Projects 2007




 

Title: 50,000 pencils
Ongoing work in progress since 1980 - 2007
Media: Interactive performance - installation
Dimensions: 10 x 10 x 10 ft
Duration: Various

Dragan Ilic: Artist’s quote:

“The process of creation that comes from human interaction with machines (such as robots, lasers, and/or computer chips implanted in the body) fascinates me.  It is the primary theme in my work.”

Dragan Ilic: Artist’s Statement:

I explore the interaction between the creative mind and robotic activity.  To achieve this goal, I work in diverse media: drawing, painting, sculpture, video, installation, and interactive performances.   My giant multiple-line abstract drawings resemble futuristic musical scores or enormous computer chips.  These drawings come about through a collaboration between the human and the machine.

My devices include sets of graphite or colored pencils, pastels, or brushes that are clamped together in a straight parallel line of two pieces to five hundred pieces.  With my entire body, I set in motion the drawing devices that produce sound and imagery on a large sheet of paper placed on the ground.   I have used drawing devices since 1975, when I started to draw multiple-lines with fistfuls of pencils.   To date I have used, in various contexts, 250,000 sharpened graphite pencils painted red.

The interaction of the human and the tool derives from my ongoing interactive performance piece “Fifty Thousand Pencils,” begun in 1980 at Barbara Bratten Gallery in Tribeca.  During this performance, I pick up and repeatedly throw sharpened pencils from a pile of 50,000 heaped on the floor.  My movements are almost choreographed as I aim  toward a 110 x 120 inch sheet of paper attached to the wall.  I engage in this action numerous times until the audience begins to participate along with me and then without me, as I walk away to observe.  As the pencils hit the paper the impact creates a sound while thousands of random marks appear on the white surface.  Over time, these marks of graphite and red from the paint on the pencils accumulate on this one sheet of paper used at each encounter.   Temporarily the work becomes three-dimensional as pencils pierce the wall and stay put until another throw pushes the pencils away.   This piece is now in its twentieth-seventh year and will continue through 2009.

 Interactivity is an important part of my work.  Most recently, I created a sculpture/drawing device made of rubber and 7000 pencils.  It is a 4 foot by 17 foot sculpture that hangs from a wall and reaches to the floor (Kentler International Drawing Space, NYC, October-November 2003).   The viewer is invited to manipulate the sculpture, thus contributing drawing, sound, and movement to complete the piece.   The drawing occurs on the surrounding walls.   By doing this, the viewer experiences the process of making art. 

Physics and mathematics inform my work, as I explores in visual and aural terms the power of  technology—manual and robotic—in collaboration with human volition and intuition.    My work considers the threshold between our quasi-android relationship with tools today and the robotics of tomorrow.