Parker is an installation artist, kinetic sculptor, educator, and mechanical engineer. His work questions digital technologies in contemporary music, art, and architectural practices; translating from the physical to the virtual. He believes these translations are not lossless, that what is vanished is a sense of presence, or what Walter Benjamin defines as object aura. The physical object is slowly tranquilized and replaced with less potent simulacra of itself.
Cybernetic algorithms have largely informed modern conceptions of intelligence, thus ignoring the ways in which naturally-occurring physical systems also form networks encoded with complex information. The quantization of analog information, from complex continuous data to discrete digital data, from unfiltered information to 1’s and 0’s, is a process which intentionally simplifies and restructures the natural world in order to increase accuracy and control. Parker's work seeks to voluntarily relinquish this computerized regulation in favor of an analog aesthetic.
Parker teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, on the Design for Performance and Interaction MArch.
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Parker's work is rooted in the careful observation of the senses, of balance and momentum, of accidental and intentional sound, of nature’s laws.
Even his abstractions appeal because they speak directly to experience.
He models things that work. An observer can transpose onto Parker’s constructions interpersonal dynamics, social dynamics, or internal reflections. His intent is to awaken empathy. We watch his constructions move and we find ourselves testing and echoing their cycles.
His constructions are seductive dance partners.
Our limbs surrender sympathetic movements.
- Wm Brown | Director, Eli Whitney Museum