In the Spark episode “Technophiles,” viewers encounter Paul DeMarinis‘s art which is filled with things both simple and magical. People experiencing his art might be standing outside, listening to the music created by a sound-modulated water jet against the fabric of an open umbrella, or they might be seeing a gas flame, flicking in lockstep to the breaths of dictators’ recorded radio addresses.
Ever since watching atomic tests light up the Nevada sky as a young boy, DeMarinis has been fascinated by the human relationship with technology. In 1971, he began working as a multimedia electronic artist, becoming one of the first to use a personal computer as an art-producing tool. He has since created numerous performance works, sound and computer installations, and interactive electronic inventions. His art has taken him around the world — DeMarinis has performed and displayed his art in galleries from New York to Tokyo, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and at the 1998 World Expo in Lisbon.
DeMarinis works in the intersection of tradition and progress, striving to cover modern knowledge’s bases. He is a Renaissance man in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, a person comfortable in both the arts and the sciences, whose kind is slowly disappearing as society becomes increasingly specialized. Aside from being an artist, he is a historian, an experimenter, a chemist, a physicist, an engineer, a programmer, an inventor, a computer scientist and an archaeologist. A multidisciplinary approach helps him distill technology’s many facets into art installations that aim to be at once comprehensible and profound.
The interplay between current and “orphaned” technologies is of particular interest to DeMarinis as he looks back in time and sees forward to our present state, achieving a perspective that unlocks secrets otherwise lost in the zeal for progress. As Peter Richards of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco has written about DeMarinis, “His is the job of exploring the relationship between questions being asked in our culture and the tools being developed to find the answers.” Questions as large as these sometimes require a person like DeMarinis, who can take history and technology together in his arms and nurture it into art.
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