Michael Joaquin Grey's work possesses a conceptual grandeur that draws together the complexity of genetic theory, the prospect of artificial life, and the awesome beauty of nature. His art explores the transitions between various states of energy, matter, and meaning. The sculptor highlights the recapitulation of such phenomena in divergent forms and functions, while questioning the processes by which those forms and functions gain scientific or aesthetic significance. His expansive cosmology begins with a drip, which splashes to become a neural network that emulates the development of a jellyfish and breeds a radially symmetrical bovine with teats comprised of upside-down Balzacs (based on Rodin's 1897-8 sculpture).

Grey's work can be explicitly technological, utilizing supercomputers to generate and visualize self-organizing systems and producing precious works of microscopic precision and great orders of magnitude using stereolithography. At other times, the things he makes are extremely down-to-earth and tactile, invoking, if not demanding, haptic engagement with them. All these works have been motivated by the artist's desire to directly experience the processes by which nature and culture originate and become inseparable components of modern identity. "On a certain level, itís really very simple," he says. "I'm just trying to figure out where I come from.î

Due to the increasing conceptual and technical complexity of his sculpture, however, Grey felt a progressively greater need to share the underlying experience of world-building in an intuitive way that would engage people in creating and manipulating form in space, rather than observing and analyzing it as a fait accompli in a fully determined work of art. This impulse has resulted in the production of objects that extend the boundaries of art and science, cross-pollinating their way into popular consciousness through the "advanced 3-D operating system" of the ZOOB. This innovative modular modeling set is produced by the company the artist founded, Primordial, LLC. While the ZOOB has many potential applications, and is currently being used as a tool for animation, it is marketed primarily to children as "the total motion toy technology."

Grey compares his experience of developing the ZOOB and the fable of its primordial origins to the experience of creating the classical laws of physics and biology, in the sense that they both involved the production of structures that order the world. "At a certain point," he said, "I realized that so many things that I knew, I knew secondhand, as given knowledge, like the way DNA works or the principles of quantum physics." He continued, "Unconsciously, I ended up recapitulating and, as a result, experiencing what it was likeóthe hubris of itóto create a set of universal laws, to write my own creation myth." At the same time, he wanted to develop a dynamic sculptural medium that would enable people to directly and intuitively explore, experience, and define formal and spatial relations in their own terms.

Grey is careful to point out however, that this open-endedness of the ZOOB complements its unique functionality, allowing users to easily and intuitively model dynamic behavior of multidimensional structures in real time. By comparison, CAD systems require substantial equipment and practice, and can emulate three-dimensional space only as a two-dimensional representation, or output static 3-D forms through rapid-prototyping processes. Grey considers the ZOOB a "universal spatial medium" that allows for immediate, hands-on manipulation and transformation of structures as they evolve through various spatial dimensions. In this regard, the ZOOB emphasizes the transitional quality of form as it slides between four characteristic states of organization (primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary).

This ethos of transitionality and "between-ness," which he characterized as "sculpture as a preposition, as opposed to more conventional conceptions of sculpture as a noun or a verb," has been consistent in Greyís work since the late 1980s. But whereas he found that the sculpture he exhibited in galleries and museums required a great deal of explanation in order for people to comprehend more than just their most superficial appearances, he feels that most people with inquisitive minds intuitively understand the underlying principles of the ZOOB and are able to produce complex structures with it even though they do not fully comprehend the mathematical and geometric sophistication of their creations. As Grey says, "The ZOOB does everything I wanted my art to do, without any wasted metaphor." What he means is that the ZOOB embodies the dynamic, multidimensional nature of organic systems, rather than representing them or having to describe them. While developing the ZOOB, Grey sketched out his creation myth in a 24-frame storyboard. In Origin of the Primordial ZOOP (Dreams of Causality), 1993, he reinterpreted Newtonian physics and classical biology according to his own artistic vision, illustrating the narrative with references to his own sculptural meditations on origins. The explanation in Origin of where ZOOB units come from has been abridged in the ZOOB Guide included in every set of toys.

A comparison of Origins and the ZOOB Guide with Grey's art objects and their sources offers insight into the genesis of the artistís creative work as a sculptor and inventor. In order for his visual narrative to make sense, however, one cannot remain overly bound to conventional logic and instrumental reason but must be able to simultaneously entertain the rigors of evolutionary theory and the whimsy of a fairy tale. For one of the underlying principles of his work is to question the analytic reductionism that characterizes the Western scientific system of knowledge and the prevalence of that episteme in other domains, including art.

There is a rich tradition of attempts by artists to either mass-produce affordable works of art for popular consumption or to place mass-produced objects in artistic contexts for consumption by elite connoisseurs. And like the works that emerged from these historical efforts, the relationship of Greyís sculptural practice to his enterprise raises some difficult questions: namely, in what sense, if any, is the ZOOB art? Part II [sketches] out some of the connections between Greyís aesthetic cosmology, his sculpture, and the ZOOB, while Part III [returns] to this question, offering some further reflections on it and placing the ZOOB in an art-historical context....

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©  Edward A. Shanken
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