Dictionary
Kinetic art

Kinetic art is a 1960s art form incorporating actual or apparent movement in art works and objects. Mechanical movement and change wrought by movement are an aesthetic constituent of the art work. The search for new modes of artistic expression is based on real experience gained from science and technology. In observing earlier mechanical devices such as the aesthetic fountains and waterworks of the Baroque period, exponents of 20th-century Kinetic art felt both attracted and repelled by them. The immediate forerunners of Kinetic art were the light and movement objects produced by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray as well as the Constructivist machines of Vladimir Tatlin, Naum Gabo, Alexander Rodchenko and László Moholy-Nagy. The best known exponents of Kinetic art, dead and living, are Alexander Calder (mobiles), Jean Tinguely (fantastic machines guided by chance which can also produce sounds), Pol Bury, Siegfried Cremer, George Rickey, Vassilakis Takis (hovering magnetic objects), Günther Uecker and Günter Haese.