Nicolas Anatol Baginsky
"Elizabeth Gardner"

Quasi Modo geneti
"Like just born".
(First sunday after Easter and opening words of the mass)
A text by Frank Barth and Annelie Lütgens,
Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1993

In this installation, Nicolas Anatol Baginsky pays tribute to Elizabeth Gardner (1957 - 1988), an important mathematician, physicist and researcher in chaos theory. her wide-ranging, significant achievements belie her short life; they became in the scientific community a prime example of brilliant creativity and exemplary dignity.
It was the artist´s own interest in models of neuronal networks that brought to his attention Elizabeth Gardner´s work and its fundamental significance for this field of research. He built ´intelligent´ machines, initially casting them in performances with dancers and musicians. Since then, these robots have gradually shed the restrictions of their stage function and begun to assert themselves in new territory. Deployed in the settings of everyday life, they interact with passers-by and other life-forms, leaving them both spellbound and disconcerted. "Elizabeth Gardner" is Baginskys latest creation and comes from a long line of machines that epitomize the constant striving and the equally constant failure of human intellect to decipher the riddles of life. It is a fusion of the wondrous with the practical, or, in the circuits of "intelligent" weapon systems, with death. "Elizabeth Gardner" takes us back to the primary questions elicited by the relationship of Man/ Machine.