Artist7: Andy Cavatorta

Andy Cavatorta is another one of those artists able to blur, if not outright ignore, boundaries between the arts and sciences. Educated at MIT, Cavatorta developed his eclectic art style, combining robotics, music composition, computer science, and sculpture. He is arelatively new artist, but his work at the MIT Media Lab has already gotten him a great deal of renown. His work caught the attention of musician Bjork. He ended up creating musical robots for her recent tour. Called 'Gravity Harps', Cavatorta and his team of engineers and sculptors assembled the harps and mounted them on a large frame. The harps, once mounted, swing back and forth like pendulums, using the gravity and mass to hit the note at the proper time. The thought and planning behind the piece - I consider it installation art - are set 45 degrees from one another along the axis of the horizontal pole on which they're mounted. Here's a video of a demonstration....

In a Make Magazine interview, Cavatorta discusses the elegance of letting gravity set the rhythm of the notes. I find this surrender of control, purposely allowing the physical world to have a direct and very visible hand in the creation of a piece, allows for a relaxing sort of commune with the physical forces around us - gravity, in this case. It seems like Cavatorta's intention was to let physics be the main actor instead of himself. Often the rules and limits of nature can feel constraining and claustrophobic, but the Gravity Harps demonstrate this regularity in nature not as limits but as tools for creation.