Museums, Basel
Nicolas Darrot
Fuzzy Logic
Museum TinguelyTickets available at tinyurl.com/th6zeard Fuzzy Logic transforms Basel's smallest exhibition space, a former telephone booth at Museum Tinguely, into a stage for automated figures, presenting a selection from Nicolas Darrot's series of the same name in five acts. Visitors activate the Theatre of Automatons themselves by scanning the barcode on a custom-designed playing card, whereupon the figure comes to life, singing, dancing and moving according to its own fuzzy logic. Nicolas Darrot (b. 1972, Le Havre) lives and works in Paris. In his sculptural and installation-based work, he creates robot puppets, automata and mechanical figures that move between theatre, technology and mythology. The artist programmes these works himself. This interplay of craft skills and digital mastery developed after he graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1998, when he worked as part of a special effects team in film production, an experience that had a key influence on his subsequent works. His studio is a workshop and a programming suite in one, where precision meets chance, as motion sequences constructed with to-the-millimetre accuracy lead to unpredictable choreographies. This deliberate openness has become an artistic principle. Fuzzy logic accepts what conventional logic rules out: ambiguity and vagueness. As a form of artificial intelligence, it allows computers to deal with the kind of non-clarity that is inherent in human thinking. The real world is imprecise by nature: twins can be told apart, the line between day and night is blurred, our knowledge on a given topic often remains incomplete. Darrot's figures embody this logic of incompleteness as they move, full of uncertainty and mood swings, in spontaneous dances and complex games. The movement of certain figures is determined by chance. For some works, Darrot composes and programmes the soundtracks himself, for others he uses recordings or works with musicians - each element is an integral part of the overall experience. Curated by Andres Pardey