Thomas James Kuntz | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | January 13, 1965 Phoenix, Arizona |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Automata / Sculpture / Mixed Media |
Thomas Kuntz (born January 13, 1965) is an American multi-media artist notable for his contemporary automata. He has devoted a lifetime to acquiring the skills of a designer, sculptor, mechanic, automatist, animator, model-maker, painter and conceptualist. [1]
Kuntz was born in Phoenix, Arizona January 13, 1965. The youngest of four, his father was a surgeon, and his mother a folk artist/doll maker. They both provided the necessary gene pool and a stimulating environment for him to grow. [2] As a child he pored over anatomy books, spent much time with sketchpads, and built his first scale model at age six. As a model maker, he was competing in the masters class (professional) by age 16. Kuntz spent the balance of his youth playing soccer, ending in a brief stint with the Western Soccer League.
In 1986, Kuntz began a professional sculpting career with his own experimental entity called Artomic Creations. While contemporaries focused on popular characters, Kuntz became one of the pioneers of the garage kit industry by creating several figure models based on obscure characters from silent movies and occult lore. [3] Gaining notoriety upon these works, he was courted by commercial model and toy companies such as Screamin‘ Products Bowen Designs, Mattel, Ertl Company and Jakks Pacific. [4] Subsequent inspiration came from the legendary Maila Nurmi (Vampira). They met in 1990 when Kuntz was granted permission to model a Vampira figure, and they remained confidants for 18 years until the day when he was a pallbearer at her funeral. [5] To quote Kuntz in an article he wrote shortly after her death, "She was a mentor, a muse, and a huge inspiration to me." [6]
Kuntz now works full-time as a multi-media artist, focusing on automatons, moving sculptures and machines. The British illusionist, Simon Drake noted "Thomas's projects tend to feature the mysterious, uncanny, sometimes darkly horrific and bittersweet sad aspects of human nature. It is not uncommon to see his projects packaged with a strong dose of 'gallows humor', theatrics and magic." [7] Kuntz uses uncanny valley, the theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's human likeness. In robotics this is seen as a problem. Kuntz uses this as an area of exploration.
On his most complex piece to date, the "Alchemyst's Clock Tower" uses theme park technology and 18th century automaton techniques applied to fine art. The clock tower is a 9 ft tall miniature theater with a 12" tall magician that conjures fire demons, turns pillars into water, produces optical illusions, and interacts with the audience. [8] “L’Oracle“, his fortune telling automaton appeared on a Halloween special of the Martha Stewart television show as part of Richard Garriott’s collection. [9]
Other notable works include animatronics and stage design for the industrial band Skinny Puppy's Doomsday: Back and Forth Series 5: Live in Dresden, and various live shows for Ohgr. Kuntz was also the animator, art director and stop-motion puppet builder for Ohgr's music video Majik, directed by William Morrison. A small collection of his works were borrowed by director William Malone for the film Parasomnia. [10]
Kuntz takes an alchemical approach to his art, conjoining seemingly opposing ideas and techniques. Kuntz’s works are influenced equally by low-brow and high-brow sensibilities, ranging from Expressionism, Dada /Surrealism, to the old masters Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel, Da Vinci, and Archimboldo. Mechanical influences include 18th and 19th century android makers, particularly Jacques de Vaucanson, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, Jean-Frédéric Leschot, and the great Parisian makers of the golden age. Other magical influences include Wolfgang von Kempelen, the French mechanic/magician Robert Houdin, as well as Walt Disney and the early Imagineers; especially Rolly Crump. [11]
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Badīʿ az-Zaman Abu l-ʿIzz ibn Ismāʿīl ibn ar-Razāz al-Jazarī was a polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, artisan, artist and mathematician from the Artuqid Dynasty of Jazira in Mesopotamia. He is best known for writing The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206, where he described 50 mechanical devices, along with instructions on how to construct them. He is credited with the invention of the elephant clock. He has been described as the "father of robotics" and modern day engineering.
Karakuri puppets are traditional Japanese mechanized puppets or automata, made from the 17th century to the 19th century. The dolls' gestures provided a form of entertainment. The word karakuri has also come to mean "mechanisms" or "trick" in Japanese. It is used to describe any device that evokes a sense of awe through concealment of its inner workings.
Pierre Jaquet-Droz was a watchmaker of the late eighteenth century. He was born on 28 July 1721 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Principality of Neuchâtel, which was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. He lived in Paris, London, and Geneva, where he designed and built animated dolls known as automata to help his firm sell watches and mechanical caged songbirds.
Ultron is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema, the character first appeared as an unnamed character in The Avengers #54, with his first full appearance in The Avengers #55. He is a self-aware and highly intelligent artificial intelligence who develops a god complex and a grudge against his creator Hank Pym. His goal to destroy humanity in a shortsighted attempt at creating world peace has brought him into repeated conflict with the Avengers. Stories often end in Ultron's apparent destruction, only for the character to be resurrected in new forms.
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The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a children's historical fiction book written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. It was published by Scholastic. It takes place in France as a young boy finds his purpose. The hardcover edition was released on January 30, 2007, and the paperback edition was released on June 2, 2008. With 284 pictures between the book's 533 pages, the book depends as much on its pictures as it does on the words. Selznick himself has described the book as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things". The book won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, the first novel to do so, as the Caldecott Medal is for picture books, and was adapted by Martin Scorsese as the 2011 film Hugo.
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Elizabeth King is an American sculptor and writer known for movable figurative sculptures that she has employed in stop-frame animations. Her work combines exacting handcraft, elementary mechanics, and digital and electronic technologies, applied in sculptures of half or full figures, heads, arms and hands, or even simply eyes. She often equips figures with subtly illuminated eyes and visible and invisible mechanisms enabling the performance of anatomically correct simple operations, seemingly of their own volition. Writers have described her figures as "insistently nonhuman" yet "uncannily alive" in their ability to project self-awareness, intelligence, agency and emotion. They reflect her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and puppet, literature involving unnatural figures come to life, and human movement. Art in America critic Leah Ollman wrote that King's "highly articulated automatons invite us to consider how consciousness arises from physical being … she portrays her mechanical surrogates as convincingly self-aware, while we are left to ponder that age-old question: where exactly does the self reside?"
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