ABOUT
Bio
Abhishek Narula is an artist, designer and educator working with kinetic sculpture, autonomous systems, robotics, and computational aesthetics. He is a Robotics Systems Designer & Lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Robotics Department, where he develops and maintains the MBot Educational Platform.
His work has been exhibited at international venues such as the Science Gallery Detroit, Speculum Artium Media Festival in Slovenia, New Media Caucus (NMC), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, The Boulder Public Library, The Boulder Creative Collective Warehouse, The Hyde Park Art Center, Sector 2337 Art Gallery & Printing Press, Tangible Embedded Interaction (TEI), International Sympxosium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), and Infosys Pathfinders Institute, among others. He is a member of Wetware Instruments, a performance duo working at the intersection of sound, chemistry, biology, and digital technology.
abhishek.narula@protonmail.com
MFA Studio Art - Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan
MS/BS Electrical Engineering - Georgia Institute of Technology
Artist Statement
I build systems that operate as autonomous beings in the world. My work is not representational as it does not depict or symbolize. Instead, they should be read as systems that exist alongside other things in the a state of ambience. They will operate, run, maintain themselves, deplete, or persist. The work operates on its own terms, indifferent to observation. It persists, transforms, or maintains in order to generate a structural poetics through operational precision and temporal duration rather than through metaphor or expression.
My practice begins by experimenting with discrete computational procedures and mechanical constructs such as timed sequences, feedback loops, and algorithmic reconfiguration and control. These operations are not tools for expression but structural principles through which the work comes into being. I engage with computational aesthetics formally where seriality, repetition, and the incompleteness are physically built into constructed systems. Extending sculptural and architectural formal concepts to digital and electronic media, my work invite an open-ended engagement with presence, process, and being.
The mechanisms are exposed because they constitute the work's existence. There is no meaning hidden beneath operation. The system is axiomatic. The system is what it does.