Twittering Machine / Die Zwitscher Maschine   (iron, copper, plexiglass, 1987)

Homage to Paul Klee’s “Twittering Machine”

This is the very first piece I made in UW-Madison in the 80s when I was a grad student and the second kinetic toy after “the Kick-Ass Device”, my last piece in MSU-Moorhead, my under-grad school.

Paul Klee’s drawing “Twittering Machine” was something I really wanted to possess–a replica, of course– and I looked for a poster or postcard in the museum shop of MOMA but couldn’t find one.

The simple solution to obtain a replica is either cut out a plate page of an art history book or draw a copy by myself– I instead thought it would be killing two birds with one stone if I could make a three-dimansional representation of the Twittering Machine– to satisfy my personal longing and a project to be submitted.

The original “Twittering Machine” has cuteness and eeriness juxtaposed in the picture frame where odd-looking mechanical birds are twittering. Its strange atmosphere is derived from the mismatched combination of birds and mechanism (or birds of mechanism). I thought I could make its 3D version with welding rods and copper plates, and somehow managed to realized it but never anticipated what would become of the piece after a quarter century; now the piece– with its iron rods rusted and the feathers tattered– has become something more close to Klee’s original in terms of eeriness.