Convento

Directed by Jarred Alterman. Edinburgh International Film Festival 19 June. Sculptures on show 15–26 June.

Credit: J. ALTERMAN (CONVENTO)

Can you describe your artworks?

I take the remains of animals and plants and bring them back to life by means of computer-controlled motors, or servos. The sculptures can interact with people and each other. There is a strong natural element and a technological part; for example, one of my sculptures has two goat skulls that bang into each other using a pneumatic system. Another is a snake eagle that dives down from a height of ten metres to meet a Duracell bunny. There is a hare skull to which I gave a new copper face. And I have five masks with little tongues that repeat lines from the 1982 film Blade Runner, in which an android asks for a longer life.

How did you become interested in machines and animals?

My grandfather was an aeroplane technician, and as a child I worked with him in his basement full of exotic parts of aeroplanes. Then my family moved to an isolated convent in rural Portugal and I explored the natural surroundings. I had dreams of machines that could fly, jump and swim. When I was at art school I had three dog skulls in my studio, and I arranged them into a mechanical Cerberus, the many-headed dog that guards the underworld in classical mythology. People were really shocked by it.

What technologies do you use?

I use old-fashioned materials such as cogs and wheels, clockwork devices, electromagnetic coils and servos, as well as radar and ultrasonic sensors. I create an illusion, but also give away my tricks by leaving the mechanisms exposed. Although computer-aided manipulation of materials is getting cheaper, I build my machines by hand. The biggest part of my work is programming them so that they seem to behave naturally.

What point are you trying to make?

I am trying to unravel humans' relationship with nature. We have rudimentary reactions to other animals, often a fight-or-flight reaction. There is a dark side to my work, perhaps a warning about the loss of species. But I also try to merge the worlds of animal and machine, so that they coexist peacefully. I try to make something that appears to be real, using technology to create a world that no one has seen before.

Paranoia

Gare Saint Sauveur, Lille, France. Until 15 August

Mechatronics gives an eagle skull new life. Credit: C. ZWANIKKEN, MONSIEUR HOUDIN, N'OEBLIEZ PAS VOTRE OISEAU! (2008)/PHOTO: J. ALTERMAN (CONVENTO)

What is your most recent piece?

My installation Scorched Earth, on show until 15 August at an exhibition in Lille, France, is a post-apocalyptic landscape in which all flora and fauna are extinct and the remains of animals have been combined with machines to populate the world. The artificial animals are autonomous, intelligent and uncontrollable. Humans exist only as a memory. The morning it was finished, I saw the images from Japan after the tsunami. They seemed strikingly familiar.