When he was a young boy, Ryan Buyssens chopped up his toys. “Then I would do something unusual,” he said.
“I would take them apart and figure out how things work, and put them together in weird ways and have them do something different. I’ve always made machines.”
Until August, Buyssens was the director of the Digital Fabrication and Prototyping Lab at UNC Charlotte. He describes himself as “this weird hybrid inventor-artist-science guy” who’s always pushing new boundaries with his kinetic art creations.
Kinetic sculpture – any art that operates on perceived or actual motion – dates to the late 1800s and was established as a major art movement in the 1950s. But Buyssens, now assistant professor of art at the University of Central Florida, says this field entails many scientific principles and even some philosophy. He’s intrigued not only by the pieces’ motion and mechanics but what they can say to us about time and space.