Techno-Muses
by Titus Gee
When his six-year-old daughter asked for an iPod, sculptor Adam Reeder knew the world had changed.
Society and technology have become so intermeshed as to be indiscernible from one another, he discovered. The mythos of our era has a smartphone on its belt and an MP3 player clipped behind its tie.
Reeder’s cultural insight soon became progenitor to a series of half-breed bronze sculptures merging the gods and Titans of Classical Greece with their 21st-century, digital counterparts — Pan playing his iPod, Zeus sending thunderbolts with his iPhone, Atlas shouldering an enormous iPod Nano, a sleeping Satyr transformed to a sleeping PlayStation gamer. He called it “Socio-Technic Evolution” and used it as the final thesis for his Master of Fine Arts degree at The Academy of Art University.
Reeder’s choice of iconic Apple products among his symbols of digital culture sparked some buzz among Mac-cult acolytes, which has led to wider attention and even some commissions. More importantly, Reeder says, it has demonstrated the very phenomenon that his sculptures discuss. At one time, his artwork might have floundered without an art critic to introduce it to the audience. But, thanks to the internet, “Socio-Technic Evolution” circumvented the system, and the audience introduced him to the experts.
Here Reeder discusses the project, its origin and symbols.
RedFence Interviews Adam Reeder on Socio-Technic Evolution from RedFence on Vimeo.
Credits:
Interview by Benjamin Ross
Filmed and Directed by Titus Gee
Edited by James Roland
Post by James Roland and Benjamin Ross
Adam Reeder, 33, lives in Folsom, California, with his wife and children. Bronze casts of his “Socio-Technic Evolution” sculptures can be purchased through his website, adamreeder.com. He also can be hired for public commissions, monuments, and private sculptures.
