Technology art in the 1980s seemed to take a page out of the Book of
Genesis. Artists were trash can alchemists retrofitting military and
industrial castoffs to refashion their pneumatic marionettes in their
own self image, choreographing mechanical spectacles that countered our
utopian dreams for the future with mutinous machines obeying their own
fuzzy logic. The gallery became a proscenium stage for Audio Animatronic
Punch and Judy shows grafting our post-human dreams onto a skeleton of
industrial bricolage. Powered by servo-motors, hydraulic pumps, MIDI
sequencing software, or even simple remote control, these
anthropomorphic actors performed cautionary counter-fables to the
aggressive optimism of SDI, favoring chaos over control, entropy over
order.

No more narcissistic than most creation myths, these crude cyborgs
fashioned from machine parts and appliances, adopted an aesthetics of
prosthetics to escape the limits of biology, hoping to jack-in to a
disembodied consciousness free from earthbound constraints. Borrowing
familiar metaphors from Isaac Asimov to William Gibson, the first wave
of technology art was posthuman before it was human, beyond psychology
because it dismissed it in what the critic Mark Dery described as
"ideation unperturbed by ideology." As the interface has become the
operative metaphor for technology in the 90s (witness Cronenberg's "bio
ports"), artists like Neil Grimmer attempt to recoup the lost natural
paradise that techno-transcendental hymns to progress have left behind,
even as his slick, industrially finished products seem to fetishize
technology's glossy, streamlined allure.

San Francisco based Grimmer graduated from the California College of
Arts and Crafts and immediately began a one year apprenticeship at Moss
Machines operating mills and lathes to manufacture high tolerance
machine parts. He is currently a candidate in the MFA program in product
design at Stanford which has allowed him to leapfrog the junkyard
aesthetic adopted by his precursors in favor of the cast aluminum shells
and highly finished LCD displays favored by the consumer electronics
industry. Grimmer's latest piece, "Meta-Physic" consists of seven wall
mounted platforms or "stations" that correspond with the seven chakra
points of the body. Each piece is a literal platform in that you plant
your face on their cozy chin rests, or "vibrating actuators," much like
an optometric exam, while a sensor gives a reading, showing the results
on an LCD display. The readings are relaxing text-based mantras that
conflate Sharper Image white noise or wave machines with the fortune
cookie messages of the mystic "eight ball" toy. As a design apparatus
for spiritual uplifting, Grimmer is able to skewer both the New Age,
utopian techno-shaman, and his evil twin, the unchecked product
designer, convinced no human dilemma, no tinkering with human habitats
is beyond his predictive engineering.

Grimmer has said, "These machines address the notions of progress with a
growing cultural need for 'connection.' The devices embody the ironic
assemblage of consumer fetish objects and a spiritual practice, with a
fundamental disconnect from the device itself." Grimmer's art is no
simple commodity critique commenting on our acquisitive desires for
material objects, but an unveiling of the subconscious desire for the
interface itself. If you doubt this, go to any gym and watch someone as
they use a nautilus machine: for every individual following the
prescribed instructions for use you'll see an equal number of people
manipulating the pulleys and levers to their own ends. That is, the goal
of cosmetic improvement often yields to a personal and instinctive
interaction with the machine.

Grimmer continues this investigation with "Aromatherapy: Forest in Four
Parts" which consists of six very clinical looking respiratory masks
suspended from the ceiling at head level with aluminum rods. Connected
to each mask is a glass jar. When a viewer plants his face in the mask
as if to receive oxygen he gets both a sensual face massage and the
olfactory pleasure of a soothing natural scent that is dispersed by an
airflow system controlled by a computer. Grimmer anticipates the fear we
bring to highly sterile, antiseptic environments evoked by operating
rooms and iron lungs and turns it back on itself offering a relaxing,
comforting experience that evokes a casual autumn stroll in an enchanted
wooden glen. He explains, "'Getting back to nature' describes an
absence, an aspiration to bridge the gap between humans and the natural
experience. The presence of this machine speaks more about the chasm
than the bridge that spans it."

"Aromatherapy" is part of a larger interactive installation called "The
Aesthetics of Obsolescence" that begins with a check-in station manned
by a surveillance camera. An illuminated sign that reads "place hand on
glass before entering" picks up the image of your hand on a monitor
while the camera takes a video snapshot of your portrait inviting you in
with the words "proceed." Grimmer takes simple stop-sign technology and
adds it to the current fascination with panoptical surveillance
popularized by webcams and department store security cameras, giving it
a menacing aspect. What appears to be an innocuous pedestrian traffic
control now becomes an index of the human matrix stored for who knows
what future, nefarious use.

Grimmer has described the installation as "focusing on the point where
displacement of the natural and replacement of the technological
intersect, the shift of perception which allows the vital to become the
obsolete." But even further, it describes a benevolent technology
conscripted to insidious ends. The digital counter that records our
entrance is benign in and of itself, but taken in conjunction with our
portrait and hand print it begins to hint toward a world of increasing
quantitative monitoring, of corporate recording of employee keystrokes
and phone calls to gauge productivity, and chain store "club cards" that
collect our spending habits reducing us to consumer profiles ripe for
direct mail blitzing. Grimmer's sculptural "products" may be
superficially seductive, but at their core they remain wolves in sheep's
clothing.