Artist Profile
Addie Wagenknecht
Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist and researcher who specializes in art that features sculpture, photography, programming, technology and robotics, videography, and painting. She uses flowers, personal objects, acrylic paint, makeup, robots, cameras, and more to make her art. Wagenknecht is well known for centering around pop culture, feminist theory, new media, open-source hardware and software, and other kinds of technology. Wagenknecht studied at NYU and the University of Oregon, earning her Bachelor’s degree in Multimedia and Computer Science and a Master’s in Interactive Telecommunications Program respectively. She has been making art since her college years. She is most known for her works that combine art and open-source materials. For example, her Black Hawk Paint Series and Alone Together.
Black Hawk Paint
This piece caught me off guard if I am going to be honest. I have never heard of a drone assisting in the creation of art before. After hearing about this it made me want to try this technique. The piece captures how far we have come along with technology as well as how much it intersects with our lives, making art more digital by the day.
Beauty
This piece also has the help of a small robot friend. Wagenknecht uses the cleaning robot phenomenon called Roomba to express her feelings of “feminine” products/gestures. The final piece showcases a depiction of what she thinks a modern woman is. I also found the piece to be quite shocking because I have never seen art performed in this fashion either. Having a cleaning robot basically, paint for you seems like such an abstract idea, yet that fact is what makes it work so well in this work. I love the absolutely unique and thematic idea of this piece and how deep her meaning/process goes.
Liberator Vases
This third piece was absolutely incredible to look at and dissect. Using an open-source 3D print of a liberator gun to create a vase? Genius. Who would think of something so out-of-the-box, yet so creative and meaningful? Wagenknecht and her partners for this project did. Not only can the vase actually be used to be, well an actual vase, but they also show the power that making things free and open to everyone can in return create more unique art and spur creativity. It can cause people to create more beauty and expand their horizons as people.
