{"id":17,"date":"2021-11-01T14:07:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-01T14:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/?p=17"},"modified":"2022-01-31T15:17:59","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T15:17:59","slug":"my-visit-to-the-tate-modern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/2021\/11\/01\/my-visit-to-the-tate-modern\/","title":{"rendered":"My Visit to the Tate Modern"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Anicka Yi’s Aerobes – the fun end of art!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I’m a self-confessed dinosaur when it comes to modern art; particularly when it comes to installations (2001’s \u00a320,000 Turner Prize Winner by Martin Creed, featuring an empty room with lights that flickered on and off every few seconds, anyone?…). On a visit to London last month, we popped into the Tate Modern, on the South Bank of the Thames, where gallery after gallery of splodges and stripes, videos of brutality and photos cataloguing just what a not-very-nice species we are, start to wear you down after a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I’m honest, it’s often not the pieces of art themselves that bother me – in fact, I consider myself to be open-minded enough to appreciate anyone’s vision and the amount of work and creativity that might have gone into making that vision a tangible thing. It’s the pretentious drivel that often accompanies such outragious monstrosities posing as art, trying to appeal to our inner-Emperor, when selecting a new wardrobe. I’m happy to accept the fun and freedom an artist experienced when emptying a bucket of paint over a large, fresh canvas, or the satisfaction another one had when painting his entire canvas blue. But when you try to tell me that the artist believed he’d discovered a totally new colour (he hadn’t), or that I should be looking deeper, to understand the underlying metaphor, then I’m afraid you’ve lost me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those that don’t know, the Tate Modern is housed in what used to be Bankside Power Station, and what is now the large entrance lobby – a tall, massive open space – used to be the Turbine Hall. And it was here that an installation entitled ‘In Love With The World’, by conceptual artist Anicka Yi really caught my attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The space is populated by floating machines the artist has called Aerobes. Based on ocean life forms and mushrooms, they ‘re-imagine artificial intelligence, and encourage us to think about new ways machines might inhabit the world<\/em>‘. Yi has also created unique scentscapes (apparently that’s a thing) which change weekly, with odours linked to a specific time in the history of Bankside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yi’s Aerobes are totally autonomous, requiring no human to pilot them. Each follows a unique flightpath generated from ‘Artificial Life’ software; a program that simulates the evolution and collective behaviours of natural life. The Aerobes respond to changes in the environment, including the heat signatures of people nearby and information received from electronic sensors placed around the Turbine Hall. All this sensory information affects their individual and group movements, so every encounter with them is unique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the majority of the work we saw on our visit totally failed to move me (at least in a pleasurable, or creative sense), these floating blobs, as we liked to describe them (of which there were about a dozen of them, of different shapes and sizes, gently floating around the hall) were the undisputed highlight. They just seemed like such fun, and innovative, yet oddly unpretentious. They just did their thing and everyone that came into the hall appeared to marvel at them. More importantly, they seemed to put a smile on everyone’s face!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should say that the exhibit is on until the 16th of January, and entrance to the Tate Modern is free, so if you live in, or anywhere near London, or plan to visit before then, I highly recommend you pop in and take a look at the Aerobes… trust me, they’re brilliant!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a self-confessed dinosaur when it comes to modern art; particularly when it comes to installations (2001’s \u00a320,000 Turner Prize Winner by Martin Creed, featuring an empty room with lights that flickered on and off every few seconds, anyone?…). On a visit to London last month, we popped into the Tate Modern, on the South Bank of the Thames, where...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modern-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/19"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/artstuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}