FELIX THORN

Extravagant music-making sculptures, that’s what Felix’s Machines are: various types of percussion instruments and idiophones are mounted together, mechanically activated, and rhythmically illuminated by small LED lights. At first glance, Felix Thorn’s works hardly seem assimilable with the digital universe, from which they actually draw their inspiration and with which they are tightly connected.

In fact, these baroque-esque machines are connected to, programmed by, and controlled with a laptop which activates them like any artificial sound generator would. In reality, Thorn’s relationship with the digital world is rather profound and abstract, and what seems like a pile of material in Machines is a metaphor for the complexity that electronics can attain. The rhythmic stratifications, which are visualized in the computer’s sequencer program, then become visible through the movement of the mechanisms and lights. Also, the sense of serene inevitability that Felix’s Machines transmit when in action evoke the inexorable pace of computer music.
The exposed mechanisms in their transparency are an emblem of the ease with which computers can create music, thus expanding the horizons of composition to many non-academic artists. Not to mention perhaps the most interesting aspect: the immense irony with which Thorn’s happy machines look at our present era.

24-year-old Felix Thorn, from Brighton, creates audiovisual sculptures. When connected to a computer, his machines translate his compositions into mechanical actions performed by customized drums and piano parts and animated by solenoids, springs, and motors. In this way, an electronic means of production is transposed into an acoustic output. Each element of the machine has its own LED synched to the music. In the darkened space of the gallery, this creates an arrangement of colored projections illuminating the sound.

TECHNIQUE

Musical instruments, pieces of musical instruments, and various objects, all individually functional thanks to the activation of servomotors. Movements, sounds, and lights controlled by a computer.