MachineMachine /stream

Simon Faithfull's exhibition Gravity Sucks and his recent talk at the British Film Institute focuses largely around his examination of that most elementary of forces we experience. What Wikipedia calls a "consequence of the curvature of spacetime which governs the motion of inertial objects" and what we call gravity.

In what has come to be sometimes called Gravity Art, there is actually a couple of artists who have chosen to use it as their medium, often in somewhat beautiful yet futile actions, "heroic failures". Among these however, there's different directions of movement, namely down (submission) and up (escape).

The most relevant of the down-camp would probably be the late Dutch-Californian artist Bas Jan Ader whose body of work only contains a few pieces but who has significantly gained in importance as people have been re-discovering him over the last few years. Ader's gravity-related work focuses on the "The artist's body [and the way that] gravity makes itself its master" as