‘A Truly Magical Moment’ by Adam Basanta – Photo by Adam Basanta.
Technology – Two lovers in the middle of the dance floor. They link arms and begin to spin. The room blurs as they stare deep into each other’s eyes. How many times have you seen this scene in movies? Unfortunately, this year not all lovers have been able to spend a romantic night out, dance and be together. Artist and designer Adam Basanta has created Truly Magical Moment, a romantic kinetic sculpture which recreates such moment for lovers cooing via FaceTime, Apple’s video call technology.
Two facing iPhones are mounted on selfie-sticks anchored to a rotating base. The lovers can use their iPhones or computers to video chat the two FaceTime accounts. As soon as they are online, the sculpture starts to spin until the background blurs and warps, while the image of the dance-partner remains in focus.
After 60 seconds of a “Truly Magical Moment” – a wordless, “genuine connection” with another person – the rotation slows down to a standstill, while a nearby digital counter keeps count of the amount of “Magical Moments” enabled throughout the exhibition.
Adam Basanta’s work investigates technology as a meeting point of concurrent, overlapping systems, a nexus of cultural, computational, biological, and economic forces.
“Through a variety of media – installation, kinetic sculpture, sound, computational image-making – I employ the visual culture of commercial technologies as a core vocabulary, displacing them into an artistic context. Placing technologies in unconventional and absurd relationships to one another, I aim to create a fissure in their conventional functions, reflecting on their roles as contemporary prosthetics with which we co-exist in a hybrid ecology.”
A Truly Magical Moment was made possible by financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts and The Agosto Foundation. Microprocessor programming by Lucas Paris. Consultation: Antonin Sorel.
Images and video by Adam Basanta.
