ABOUT
Bio
Abhishek Narula is an artist, designer, and educator whose work engages with computation, digitality, and automation as both material and concept. His sculptures, installations, and interventions, often reveals paradoxes, inconsistencies, and disruptions as sites for poetic experience. Through his practice, he seeks to cultivate an alternative discourse around technology where one can move beyond spectacle and productivity, toward an open-ended engagement with presence, process, and being.
He is a Lecturer & Robotics Systems Designer 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 Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, Science Gallery Detroit, Speculum Artium Media Festival in Slovenia, New Media Caucus (NMC), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, WaveFarm, 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. And a system is what it does.
Some dissipate. Some compound themselves through feedback. Some seem to hold still, then eventually fizzle out. Each one begins with an ordinary object, site, or setting and a set of conditions that I preconfigure and precisely construct. Then it runs on its own terms, in its own time, for as long as it can.
The work is not a depiction. The system doesn't stand in for something else, and there is nothing hidden, no puzzle to be deciphered. It does what it can do in those settings. And from those conditions, something emerges that exceeds its construction. Something that reveals itself, originally not known. The work is an opportunity to linger, to engage with process and to be present.
Every object or site is already a dormant system holding a tendency, something it is about to or could do. I build the mechanism that brings that latent system into operation, using simple procedures such as timed sequences, feedback loops, and algorithmic configurations. These operations are not a means of expression. Instead, they are how the work comes into being. I don't impose a system onto the object. I build the one it already is, at any scale, from an object to a room.