Marcello Mercado

Variations on Van Gogh: Compositions for Small Motors and Robots

Variationen Van Gogh: Kompositionen für kleine Motoren und Roboter

25 × 20 cm, 82 pages

2014

 

 

Variations on Van Gogh: Compositions for Small Motors and Robots /
Variationen Van Gogh: Kompositionen für kleine Motoren und Roboter (2014) extends Marcello Mercado’s long-term engagement with processes of transformation, translation and displacement. The project takes as its point of departure the painted Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh, not as images to be reproduced, but as operative material to be reconfigured across heterogeneous systems.

Visual representations derived from Van Gogh’s paintings are interwoven with musical compositions and notations generated through the use of small motors and robotic devices. These mechanical agents function neither as performers nor as tools of automation, but as mediators within a chain of transductions that shifts the work between image, movement, sound and notation.

The book does not seek synthesis or interpretation. Instead, it assembles a field of variations in which pictorial motifs are fragmented, translated and re-inscribed into machinic and graphic processes. What emerges is not a homage to the historical image, but a layered score—an unstable constellation where painting, mechanics and notation coexist without hierarchy.