[dNASAb]’s ‘Dataklysmos’ offers cyber chaos at Irvine Gallery

Part the blackout curtains that Irvine Gallery has installed for its latest show, “Dataklysmos: Multidimensional Sculptures,” and you’ll enter a crypt fo r electronic gadgets. Arrayed in the darkened space are assemblages of LEDs, flat-screen monitors and the stray iPod or iPad — all battered, jumbled or melted. The overall effect is of a digital-age memento mori. Except that the things are still alive.

The Brooklyn artist who calls himself [dNASAb] — that’s short for Disney-NASA-Borg — might seem to hate electronic gadgetry. One of his video pieces, “Aesthetics of Decay: Design for Dying Electronics,” documents an assault on an already-cracked video screen, which ends with the device’s full demise. The two-minute cyber-slasher movie is sure to stir the blood of anyone who’s seen too many Xfinity commercials.

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( Courtesy [dNASAb] and Irvine Contemporary / ) - “LCDblossom_Phospherescent Polyp, 2011,” by [dNASAb], uses silicon that absorbs the light that the piece emits.

One of the ideas behind such combative work, the artist says, is to contemplate our reliance on these devices and our sense of abandonment when they stop working. “What percentage of yourself do you lose,” he asks, when your computer, smartphone or DVR fails?

But [dNASAb], like most of us, has a complicated relationship with electronic gizmos. He doesn’t merely want to punish them for their inadequacies or dissect them to see what will happen. He also transforms them into something beautiful. Some of the pieces shape plastics, resins and fiber optics to suggest birds, insects and flowers. Reconfigured, the factory-made gear seems almost ethereal, a sense that’s magnified by hanging some of the finished pieces from the ceiling, so they appear to be hovering.

Sometimes, the artist’s work competes with nature: The multicolored “LCDblossom_Phospherescent Polyp” uses silicon that absorbs the light that the piece emits; when the construction is unplugged, the stored light glows like a tiny sun. In a series of large digital C-prints, [dNASAb]’s sculpture challenges the ocean. Photographed at North Carolina’s Outer Banks, these images of “Emergent Ecological Technologies” show waves crashing on LED-illuminated assemblages. (That’s not obvious from the photos, which were shot at night, and appear simply to be abstract compositions of dark, motion and artificial light.) [dNASAb] plans another series of such photos, this time underwater.

Although he has a sculpture and mixed-media MFA, [dNASAb] is self-taught in electronics and uses off-the-shelf technology. One of his inspirations is Nam June Paik, the Korean-born American artist who’s the subject of a current show at the National Gallery’s East Building Tower. Paik was among the first artists to recognize the possibilities of the cathode ray tube, and stacked multiple TV screens to build works of kinetic sculpture. But his work looks tidy next to [dNASAb]’s, and is based on technologies that seem quaint.

Given its appetite for destruction, [dNASAb]’s art seems closer in spirit to Jean Tinguely and the Ant Farm. The former, a Swiss artist with roots in the Dada movement, built “metamachanic” sculptures that were designed to destroy themselves. The latter, a California design collective, staged a 1975 performance piece that involved driving a Cadillac through a wall of burning TV sets. The Farm is probably best known for “Cadillac Ranch,” a row of half-buried cars that followed the angle of the Great Pyramid of Giza. (From Cadillacs to iPads is not such a long trip, since Apple emulates the old Detroit paradigm of marketing quickly obsolescent products designed to be replaced by next year’s model.)