in the borderlands of robotics

He deals in constant deconstruction of art, entertainment and technology. He is among the pioneers who developed the Burning Man phenomenon. Kal Spelletich is a robotics genius who commutes between Hollywood and Silicon Valley – and also t he uncrowned king of t he hi-tech underground.

Behind a row of rundown warehouses in San Francisco’s Butchertown grows a wonderland of robot constructs, flame throwers and military metal gadgets between eerie iron trees and magical disco balls. This is where Kal Spelletich lives with his six-toed dog. “Do you want a cup of herbal tea,” he asks in a friendly manner as he invites me inside into an almost post-apocalyptic universe that besides being deadly is his home. It is at once scary and welcoming. There are no boundaries here: art, fire and a spiritual robot that he is currently building. All the projects that Spelletich have been part of seem to point towards a larger cultural shift. One example is Burning Man, which originated in San Francisco in the mid-1980s, and right now it is developments in robot technology.

EXPERIMENTS IN THE BORDERLANDS

Where the robot industry in general is situated somewhere in the robot evolution’s refinement of arms and hands with an eye to production and finish, a few frontrunners are experimenting with the robot’s brain. One such is Industrial Perceptions in Palo Alto, which deals with intelligent software and in this connection with subjects like perception, manipulation and control. However, where these point towards commercial breakthroughs, Kal Spelletich goes his own ways with his experiments in the borderlands of robotics. “I have always taken part in important subcultures. I often feel a bit like I am working in a vacuum, even when I’m in the eye of the storm,” he says. It is in the tension field between future product opportunities like intelligent robots and the world of arts that he is most at home. His art grapples with the ambivalent state that human beings were planted in when the machine was invented: we are at one and the same time fascinated and frightened by our own power of creation. “I guess art is a bit like staring directly at your own mortality. The more we people choose to stay at home and just sit in front of a computer, playing games or watching movies – instead of going out and getting real experiences – the more we will be attracted by events or art that remind us that we are mortal; that we are human beings and that things don’t always go the way we expect.” As a part of the exhibition Weird Science, Spelletich built a ‘Space Measurer’ from small mirrors and blue laser lights that can measure the speed of light. New York Times has written about his art: “If the essence of science is the development and testing of theories about reality, then you can’t say that the artists in this unfocused but intriguing show are doing science, weird or otherwise. Where the two domains [art and science] can overlap, though, is in playing with technology.” It is in such playing that Kal Spelletich develops robots that tickle our idea about the unlikely and our perception of ourselves as human beings. “People desire real-life adventures. The more this is taken away you or denied you, the sicker you become. Personally, I have never been particularly good at passive entertainment. Most people have never loaded a gun, hunted an animal, cleaned it and boiled and eaten it. Yet these are the most basic, simple and early experiences. I don’t say that killing animals is the right thing to do, but it is an ur-experience that most people no longer experience. I try to give people a cathartic experience while also challenging their prejudices about what art and content can be. The key is to add a story or concept to the aesthetic. Parties, celebrations, substance abuse, alcoholism, violence, sex, the human condition breaks down and pulls itself up again. They reflect all the real things that can shape and change our lives: like a carnival.”

PUNK

Besides his artistic vision and his playing with the expressions of technology he is known to be one who defines technological directions and who spits out trends long before they land in the time the rest of us live in. Hence, it is not rare that people come knocking on his door. This might be NASA in need of his take on a new invention, Hollywood film producers – like the idea men behind the movie The Matrix – needing to visualise the future, or ordinary Silicon Valley engineers on the run from corporate desks and constricting suits that miss playing with the electronic universe. Spelletich was born in an elevator and grew up as number seven of a sibling flock of nine in Davenport, Iowa. “The city has recently been elected the worst place to live in the US,” he says with clear ambivalence about his upbringing: “I got a chemistry set when I was nine and experimented with electricity, fire and fireworks. At the same time, I started working in my dad’s construction firm.” When fifteen, he ran away from home and lived in abandoned buildings and on the street. When punk rock hit the 70s, he saw the light. He felt at home in this noisy and anarchic universe of music. “It was the DIY energy and the anti-authoritarian rebellion that fascinated me – that you could create art while destroying the framework,” he says. Kal Spelledich was in the middle of the crucible, and he still is as part of the collaborative SEEMEN, which throughout its history has developed technological DIY platforms and explored future scenarios with interactive robots and kinetic art. However, you will never get him to mention the icons with whom he in his time has experimented and created art. He evaluates his collaborations by their creative, artistic and anarchic value, not by the names that have become part of the history of art, music and movies. It is almost an insult if you ask him for names. In general it is almost impossible to make him answer questions that have to do with specific projects or products he has taken part in creating. He is the eternal punk soul who disappears when a process becomes too concrete. However, even though the many things hanging from ceilings and on walls and shelves with whimsical inventions in his San Francisco cave hisses ‘fuck the system’, they are also nostalgic memorabilia from his collaborations with everything from Hollywood blockbusters like Titanic to NASA.

SLACKER

One thing he can’t run away from is when he was immortalised in the cult movie Slacker (1991) by Richard Linklater (the man behind e.g. the movie trilogy Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight; ed.). They met each other in Austin in 1988. “I met Kal Spelletich at an art event with all sorts of insane experiments. Even then I knew that he was something special. His head was full of ideas, and his art had this particular physical dimension. I remember him saying something like: ‘The art of painting is a dead genre – I don’t even want to talk about it.’ He had made a backpack from a TV set as a commentary on the industry. When I had to devise the scene in Slacker with this guy in a room full of television sets flickering in an endless river of clips, I thought of Kal and his TV backpack. That he himself was a part of the TV was an incredible sight. And then I had always been mad about Kal’s performance and was sure he would be good on the screen. He is a true pioneer and totally badass! He is guaranteed to always be ahead of the pack, never at the back,” Richard Linklater says. Spelletich’s role in the movie – the TV guy – is a description of a particular type of media user that has stopped looking for the truth in the physical world and instead finds it on TV or in a smartphone. “I wrote about this ten years ago, and it is truer now than ever,” he says. “Most of our reality is shaped by the media. We need live experiences; a digital recording will never replace a real-time event, and I’m not talking about a practiced set or playing timed to a heartbeat. Perhaps there would be an aesthetic or beauty in that, but it always contains a loss of spontaneity, of reality.” And Spelletich keeps working with this attitude. Where the robot industry at the moment sets the boundaries for future commercial possibilities regarding the individual experience through recognition and hence also faith, Kal Spelletich is in the process of proving that robots can be built to have a sixth sense. This may seem a smidgen insane, but this has always been the case with Spelletich’s art. He experiments with possibilities we cannot yet imagine.

Kalman Spelletich (b. 1960) grew up in Davenport, Iowa. He ran away from home at the age of 15 and lived as a squatter for many years. In 1980, Spelletich was accepted at the University of Iowa where he took a bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Arts and in his own words “discovered art through the camera”. He later got a master’s degree from the University of Texas. Spelletich is very active on the underground art scene and has since 1994 exhibited in many galleries, almost always with a focus on deconstructing the machine or experimenting with human-machine relations. In 1988, Spelletich was co-founder of the art collective SEEMEN, which is an “interactive machine art performance collective”. The collective specialises in performances and is particularly well known for its great influence on developing the concept of Burning Man. Spelletich has also worked with other art collectives like Survival Research Laboratories, which also works with machine performance art and especially operates with large technical installations. Spelletich has made special effects for several movies, including Titanic and The Matrix, and he has acted in the cult movie Slacker.

This conversation was published in SCENARIO Magazine 01.2014