This Year’s Seattle Art Fair Promises to Be a Raucous Affair. Here Are 3 Works You Won’t Want to Miss
This year's event is bringing fair goers AI art, earthquakes, and a member of Pearl Jam. (It is Seattle, after all.)
This year's event is bringing fair goers AI art, earthquakes, and a member of Pearl Jam. (It is Seattle, after all.)
The Seattle Art Fair has been shaking things up in recent years, quite literally. Last year the fair made headlines with an opening-night battle between dinosaur-like robots; this year, not to be outdone, the fair is bringing together an ambitious set of programming that includes… an earthquake simulator.
So while the rest of the art world maybe getting sleepy for the summer, we can expect a fair share of excitement coming out of the Emerald City this week. Ahead of the fair, now in its fifth edition, we’ve put together a list of can’t-miss special features.
Already creating a buzz is artist Stephanie Dinkins’s Not The Only One (N’TOO), a sculpture with evolving artificial intelligence, that recounts the story of one black American family across generations. The voice-interactive AI was trained on information provided by by three generations of women from one family, but the story itself is told from the first-person perspective of the AI. Fair visitors will be able to speak to the AI, hear its story, and participate in its evolution.
Swedish artist duo Bigert & Bergström are known for creating conceptual installations and interactive public art, which pry at the connections between humanity, technology and environment. They do this, generally, with quite a sense of humor: recently their “Solar Egg,” a golden, portable sauna opened lakeside in a Swedish town. For the fair, they’ve created Incubator for Earthquakes—a kinetic dinner table sculpture and vibrating motor, which is intermittently subjected to earthquake tremors that set the dinner china jumping.
Infinite Color and Sound, the creative collaboration between artist and musician Mike McCready of Pearl Jam and painter Kate Neckel, will return to the birthplace of grunge for a series of creative performances. The visual art and music duo create works ranging from collage, sculpture, painting, drawing, music, and performance in semi-choreographed routines. Red Hot Chili Peppers’s guitarist Josh Klinghoffer will join the duo for their performance at the fair.
Seattle Art Fair will take place at CenturyLink Field Event Center, August 2–4, Collectors Preview, invitation only August 1, 3:30 p.m.–6 p.m. and Opening Night Preview, 6 p.m–9 p.m.
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