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Wade Marynowsky

The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons

16 February - 12 March 2011

Filmed in 2009 at Performance Space Carriage Works, Sydney

Wade Marynowsky - The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons, 2010, Beyond Mediations, Mediations Biennale, The 2nd International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Poznan, Poland

Haunting John Buckley Gallery from February 16 – March 12 direct from Beyond Mediations, the 2nd International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Poznan, Poland, is Wade Marynowsky’s The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons. A ballet of robots traverse the gallery space, performing their theatrical movements to an unnerving soundscape.

Marynowsky’s robots are stripped of identifiable human likenesses, but still possess an eerie abstract resemblance to the human form. Dressed in elegant ball gowns, The Hosts move through the gallery as though performing a liturgical dance. Their menacing presence and the unsettling voices seek to lull us into their uncertain recital.

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s “Uncanny Valley” hypothesis speculates that human’s become alarmed and fearful the closer robots become to a true human likeness. Once a robot has been designed to replicate human nuances or appear tactilely human we fear a being potentially more dangerous than ourselves. They present as the living dead, incapable of the most privileged emotive qualities of humanity. Marynowsky’s automatons invoke these troubling dilemmas and toy with our competing senses of curiosity and apprehension.

The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons was supported by a project grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and commissioned by Performance Space, Sydney 2009

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