alkhuzairieali: 2012: PLATOON

PLATOON by AL KHUZAIRIE ALI

Galeri Chandan, Kuala Lumpur, June-July 2012

"This time, my works fall under the theme ‘Platoon’. The word is synonymous with army units, and my works have been about creating an army of human-machines or robots that have their own characteristics and individual roles, just like in real army squads. Robots aren’t like normal human beings whose roots lie in the biological realm;they have been designed, created, and programmed by their parents(humans), who all live in different environments and who come from dissimilar backgrounds.

A few of these robots have been presented with machine-like qualities as far as features and characteristics go, but they’ve also been injected with elements that appear ‘bio-mimetic’ and ‘anthropomorphic’.Robots are essentially created as substitutes and they then go on to simulate and replicate behaviors or aspects from living organisms in the real world. This fact leads us to the following questions: how can a machine become intelligent? How can they see and experience the world around them? Do they even have that will? And what relationship do they have with their creators? This series is a continuation of a few of my previous works from 2011, which I showed at the Gyeonggi Ceramix Biennale 2011 in Korea. I was shortlisted for that international event, and this was followed shortly after by a group exhibition in Singapore. My works from these two events thus form the basis of today’s body of work, but I’ve extended the series further and also added finer details to the works." -Khuzairie, May 2012

PLATOON A