Kinetic Art

Kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect.

The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer.

Kinetic art encompasses a wide variety of overlapping techniques and styles.

Kinetic art marked an important revival of the tradition of Constructivism, or Constructive art, that had been a presence in modern art since the 1910s. Parts of the movement also revived its utopian optimism, talking once again of the potential for art to spread into new areas of everyday life and to embrace technology in ways appropriate to the modern world.

But the movement also borrowed much from Dada, and in this respect parts of it were highly skeptical about the potential of technology to improve human life. Artists who were inspired by Dada, such as Jean Tinguely, used their work to express a more anarchic, satirical attitude to machines and movement. They suggested that rather than being humanity's helpmate, the machine might become her master.

Although ostensibly fascinated by machines, some Kinetic artists developed a profound interest in analogies between machines and human bodies. Rather than regarding machines and human bodies as radically different - one being soulless and functional, the other being governed by the sensitive, rational mind - they used their art to suggest that humans might be little more than irrational engines of conflicting lusts and urges, like a dysfunctional machine. This idea has deep roots in Dada, and betrays Kinetic art's debt to that earlier movement.

Kinetic drawing

Kinetic drawing makes use of the critical balance and creates 3D drawings from various materials. Kinetic means that the object holds energy, kinetic drawings usually are critical in their stability and are eager to find a more stable position, through gravity. From there they are built up again, better and stronger and with a repetition of this process a beauty of its own starts to grow by natural forces.

A variation of kinetic art in the realm of painting is ModulArt, where smaller modular elements allow a larger painting to be in flux, though not continuously but at the will of its creator, owner, or user. However, the painting stays is motion, offering alternative views and alternative interpretations.