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Tine Bech is a visual artist and researcher working with interactive installations and public art. She was born in Denmark and now lives and works in London, UK.
Bech's practice is concerned with how we engage with our immediate environment and aims to create experiences of immersion and play. The work is intentionally accessible through the use of location and materials and often ‘hums and reacts with a playful anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by surprise. Projects have centred on the use of interactive electronics and location tracking technology, urban spaces and environmental elements such as gravity, water, sound and light.
Bech's practice is concerned with how we engage with our immediate environment and aims to create experiences of immersion and play. The work is intentionally accessible through the use of location and materials and often ‘hums and reacts with a playful anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by surprise. Projects have centred on the use of interactive electronics and location tracking technology, urban spaces and environmental elements such as gravity, water, sound and light.
Her public art is site-sensitive (often in unexpected places) and aims to challenge our common assumptions about public space and its use. The work questions public behaviour (don’t touch in galleries, don’t play/run in public spaces) and develop spaces where interaction, play and collaboration take place, whether between large groups or in intimate interactions between the viewer and the artwork. Bech also enjoys collaboration and has worked with engineers and scientists to explore new forms of expression, at the edge of the disciplines.
Bech's use of interactive technology addresses the meeting between the digital and the physical. Her work explores the body moving through the environment that it is immersed in. The body is the membrane through which we must necessarily relate to the world. However, the borderline between the body and world is not sharply defined, instead they are entwined in a constant dialogue. This dialogue is an important part of the work.
Texts:
“Everything is secretly alive in Tine Bech’s work: shoes, bridges, streetlights, balloons and coloured blobs. They hum and react with a playful anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by surprise. Boundless in Space is a pink blob looking a little like a cushion on wheels that moves and clicks when you come close to it. Echidna is a black wiry sculpture, emitting sounds in response to your touch, which was inspired by the Australian hedgehog of the same name. Coloured lights are activated as people pass on the bridge beneath in Tracing Light. A large red blob accompanies the artist on a bicycle tour of Toronto Island in another work. And in Mememe, visitors move around in flamboyant sculptural shoes creating sound compositions in a gallery space. Bech’s sculptures and installations are full of bright colours evoking sunlight and playgrounds”
Tracey Warr, Watery Looks, visiting artist exhibition, Catalogue.
In the encounter with Mememe you are not a distant observer, but an active participant, and soundless, invisible surveillance is replaced by noisy play, freedom and movement. This constitutes a break with formalistic views of art, according to which the surroundings and the context are not especially important to the aesthetic and subjective appreciation of art. In the case of Mememe, it is precisely the performative relationship between work, viewer and space that seems to be the all-important starting point for the creation of meaning. It establishes a visual and auditive dialogue between work and audience, a dance between technology, art and man. Mememe proposes a phenomenological appreciation of art that activates the whole body and all the senses - where the artwork becomes something more than just a visual and intellectual experience.
Annette Damgaard, Curator, Marie Nipper, Writer and Thorsten Sadowsky, Director Aarhus Contemporary Art Centre, Catalogue Mememe, On the Edge.
…Bech started developing reactive sculptors as she had come to realise that art is something that should be experienced not only visually and intellectually but with the whole body and all its senses. Bech’s reactive robotic sound balloons encourage people to interact in a somatic and tactile way; they invite to play with them in a physical mode going beyond a merely intellectual appreciation.
Selma Stern, The UK’s Sculptural Newcomers
"Where does the body end and where does our surrounding world begin? These were the two questions that resounded inside my head after seeing Tine Bech's interactive sound installation 'Floating Field 2'
...It is the weightlessness of the sculptural construction that makes the work sensitive to the slightest influence. This sensitivity is important as it highlights that the body is capable of affecting the world, without being in direct contact with it. The installation signifies the bodies indefinable boundaries; there is a life between body and world that is not immediately intelligible. In other words Tine Bech unites body and world in a formless intersection on the edge form.
...In a way the installation almost has Buddhist elements in the way it attempts to go beyond the classic dualistic dichotomy: Body and Mind are interdependent. Hans Christian Andersen wrote about this 200 years ago and Tine Bech now re-ignites the debate - in case anyone should have forgotten the old poet."
Rene Lundgaard, Floating Field 2, Review.
Bechs use of interactive technology and qualities inherent in natural phenomena such as rain, bird song and buoyancy are reminders of physicality - we want to touch her objects, we need to walk around them, to experience them, to meet them and they interact with us, responding to our proximity.
Tracey Warr, ‘Materialisation’ Catalogue Text.
This summer hit is DCRC PhD student Tine Bech's Big Swim project. Have a look at the lovely video of folks swimming in the unique colour mists that Tine created for the work. A triumph of health and safety. See also her new interactive teapot - I know, how interactive do you want a teapot to be ? But, like all Tine's work, its seriously beautiful.
Jon Dovey, DCRC blog.
It was one of the most successfully interactive art works I have been to, and I've been to a few over the years. Not only did you transform a vast area but also you shifted the way the whole space was treated as well as experienced. It was beautiful to swim in a slightly disorienting dream of fog and light for an array of reasons. For as start the fog heightened the awareness of (moonlit) wave and water by disrupting the swimmer's vision, but also by endowing her with a comfortable anonymity...
Althea Greenan about Purple Membrane, Camberwell Arts Festival.
Echidna has been a very popular exhibit (many fascinated and appreciative visitors, including people with visual impairments and people with special learning needs). The exhibition is being very well received including Echidna, in fact I think it seems to be one of the highlights, especially among young people. And we have just had a dad and son coming in asking for "the hedgehog". Seems it was a word of mouth recommendation from friends saying they should go and see your work.
