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 Symposium 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. The work is not representational—it does not depict or symbolize. A system runs, maintains itself, depletes, or persists. It exists alongside other things.
I work with discrete computational and mechanical procedures: timed sequences, threshold responses, algorithmic control. These operations are not tools for expression but structural principles through which the work comes into being. I'm interested in the indeterminacy that emerges from formal systems themselves—where determination encounters its own limits.
I find computational aesthetics in structure, not sensation. In the discrete steps of an algorithm made physical. In seriality, repetition, and the incompleteness built into constructed systems. The work refuses optimization, refuses efficiency. Systems labor at edges of failure or depletion, making visible the effort that sustaining any condition requires.
The mechanisms are exposed because they constitute the work's existence. There is no meaning hidden beneath operation. The system is what it does.
The work operates on its own terms, indifferent to observation. It persists, transforms, or maintains—generating a structural poetics through operational precision and temporal duration rather than through metaphor or expression.