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THE DANCE OF EVOLUTION

Contemporary biology uses new metaphors to describe the phenomena of life, which is seen as a constantly changing dance of countless elements.
According to Francisco Varela, organisms should be understood as webs of virtual Selves; they are not endowed with a strong identities but rather they are a mosaic, an assortment of different identities: a cellular identity, an immunological identity, a cognitive one, and so on, all of them manifesting in different interactions. The aim of biology today is thus to explore the transition from local interactions to global emerging qualities, in order to understand how all these different Selves merge and separate once again in the dance of evolution. This is what evolution is, a dance of living species intent on exploring the space of their own possibilities.
Uwe Niemann's wind sculptures, constantly dancing and changing in the wind, are to me the most fantastic aesthetic metaphor of these new perspectives in contemporary biology.
According to physicist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, scientific knowledge offers us a "limited window" onto the Universe. Art is therefore another language with which our species' mind explores the different dimensions of the Universe. According to Wittgenstein, to imagine a language is to imagine a life form.

Bruno d'Udine

ART HAPPENS WHEN TECHNIQUE TURNS INTO EMOTION

Uwe Niemann's kinetic sculpture, which Aboca is presenting for the first time in Italy on the occasion of the March 2010 International Lecture on Nature and Human Ecology, clearly shows us how technique can serve to transcend man's perceptive limit. Ever since Plato's "cave", we have been questioning our capacity to observe reality as a phenomenon of nature, and how the image of the real is influenced by our ideas, to the extent that one can believe that the idea itself is the only certainty of reality.
In front of a work by Uwe Niemann, our perceptive boundary is lost.
The German sculptor's "free machine", made of metal equilibriums that defy inertia thanks to their technological precision, can record even the minutest movement of air.
And so the machine becomes organic, it defies any control and becomes pure random and harmonic movement. The mechanical movements' endless variables open themselves up to the air, in a perfect and anarchic choreography. The machine's movements reveal the morphology of the air, as though it were doing a Tai Chi form.
Technique thus enters into a perfect synchronization with the air, erasing the boundary between artist's work and nature.

Gianpietro Carlesso

Uwe Niemann
Vier WindbÕgen ("Quattro archi di vento", Four Wind Arches) 2010 acciaio, h 10,5 m., Ø parti in movimento 7 m. / steel, h 10.5 m., Ø moving parts 7 m.