Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich
The collaborative artistic practice of Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich, both respected designers in their own rights, addresses the relationship between humans and machines. Upon seeing Lehni’s computer-controlled spray can called Hektor, which uses customized software to translate digital graphics into real-time drawings, Rich was inspired to join forces with Lehni. Together, the duo continues to playfully explore the intersections of art, design, and technology, primarily through the creation of unique writing and drawing machines. Performative and interactive alike, Lehni and Rich’s innovative tools offer new methods for artistic and literary expression—a CNC plotter, for instance, spells out song titles in sequential dots, while a motor-powered machine produces large-scale drawings and text in chalk.
Lehni has said of his interest in man’s relationship to technology: “We are all being sold proprietary software all the time and being told how to use it in a prescriptive way, but it is possible, if we know how, to bend it to our own will and to use it in a different way. The capacity of this software is not anticipated by us and it often has poetic potential.”
Lehni and Rich have both exhibited their work throughout the world on an individual …
The collaborative artistic practice of Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich, both respected designers in their own rights, addresses the relationship between humans and machines. Upon seeing Lehni’s computer-controlled spray can called Hektor, which uses customized software to translate digital graphics into real-time drawings, Rich was inspired to join forces with Lehni. Together, the duo continues to playfully explore the intersections of art, design, and technology, primarily through the creation of unique writing and drawing machines. Performative and interactive alike, Lehni and Rich’s innovative tools offer new methods for artistic and literary expression—a CNC plotter, for instance, spells out song titles in sequential dots, while a motor-powered machine produces large-scale drawings and text in chalk.
Lehni has said of his interest in man’s relationship to technology: “We are all being sold proprietary software all the time and being told how to use it in a prescriptive way, but it is possible, if we know how, to bend it to our own will and to use it in a different way. The capacity of this software is not anticipated by us and it often has poetic potential.”
Lehni and Rich have both exhibited their work throughout the world on an individual basis, and together, they have been the subject of shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Swiss Institute in New York.
