Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines

The Graham Foundation presents Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines, a concise yet rich examination of Frederick Kiesler’s (1890–1965) experimental design practice through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. The output of Kiesler’s Laboratory included research, design studies, and drawings that probed the possibilities of his theory of biotechnique, while reflecting on the relation between design, energy, and the human body (its posture, respiration rates, and image consciousness). The exhibition highlights two of Kiesler’s most essential and ambitious projects developed at the Laboratory: the Mobile Home Library and the Vision Machine. Together these projects illustrate the fantastical scope and applications of Kiesler’s correalism: a design approach he conceived to “express the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments.”

Central to the exhibition is Kiesler’s important but previously unrealized Mobile Home Library, fabricated and presented in its entirety. This dynamic device proposed to improve basic domestic activities, while also radically altering domestic space. In its most iconic form, the library appears as a circular series of bookshelves; the entire piece is ambulatory, with each module also designed to spin within the Library’s ring frame. The exhibition also includes Kiesler’s drawings and studies for his Vision Machine, an ambitious device intended to visualize human sight—from optics and nerve stimuli to dream content and dream images. The selection of more than 100 drawings, photographs, and research studies of these projects will illuminate Kiesler’s remarkable attempts to grasp human vision, record dreams, and to correlate libraries, information, images, and consciousness.

Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines is organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in cooperation with the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

The Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (BMKOES) supported the preparation of the exhibition with a grant to the Kiesler Foundation, thus making the preparatory work for the exhibition possible.

The exhibition is curated by Mark Wasiuta; designed by Wasiuta, Farah Alkhoury, and Tigran Kostandyan; and fabricated by Powerhouse Arts Makers.

Special thanks to Gerd Zillner, director of the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.
 

Frederick Kiesler, Mobile Home Library as represented in the “Correalism Manifesto,” 1947. Copyright Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna