Simple Machines Made of Everyday Objects Make Tech Wondrous Again

In every bottle of Perrier, there are countless bubbles. Together, #ExtraordinairePerrier and The Creators Project celebrate "the extraordinary" behind some of the most fascinating artists pushing boundaries through their chosen medium, technique, and perspective. This is an ongoing series exploring those artists. 

From a tricycle that writes messages in water droplets to a machine that blows huge soap bubbles, Nicholas Hanna’s unusual devices make boundary blurring an artform. Using software code, hardware circuits, and mechanics, Hanna produces artworks that defy categorization. “I guess I would describe my work as device art,” he says. “I just tend to automatically move toward this idea of making objects that perform in some way that is interesting to look at or think about.”

Hanna’s work is equal parts machine, everyday object, and childhood wonder. He highlights the last of these as a particularly important ingredient in his work. “I think wonder is one of the emotions that is fundamental to being human,” he says. “We become fascinated by certain aspects of the world and I think at the first level that’s just a sort of aesthetic appreciation, but then I think that can lead into a deeper questioning, which is like, ‘Why is that beautiful?’ or, ‘How does that happen?’ I think wonder is connected in a way to the scientific impulse and the desire to probe deeper and understand.”

Though Hanna isn’t a scientist, he does approach art with some degree of an outsider’s perspective. He didn’t follow the usual art world trajectory. His circuitous path toward becoming an artist began in 2009 when he graduated from Yale University with a degree in architecture. Unable to find work in the wake of the financial crisis, he uprooted to Beijing.

“I thought, ‘What could be worse?’" Hanna remembers of the decision. “I know that if I go to New York I’m not going to get a job anyway, so I might as well try something different.” The move to Beijing proved to be a fateful one. While teaching architecture at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Hanna met the Chinese new media artist Niu Miao and they collaborated on a project called Candle Light.

Candle Light takes shadow and transforms it into a shimmering cascade of light. Though Hanna has worked with a broad range of material this idea of transformation has remained central to his work including the Bubble Devices and Trike Writer. These projects take intangible ideas like wind and manifest them as bubbles or text on the ground. Hanna’s simple machines take commonplace elements of our world—things we can’t or don’t notice—and make them visible by changing our perspective on them.

Perhaps none of Hanna’s pieces does this more effectively than his Bubble Device. “When we’re kids, we’re all fascinated by bubbles,” he explains. “Blowing bubbles is like this amazing thing. When you’re a kid, you’re learning all these fundamental rules about the world. You knock things off a table and they fall on the floor. You’re sort of establishing all these fundamental parameters and then you see a bubble and it seems to violate all of these rules. So, that’s why everyone is fascinated by them, but of course you eventually get bored of them. They become a known quantity. I think one of the things that the bubble device can do is kind of reconnect you to this pure state of wonder.”

Candle Light 烛光 from Nicholas Hanna on Vimeo.

Making visible the unseen, unfelt or unnoticed is a goal that Hanna extends conceptually into our technologically complex world. “When I give lectures about my work, one of the things that I talk about is the kind of mute quality of modern technology,” he says.

The simplicity of Hanna’s devices stands in stark contrast to the incredible complexity of the devices we now use everyday. Think back to the very first experience with a cell phone or typing a question into Google or using instant messaging.

Bubble Device #4 – Taipei Fine Arts Museum – Nicholas Hanna from Nicholas Hanna on Vimeo.

“One of the things that I think appeals to people about the work that I do is that you can look at it and everything about it is sort of evident,” Hanna explains. “You can see how it operates. There are no secrets to it whereas the way that technology works now is that you look at your iPhone and even when it’s in your pocket and the screen is off, it’s furiously busy doing all sorts of things.” In this way, Hanna’s work causes us to consider our perspectives by blurring the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

For more on Nicholas Hanna, visit his website here.

To learn more about Thirst for the Extraordinary click here.

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