly comprehensible level.
For Try keeping it balanced, Braas sets two camera stabilization systems, known as “gimbals,” working against each other. They are complex apparatuses that work well as systems on their own. Interlocked against each other, though, feedback, control deviation and steering become chaotically entangled, and the result is a permanently unstable state. The leeway left by mechanical shortcomings and limited computing power becomes visible. The stone held between them threatens to fall to the ground at any moment.
This self-organizing balancing of forces stands as an example that can be compared, on many levels, with the moments of being overwhelmed that we experience every day. Here our trust in open cybernetic systems, which we rely on in almost every area of life even though their hypercomplexity keeps them impenetrable, plays out as an unsettling irritation. It is a sensory experience that raises a question: where do we stand today on the view of computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, who advised against building systems whose behavior the individual cannot follow? “The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.”
Text: Olaf Val – Monitoring – Kasseler Dokfest 2019
Camera stabilization systems (2 gimbals), stone, aluminum and steel elements, electronics, software, dimensions variable.
