Steel to robotics: The evolution of David Bowen's sculptures

For this month's alumni spotlight, we check in with David Bowen (B.F.A. Sculpture '99), an associate professor of sculpture and physical computing at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Bowen's creations engage elements of the natural world with autonomous machines through robotics, open source data, and custom software.

In the nearly two-plus decades since graduating, he has tracked government-owned buoys to visualize the surface of distant oceans; detected the flight patterns of houseflies to operate blimps and compose tweets; and measured the growth of plants for responsive circadian drawings. Today, he's preparing an installation for the Minnesota Museum of American Art that captures real-time wave videos from locations all over the world.

Here, Bowen talks about the evolution of his creative practice, teaching young artists to incorporate technology in their work, and staying busy in the studio.

HERRON: What kinds of work did you make as a Herron student?

DAVID BOWEN: At that time, I was doing a lot of steel fabrication – welding, grinding, and assembling steel sculptures. Towards the later part of my career at Herron I became interested in kinetic sculpture – making things that have moving parts in simple analog ways with switches that would turn things on or cranks that were interactive. It was really simple kinetic sculpture. I also got a job at a bike shop and that influenced what I was doing with the mechanisms by integrating a lot of repurposed bike parts.

HERRON: What themes or concepts were you exploring in your work?

BOWEN: I think a consistent thing I looked at then and even now is combining natural and mechanical elements within my work, at least as a starting off point. As I got into later work and using robotics, I started to realize that maybe that contrast was not so clear.

I've always been fascinated by nature. In fact, as a young person growing up in Indianapolis, my grandparents had a pet shop in Irvington and I spent a lot of time there. Being with the animals and the elaborate systems my grandfather would create to keep tropical fish alive was always very fascinating to me. So, this combination of a mechanism designed to maintain a living thing is where a lot of that interest came from.

HERRON: Conversely, how has your work evolved into the realm of data-driven sculptures?

BOWEN: I attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for my M.F.A. and chose that program to work with a particular kinetic sculptor. His name was Guy Baldwin. He was a great resource for analog kinetics, such as on and off switches and motors.

As a graduate student at this big research university, part of my thesis requirement was to seek out faculty outside of the art department. I was fortunate enough to find a mechanical engineering professor who was interested in working with me and introduced me to programmable microcontrollers, which are basically little computers that you can plug into your laptop or desktop computer and program to input data from various sensors, or output data like movement or light.

That really opened up the possibilities with the kinetic systems I made and gave me the ability to integrate more complexity into the way that these systems would respond to natural inputs. So, at that time I became a coder. I'm not classically trained but I've been using coding in my work ever since.

HERRON: In 2009, you had a show in the Herron galleries titled "if/then." Tell us about that work and how you incorporated housefly movements to activate the installation.

BOWEN: The title was taken from computer language called BASIC, using if-then statements. If the fly does this, then the mechanism does that.

For the installation at Herron, I had a piece titled "swarm." That piece was commissioned in 2008 by a gallery that's no longer around called Exit Art in New York. They had an open call and were looking for works about the brain. I sold those curators on the idea of 500 living houseflies inside a 10-inch-diameter acrylic sphere as the brain of an autonomous robot.

So, inside of this sphere were flies and food and water to keep them happy and healthy, as well as some sensors that would detect their movements. Data from the sensors was then mapped or scaled to output, basically drive motors, so if a fly was landing on a sensor or flying past a sensor, that data would then be mapped to a motor. Essentially, the flies were driving the rover around the gallery space.

There was a black-taped ring on the floor and the device had some sensors that would look down and detect the ring and keep it within that space. But occasionally it would bounce off of the ring, kind of like a fly bouncing off the inside of the sphere or on a window.

HERRON: How did you utilize data for "tele-present water?"

BOWEN: With a lot of my recent work, I'm getting data from what's happening from distant locations and collecting movement from the surface of the water. You can do that relatively simply with an accelerometer – a thing that measures movement of X, Y, Z. – and map that data to various outputs.

I wanted to get some water movement data, so I needed to make a sealed, waterproof container that has batteries, an accelerometer, a remote controller, and maybe cellular output so that it could pipe that data to the piece. It was working through this technical conundrum of making this thing work and making it last, when a friend of mine – a technician at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) where I'm now teaching – mentioned NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they've already done that.

They've made bouys that collect all kinds of data and they've done a way better job than I could ever do. I checked out NOAA and it turns out that these data are free for anybody to use. At that point, it was just a matter of writing some custom software that would pull data from a particular buoy. It was the simplest solution rather than trying to make my own thing.

