Incessant texts and social-media alerts are inescapable facets of contemporary life, and artist Chris Eckert attempts to make sense of this glut of seemingly endless data. Eckert has successfully melded backgrounds in the fields of mechanical engineering and professional art-making—disciplines with seemingly opposite agendas—into a singular and timely practice. With the Getty Foundation on the cusp of launching its PST: Art & Science Collide region-wide initiative, his current exhibition seems an apt, if serendipitous, contribution to industrial technique-driven art. Eckert is probably best known for his automated tattooing machine, Auto Ink (2010), a polychrome sculpture that tattoos random religious symbols directly onto participants’ skin—a conceptual provocation. The artist notes, “My work is a reflection of ideas and questions I find perplexing. While some find machinery cold and impersonal, I find [it to be] a vehicle for exploration and introspection.” 

“Overload,” his current exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art’s downtown annex, is a testament to Eckert’s vision and facility as a sculptural virtuoso. In technical collaboration with Martin Fox and John Green, he has created a deceptively austere landscape of walls lined with seemingly innocuous, semi-autonomous devices. Each machine object was individually hand-wrought and programmed. These sculptures are not static by any means, functioning as both aggregators and reflectors of an increasingly cacophonous world. In essence, the machines capture data streams from the internet or cameras installed in the gallery and reinterpret the information within a variety of formats. Building on the uncannily anthropomorphic characteristics of the recently deceased Alan Rath’s mechanical sculptures, Eckert takes the notion one step further, inviting the global information miasma into the gallery via the sculptures. It’s a dynamic, revelatory experience, and Eckert attempts to shape the information into something that is both thought-provoking and waggish.   

Chris Eckert, Martin Fox, and John Green, Look. Courtesy of the artist and the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Crosstalk (2024) is an installation of 20 polychromed-metal machines that capture newsfeeds for various national and international sources, morphing them into musical compositions ranging from Ennio Morricone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” to “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals. The intent is to transform the onslaught into something contemplative and engaging. Mixed Messages (2017) is arranged as a phalanx of 24 sculptures, also in polychromed-metal, that translate data via what’s known as a telegraph “sounder,” a 19th-century receiver, into Morse code. The data are an amalgam of news sources, but the machines’ physical presence and insistent clacking create an impression that is relentlessly urgent, strident and oddly euphonious. 

Ultimately, Eckert’s approach to information overload makes for both a sobering and entertaining spectacle. Blink (2018) takes an altogether different tack with a focus on surreptitious surveillance. Ten metal sculptures are each embedded with an animatronic “eye” that contains a sensor that tracks and records visitors’ presence, and, in a separate gallery displays the projected images of these hapless subjects. That is the predicament of modern life. 

Information overload can be a debilitating affliction and Eckert proposes that, while such noise can be overwhelming, it is not all gloom and doom, and in some ways he has defanged the monster that is his subject. He seamlessly reframes a world rife with incessant stimuli, and his technical acumen, conceptual ingenuity and wry humor make for a convincing exhibition.