Self Organizing Still Life (SOS)
Sound stimulated interactive Sculptures

The Acronym SOS implies communication within the trust of an interdependent social system. Fried has chosen SOS - Self Organizing Still Life, as the working title for his ongoing series of sound-stimulated interactive sculptures, which premiered at Art Berlin in 1998. Since then, his SOS sculptures have been in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including a touring museum show including works by Rebecca Horn, Robert Rauschenberg, Leo Erb, Günter Uecker.
Whatever the scale or materials used for the SOS, all of these works consist of solid spheres, which are stirred into motion by ambient sound on a predetermined level object. Audible sound is transformed live into waves that silently stimulate each of the spheres into motion. The resulting action of the individual spheres and their interactions with one another are undetermined. They rearrange themselves in continually new patterns of elegantly fluid choreography.Some kiss, some spin off alone, while others race head-on only to meet with a soft embrace, or swerve around one another, often changing the path and destiny of each other without physical contact, as each sphere is able to feel one another.
Fried is able to give an individual character to each of the solid hand-made spheres, allowing them to respond and behave differently to live sound, though the artist is able to give each entire SOS a particular overall tendency of choreographic response. Like two people would dance differently to the same music, the spheres interact in a unique and live choreography directly initiated by its environment. When an acoustic signal is no longer detected, the spheres come to rest in ever-different constellations (Still-Life).
As we simultaneously influence and trace the movements of the spheres, our attention becomes increasingly focused on the non-linear dynamic relationships that unfold between them, effectively shifting the emphasis away from the individual objects themselves towards a highly subjective glimpse of the bigger picture.
Creating a complex live visual experience, Fried‘s interactive sculptures are compelling by their symbolically provocative simplicity, as the viewer is moved to forge perspectives on relationships, life and the universe of thought
 

'Kunst in Bewegung', Exhibition Museum Würzburg

 
In bed with Lucy and Dolly
Photograms   

Mapping the temporal balance between water and air in the form of unique bubbles - which emerge as a result of dynamic systems that do not follow linear and hierarchal patterns of organizational behavior - Fried charts the fundamental economy of networks in nature. In varying chromatic tones, Fried depicts strictly non-biological membranes that evoke a strong resemblance to primordial living cells or biotech test-tube creations, and remind us of just how strong yet corruptible the architecture of life is.
Fried creates large gaseous vesicles in a totally darkened room using infrared goggles and, at the decisive moment, photograms them onto grainless color sheet-film. Specifically, he uses the shadows of objects - even transparent things - to make an image on a photosensitive support using only light and the light sensitive material. No camera, no lens. What we see in his enlarged C-prints are the latent shadows and spectral aberrations of these transparent forms.
The title refers to Lucy (the early hominid Mother), to us (the Myth), and to Dolly-the-Sheep (the Missing Link) in a dialogue that seeks orientation in a world in which man has moved from controlling the environment to the inescapable urge to invent our predecessors. Fried takes us on a biomorphic journey from the Cambrian sea to the artificial womb.

Rainscapes
Photography

At first glance, the colorful arrays of countless water drops in Fried’s Rainscape photographs appear to be falling galaxies - clusters of dripping light painted on the night sky. On closer inspection one sees that they are actually photographs of pure falling rain.

Fried captures strongly individual patterns of rainfall on large format color film. Rich chromatic variations are revealed by the prismatic effect of light passing through each individual raindrop, evoking a spacious cosmic look. Fried’s large-scale Rainscape photographs exude a quiet replenishing quality that unloads poetically within the viewer.

Observing what gives rise to civilizations, or may ultimately lead to their demise, Fried sees freshwater as problematic in the 21st century. Since ancient times, with prayer and rituals - to science and its methods, humans have wished to influence the weather, and although the collective human pursuit has undoubtedly had profound affects on the ecosystem, we are luckily still unable to control bigger systems such as the weather. Rain still falls freely through the world’s trees, and harvesting hands before completing it’s cycle. However, access to - and usage of - clean water is being moved into increasingly privatized hands, servicing industry more than local needs and down river ecosystems. Fried’s Rainscapes portray sweet water at its birth and invites us to contemplate its worth as we become its temporary custodians