HERRON: There are a lot of free data sets out there that you can be incorporated into artwork.

BOWEN: Absolutely. That was back in 2011 and it's really blown up with the Internet of Things and connectivity. There are even weather apps from which you can grab data on your smartphone. I'm working on a project right now where I can plug in some GPS coordinates and get a satellite photo from the other side of the world of the clouds and the ocean. It's right there at your fingertips.

HERRON: What challenges have arisen with using data to inform your work and how have you adapted your workflow?

BOWEN: Things seem to be ever-changing and there are technical challenges. For example, maybe one of the buoys is down, so you have to have a plan-B in place or switch over to a different buoy.

HERRON: What percentage of your studio time is spent programming versus creating the sculptures?

BOWEN: I'd say a third of the time in my studio is making, so even with digital fabrication you're still having to do the making. It's still relevant. A third of the time is coding, typing the code to make the piece do what you want to do. Then, the other third of the time is what I call debugging or testing.

I've got a commission I'm working on for the Minnesota Museum of American Art that I'm running right now. It's a two-part piece and I'm running half of it constantly in my studio just to see what's going to break and then fix it to get ahead of any issues. Luckily, it seems to be working pretty well. But there's nothing worse than going to an exhibition of kinetic, interactive, or data-driven work that's supposed to do something and it's not doing anything because it's broken. I try to avoid that as much as I can. I'm not an engineer, though. I have a little bit of engineering training from graduate school, but a DIY spirit comes through in my work.

HERRON: Are there any happy accidents with your work?

BOWEN: I think it's impossible to make things perfect, especially when you're pulling from outside data sources. You really never know what's going to happen. I have this piece, "fly revolver," that's in the Beijing Media Art Biennale right now. It's a gun that's aimed and fired by flies. The flies are in control.

It's probably the most political thing I've ever done. I did it pretty soon after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The first time it was exhibited was in Chicago, and Illinois was the last state in the U.S. to pass the concealed-carry law, where you can carry a gun wherever you want. I was invited to participate in an exhibition related to that law passing. Of course, for the exhibition it had to be a very convincing replica revolver. The flies fired that thing so many times that the gun broke, which I thought was pretty great.

HERRON: You've exhibited widely – nationally and internationally – in exhibitions related to the intersection of art, science, and technology. From an artist's perspective, how do you perceive the connection between these seemingly disparate fields?

BOWEN: I don't see art and science as super disparate, especially in terms of the work that I do. I like to read books by Oliver Sachs, Steven Johnson, Howard Ringold, and Brian Green that are inspirational – thinking about the bigger picture, the universe, how we interact with the world and artificial intelligence, and how it's changing us as a species. I'm fascinated by science. But I'm not trying to solve any scientific problems or anything like that. As an artist, I tend to ask questions rather than answer them.

HERRON: What key lessons did you learn at Herron?

BOWEN: The biggest thing I picked up at Herron is a strong work ethic and dedication to studio practice. You've got to put the time in. That was something that was very much instilled in me early on. We were also encouraged to take courses outside of our field. I took a physics course, "Physics for Educators," and I didn't see it so much at the time but I think it influenced my studio practice down the way.

I was also hired by my professor, Eric Nordgulen. He was my mentor at Herron and really gave me a lot. That was an amazing opportunity and I was very fortunate to have that experience because it showed me the nuts and bolts of installing a piece, pouring concrete footing, packaging artwork for shipping, and basically, everything about running a studio. That was incredible and something you don't necessarily get in the classroom.

HERRON: As an educator, how do you approach teaching students in today's rapidly changing creative and technical environments?

BOWEN: I'm implementing a course, "Robotics and Physical Computing," here at UMD. It's like a "Sculpture II" class where students start to integrate programmable microcontrollers. It gives them the ability to start bringing in data sources and trying to make more complex time-based systems.

The beauty with all of this microcontroller stuff that I do is that I tend to stick with open-source software. I use Processing, which has an amazing community of people who are doing similar things. I use Python occasionally, and the microcontrollers I'm using are Arduinos. There are other things that people use like Max/MSP, which are great but they cost $600. I think it's better for students to use open-source software because it's free. I use it myself for a lot of my studio practice.

Last year, I did an artist residency in San Francisco with Autodesk. They have an amazing makerspace on a pier right off of the Embarcadero, giving artists access to this incredible equipment and incredibly smart people. After I got back from Autodesk, I felt confident enough in my abilities to teach digital fabrication in my curriculum at UMD. We got a CMT machine last year and I started to integrate that, too.

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A post shared by David Bowen (@davidbowenart) on Feb 14, 2018 at 5:18pm PST