KEN RINALDO : Comprehensive Encyclopedia

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Ken Rinaldo born (1958) artist, inventor and theorist has pioneered new interactive art installations and experiences for humans and other animals. His robotic and bio-art installations work to intersect natural and technological cultures. In his works organic and electro-mechanical elements merge seamlessly and speak to a desire for a gentle symbiosis between natural and technological cultures.

His works are influenced by living systems theories, interspecies communication and artificial life research. Many of his works are concerned with ecological issues that are often not considered in the realm of technological progress.

Ken Rinaldo's works have been commissioned, displayed and presented nationally and internationally at exhibits and festivals such as Ars Electronica, The Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth Australia, Transmediale Berlin Germany, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art Finland, Museo de Arte De Caldas Colombia, ARCO Arts Festival Madrid, Spain, Banff Walter Philips Gallery Canada, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, V2 Dutch Electronica Arts Festival Rotterdam Holland, Image Du Future, Montreal Canada, Siggraph Los Angeles, The Exploratorium San Francisco and his works have been featured on TV and radio in Europe, USA, Australia, Japan and Singapore.

Rinaldo is an Associate Professor teaching interactive robotics and electronics, 3D modeling and rapid prototyping at The Ohio State University in the Art & Technology Program of the College of the Arts.

Rinaldo is concerned with an idealized melding or an intersection that he believes is possible between natural and technological systems. He often asserts that integration of the natural and non-organic electro-mechanical elements are part of an important and very natural confluence and co-evolution that is necessary between living and our evolving technological material. His art works are influenced and evolve with research into living systems theory, artificial life and the current technologies we use to model and express mimesis through our current understanding of natural living systems.

Rinaldo believes that interactive art can encourage active and self-determined relationship with a work of art and this can demonstrate and become both a real living system as well as a metaphor for a co-evolved and symbiotic coupling that can exist between nature and culture.

He uses open structures and exposed electronics and mechanics, as part of an open-electronic-aesthetic in proposing that there are often subtle but real structural relationships between circuits, wire and other natural living forms. Rinaldo believes this it is imperative that our technological systems model an evolved wisdom that exists in all natural living systems, as he hopes this will permit a kind of emergent and interdependent earth, that permits coexistence between our highly technologized world and the natural living world, which we depend for our survival.

THE AUTOTELEMATIC SPIDER BOTS, 2006 is an artificial life robotic installation consisting of 10 spider-like sculptural works that can interact in real-time and modify their behavior determined by their interaction with themselves, the viewer and their food source (recharge station). The Installation can be seen as an artificial life chimera; a robotic creature, seeing like a bat, randomly foraging for recharge like an ant and has the voice of an electronic twittering bird. This work pioneered the use of rapid prototyping plastics in the creation of a new robotic joint.

AUGMENTED FISH REALITY 2004 is credited as the first free range fish driven robot. It is an interactive installation of robotic fish-bowl sculptures that allow the fish to control the robots and in the process these works explore interspecies and transpecies communication. These could best be termed as “biocybernetic” sculptures that allow Siamese Fighting fish to use intelligent hardware and software to move their robotic bowls.

AUTOPOIESIS 2000 is a series of fifteen musical robotic sculptures that interact as a group consciousness, displaying dance like and choreographed behaviors and simultaneously interact individually and with participants in the installation as they self modify and evolve based on participant interactions.

2004 An Award of Distinction from Ars Electronica Austria for Augmented Fish Reality

2003 Commission Lille 2004 European Capital of Culture for the Augmented Fish Reality

2000 VIDA 3.0 International Artificial Life Competition First Prize for Autopoiesis

Mitchell Whitelaw, Metacreations: Art and Artificial Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004