Dale Johnston, Events & Exhibitions Officer, Banbury Museum
At an exhibition in Brighton a child flung himself upon one of her sculptures, as if it were a giant pillow. Bech watched in horror and fury, shortly followed by relief when it emerged unbroken from underneath the offending boy. But she concedes to being flattered – he had merely succumbed to the urge that she aims to elicit. Bech calls the viewers’ interaction with the objects ‘playing’ and feels strongly that fun should be inherent in her artwork.
Lucy Manning ‘Features Tine Bech’
Bech's use of interactive technology addresses the meeting between the digital and the physical. Her work explores the body moving through the environment that it is immersed in. The body is the membrane through which we must necessarily relate to the world. However, the borderline between the body and world is not sharply defined, instead they are entwined in a constant dialogue. This dialogue is an important part of the work.
Texts:
“Everything is secretly alive in Tine Bech’s work: shoes, bridges, streetlights, balloons and coloured blobs. They hum and react with a playful anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by surprise. Boundless in Space is a pink blob looking a little like a cushion on wheels that moves and clicks when you come close to it. Echidna is a black wiry sculpture, emitting sounds in response to your touch, which was inspired by the Australian hedgehog of the same name. Coloured lights are activated as people pass on the bridge beneath in Tracing Light. A large red blob accompanies the artist on a bicycle tour of Toronto Island in another work. And in Mememe, visitors move around in flamboyant sculptural shoes creating sound compositions in a gallery space. Bech’s sculptures and installations are full of bright colours evoking sunlight and playgrounds”
Tracey Warr, Watery Looks, visiting artist exhibition, Catalogue.
In the encounter with Mememe you are not a distant observer, but an active participant, and soundless, invisible surveillance is replaced by noisy play, freedom and movement. This constitutes a break with formalistic views of art, according to which the surroundings and the context are not especially important to the aesthetic and subjective appreciation of art. In the case of Mememe, it is precisely the performative relationship between work, viewer and space that seems to be the all-important starting point for the creation of meaning. It establishes a visual and auditive dialogue between work and audience, a dance between technology, art and man. Mememe proposes a phenomenological appreciation of art that activates the whole body and all the senses - where the artwork becomes something more than just a visual and intellectual experience.
Annette Damgaard, Curator, Marie Nipper, Writer and Thorsten Sadowsky, Director Aarhus Contemporary Art Centre, Catalogue Mememe, On the Edge.
…Bech started developing reactive sculptors as she had come to realise that art is something that should be experienced not only visually and intellectually but with the whole body and all its senses. Bech’s reactive robotic sound balloons encourage people to interact in a somatic and tactile way; they invite to play with them in a physical mode going beyond a merely intellectual appreciation.
Selma Stern, The UK’s Sculptural Newcomers
"Where does the body end and where does our surrounding world begin? These were the two questions that resounded inside my head after seeing Tine Bech's interactive sound installation 'Floating Field 2'
...It is the weightlessness of the sculptural construction that makes the work sensitive to the slightest influence. This sensitivity is important as it highlights that the body is capable of affecting the world, without being in direct contact with it. The installation signifies the bodies indefinable boundaries; there is a life between body and world that is not immediately intelligible. In other words Tine Bech unites body and world in a formless intersection on the edge form.
...In a way the installation almost has Buddhist elements in the way it attempts to go beyond the classic dualistic dichotomy: Body and Mind are interdependent. Hans Christian Andersen wrote about this 200 years ago and Tine Bech now re-ignites the debate - in case anyone should have forgotten the old poet."
Rene Lundgaard, Floating Field 2, Review.
Bechs use of interactive technology and qualities inherent in natural phenomena such as rain, bird song and buoyancy are reminders of physicality - we want to touch her objects, we need to walk around them, to experience them, to meet them and they interact with us, responding to our proximity.
Tracey Warr, ‘Materialisation’ Catalogue Text.
This summer hit is DCRC PhD student Tine Bech's Big Swim project. Have a look at the lovely video of folks swimming in the unique colour mists that Tine created for the work. A triumph of health and safety. See also her new interactive teapot - I know, how interactive do you want a teapot to be ? But, like all Tine's work, its seriously beautiful.
Jon Dovey, DCRC blog.
It was one of the most successfully interactive art works I have been to, and I've been to a few over the years. Not only did you transform a vast area but also you shifted the way the whole space was treated as well as experienced. It was beautiful to swim in a slightly disorienting dream of fog and light for an array of reasons. For as start the fog heightened the awareness of (moonlit) wave and water by disrupting the swimmer's vision, but also by endowing her with a comfortable anonymity...
Althea Greenan about Purple Membrane, Camberwell Arts Festival.
Echidna has been a very popular exhibit (many fascinated and appreciative visitors, including people with visual impairments and people with special learning needs). The exhibition is being very well received including Echidna, in fact I think it seems to be one of the highlights, especially among young people. And we have just had a dad and son coming in asking for "the hedgehog". Seems it was a word of mouth recommendation from friends saying they should go and see your work.
Dale Johnston, Events & Exhibitions Officer, Banbury Museum
At an exhibition in Brighton a child flung himself upon one of her sculptures, as if it were a giant pillow. Bech watched in horror and fury, shortly followed by relief when it emerged unbroken from underneath the offending boy. But she concedes to being flattered – he had merely succumbed to the urge that she aims to elicit. Bech calls the viewers’ interaction with the objects ‘playing’ and feels strongly that fun should be inherent in her artwork.
Lucy Manning ‘Features Tine Bech’