Brian Oakes
BETATESTERS / DOOMSDAYERS
© Brian Oakes.
Though we are dependent on the electrical components that go into our devices, most people know and care little about them. Not Brian Oakes, who considers circuit boards a “hyper contemporary object that could never have been before.” Their interest in electronics was solidified in art school, where they were a sculpture major with a concentration in Computation, Technology, and Culture. At first, the designer elected to make their own circuit boards by hand, but designing them and having them manufactured made the operation repeatable and scalable. Now, to develop the aggressive-looking board shapes, they utilize the surrealist tradition of automatic drawing and then scan them into a computer. Oakes’s multiplying forms have become far more complex, free-standing objects. Using cyber-gothic industrial vocabularies, the dynamic lighted structures are programmed to a sequence that has them blink in many colors to display what the artist calls “functional states of chaos in the most ambient way possible.”
Pieces like Vessel 1 additionally employ motorized elements that move up and down. Oakes has also experimented with numbered channel systems that randomly record the surrounding ambient noise so their creatures can play it back to give their work more humanoid qualities, simulating twitching or breathing. The chaotic-neutral sci-fi-fantasy objects are intensified by an abundance of power cords—another raw material of the future—giving the concept of structure as form in art a new dimension.
B. 1995, Harrington Park, NJ
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
brianoakes.xyz
@broakes
HL2808
Brian Oakes, Vessel 4, 2024, Circuit boards, electronic components, signal cables, power supplies, chain, and hardware. Courtesy of the artist.