GOOGLE'S EYES

Merijn Bolink (NL)

This piece has been made using Goggles, an android app by Google. The app is meant to recognize monuments, objects and people, but when it is shown new objects, it will provide images of things it 'thinks' are similar. The results are remarkable, poetic and sometimes really striking.

The artist made a small clay sculpture of one half of a car tyre to begin. The car tyre was then scanned by the app, and gave twenty results of images it sees as similar — of these, the artist selected the most interesting one, a human jawbone, and produced it in clay. The subsequent sculpture was then scanned by the app, which thought it was a hand, so the artist made the hand... and so on. The series of objects has been fired to stoneware after it was completed in clay.

PROFILE

Merijn Bolink is a Dutch sculptor whose sculptures are typically based on real objects, like a bicycle, a stuffed dog or a cigarette. He makes new versions of these objects, trying to understand what they are, hoping to discover something magic in the process of transition, or even something mystical. He once cut his own piano into pieces to make two copies. Bolink is inspired by the idea that all matter is on its way to becoming something else, and that we humans can only interact with that matter for a relatively short time, trying to make sense out of what we experience.

Recently Merijn is working around the subject of artificial intelligence, fascinated by the notion that supercomputer systems might become self-aware and generate thoughts and emotions in the near — even very near — future.