Installations

Gamelatron by Aaron Taylor Kuffner

The Budart Exhibition presents you the Gamelatron - the world’s first fully robotic gamelan orchestra. A Gamelatron is a sound producing kinetic sculpture, which is made from traditional bronze, brass and iron instruments from Indonesia’s gamelan tradition, retrofitted with mechanical mallets on sculptural mounting systems. The pieces are connected to a network that transcribes digital compositions into an array of electrical pulsations that results in a ghostly musical automaton.

Gamelatrons draw on the thousand-year-old sonic tradition of Indonesia–Gamelan–and the emerging field of robotics to create magical, viscerally-powerful, site-specific performances, installations and stand alone art works. The artworks’ mission is to expand the legacy and creative cultural power of gamelan through innovation. The Gamelatron Project exposes us to the rich and profound nature of resonance and its effect on the psyche. It strives to create a harmony in the tension of fusing the East and the West, the Modern and the Ancient. 

Principal artist Aaron Taylor Kuffner uses exhibitions of the Gamelatrons to create sanctuaries both in public and private spaces. He believes that the Gamelatron furthers the evolution of consciousness through the experience of beauty and the sublime and views this body of the work as an offering to the observer. 

The Gamelatron Bunganya Dewa at the Hammer Museum, NYC