What distinguishes Laarman’s work is the powerful way he interweaves distinct categories and practices; for example, using the increasing power of digital technology to draw ever closer to the old dream (of the Art Nouveau movement, among others) of replicating nature, not through mere symbolism but rather unpacking its unseen codes and rewriting them into objects. The machine, in a sense, brings us into the garden.
Excerpt from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
“The technology has to be considered as larger than just the inanimate pieces of hardware,” said Felsenstein. “The technology represents inanimate ways of thinking, objectified ways of thinking. The myth we see in WarGames and things like that is definitely the triumph of the individual over the collective dis-spirit. [The myth] is attempting to say that the conventional wisdom and common understandings must always be open to question. It’s not just an academic point. It’s a very fundamental point of, you might say, the survival of humanity, in a sense that you can have people [merely] survive, but humanity is something that’s a little more precious, a little more fragile. So that to be able to defy a culture which states that “Thou shalt not touch this,’ and to defy that with one’s own creative powers is…the essence.”