Owen McAteer

Owen McAteer is an Irish new media artist, based in Madrid. He creates living artworks using code and mathematical systems that manifest as kinetic displays and interactive installations of colour & light.

His art practice explores the human connection with the hidden world around us and our desire to understand it, and in doing so, uncover the beauty within the unpredictable.

His work has been exhibited internationally at galleries, museums & public spaces including; Christie’s, Phillips, HOFA, ArtBlocks, Pisa, CCCC.

A series of kinetic displays comprising 14x4 digits, housed in a black-dyed Oak frame, each one unique with its own animations and personality, these kinetic sculptures aim to bridge the gap between hard data and natural movement. Transforming from rigid mathematical sequences and counting into soft, wave-like patterns. It is an exploration of how the most basic building blocks of technology can be used to mimic the unpredictable, fluid flow of the natural world.

INLINE asks what it means to make something in a world that always exists somewhere else too. McAteer's displays answer by refusing the split. Each one is code — a counting routine, a sine function, a rule for growth — and each one is fifty-six mechanical digits turning over in a frame of black-dyed oak, audibly, at the pace the code decides. Take either half away and there is no work left. The code is McAteer's own, and so is the hardware it runs on.

What separates the four is where their instructions come from. Waves and Cluster Growth work from within, following a wave and a lattice. Lines and Cosmic bursts take theirs from outside the box: from radio static, and from the background radiation registered by a Geiger counter mounted on the frame. Two of these works are, quite literally, tuned to signals no one in the room can see.

Gallery 3 gives the series a room of its own. Seen together, four boxes with the same frame, the same grid and the same digits behave as four different temperaments — the clearest way to show that what matters here is not the object, but what drives it. Listen as well as look: the turning of the digits is part of the work.