In 2008 Kinetica Museum co-presented the solo work of Montreal-based media artist Eric Raymond in the first stage of two-part exhibition Schematic: New Media Art from Canada. This first stage, consisting of a solo show of Raymond’s work, was set in the dramatic surroundings of Canada House, London, providing the foundations for the second-stage group exhibition at SPACE, East London, in November - December 2008.

New Media Art from Canada was curated by Heather Corcoran, Michelle Kasprzak and Gillian McIver, featuring two of Raymond's most notable installations that explore the dynamics between technology and the natural world. In this case the natural world is both human movement, and meteorological phenomena. These works both complemented and interfered with the sense of history and tradition embodied in Canada House, emphasizing the sense of relational movement that came about in the second group-show of the exhibition.

In Linescape (2004) motorized monitors reveal a serene outdoor horizon piece by piece, creating an interpretation of the natural world indoors, and within an essentially ‘unatural’ environment. The second piece to feature in this exhibition, Scribes (2005), entailed tiny robots drawing a digital landscape of wireless signals picked up in the gallery.

Schematic: The Machine that Moves Us

The works in this exhibition challenge our assumptions about the common objects that surround us. They do this in the ways they move, and the ways they require us to move in our interaction with them, constantly obliging us to reconsider movement. Rosalind Krauss, in her classic text ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, noted that sculpture in the early sixties “was what was on or in front of a building that was not the building, or what was in the landscape that was not the landscape.” The works in this exhibition, through the unique set of behaviors that they manifest, represent human movements and motivations that are, at once, not human. These works create delight but also unease, in that they cause the viewer to confront the question; what do the machines we create say about ourselves? Our contemporary context is one of increasing reliance on technology and advances in technology as a result of human virtuosity. In the spirit of our time, works such as these, by artists who are also the inventor, continue to interrogate the spectrum of human expression, through the spectrum of the non-human.