Flabbergasted by Jeremy Mayer's Art Work

Via Inhabitat ( http://inhabitat.com ) I’ve discovered the astonishing Typewriter Reasembly art work created by Jeremy Mayer...

Not only the appearance of the sculptures, but also their souls are futuristic. During the creation of the sculptures, the artist reassembled the different pieces of old typewriters so “I don't have to buy anything or use anything that doesn't come from a typewriter. “

And finally, the best of all! We had the opportunity and the immense pleasure of asking a few questions to the artist. So now it is time for me to shut up and let you enjoy the interview.

Q. You said you are interested in science fiction; do you think that future will be green or that's science fiction?

A. There are people who will mass-produce "green" products for profit, and people who will put newly available technologies to work in creating more energy with less waste. People are thinking differently, and I think it's a good start, but from my experience, I think I would suggest to people to stick to the small things that they can do at home, but don't assume that "green" corporations or products are going to save the world.

Q. Could you say art/sculpture through recycling is kind of a new trend among the artist community?

A. It's not new at all, though it wouldn't have been called recycling. Dada, the Surrealists, the Nouveaux Realistes, and the Arte Povera movement all used discarded or found items as a means of eschewing what they thought were the dispassionate and sterile ideals of "high art".

I'm sure if you dug deeply that you could find many examples of creative reuse throughout human history. Much of the time it had to do with the value of the raw material. Now value has to do with the novelty or aesthetic of the raw material, and the value of novelty is very interesting to me. I like the idea that I can make something that would be really difficult to 3D print.

Relating specifically to typewriters, there are a quite a few artists in the past who used their parts for art. Robert Klippel, Esphyr Slobodkina, Raoul Hausmann, Jean Tinguely, and Ed Rusha are the first names that come to mind. There are many more.

The idea of recycling is an old one, but it's importance is much more urgent than it's ever been.

Q. I was wondering, is there a message behind the fact that you transform what's originally biological into something mechanical? Could it traduce your vision of future?

A. When we designed the typewriter, we put ourselves into it. The desire I have to take them apart and reassemble them comes from this fascination in finding subtle curves and forms that I find seductive or beautiful in a human or an animal form. The future of this kind of art is that it will develop into a sort of traditional style of art, or more specifically, craft. I don't feel like I'm doing anything "futuristic" at all.

The future I see will have a lot of "stuff", but the mechanical processes making it all work will be invisible to most of us. People will always have some nostalgia for visible mechanical processes, especially now that the machines and gadgets we use have processes and functions that are essentially invisible to the untrained eye, and run on electrons darting here and there as opposed to the gross mechanical processes we've been accustomed to for the last few thousand years. I think that what

I do is a sort of homage to the ingenuity of the people who did the work of designing typewriters, and my way of recognizing the hundreds of thousands of man hours and trial and error involved in the more than 100-year design cycle of the typewriter. It's also a way of saying that we'll disassemble our machines and repurpose them in much the same way we'll have to disassemble our collective knowledge as people and reassemble it to fit in a changing world.

Q. Recycled sculptures are part of a sustainable commitment or just the result of a typewriter interest?

A. My very first interest in taking apart that very first typewriter in 1994 was about my fascination with the typewriter as a machine. After taking a few apart, I realized that I could use just typewriters and nothing else- all I needed were tools to take them apart and reassemble them. I don't have to buy anything or use anything that doesn't come from a typewriter.

As a 20-something in the 90's, that was very appealing to me as a practice of recycling, since no one was using typewriters, nor were they valuable yet. Now I've shifted my thinking about this a bit as the popularity of typewriters has recently surged because of this nostalgia that I spoke of (often borrowed) for visible mechanical processes.

Now the typewriter has a use again in the technological world, even if for affectation, and continues to be very useful in many countries all over the globe. I'm thinking now about my participation in disassembling the past willingly, even giddily, as a metaphor that speaks of the dire need for a dialog about our transition into the future. It's quite obvious that we have some sticking points in that many people will simply not be participating in that transition.

They will hold on to these things that give them comfort. What does it do to them to see it systematically and willfully destroyed or repurposed? How will they resist it? How futile is that resistance? I feel like there is a statement in what I'm doing that's in line with what I just said, but a lot of it is hindsight. First and foremost, the process of making us out of something we made without introducing more waste is really interesting to me.

For more information about the artist, visit http://jeremymayer.com

Guio