‘The Predator’: A Beast With Very Little Bite

This beast has more bark than bite. “The Predator,” a digitally designed installation at UC Irvine’s University Art Gallery, is more about hype than incisive vision--despite its elaborate technical genesis and tony pedigree.

Created by Argentine painter Fabian Marcaccio and Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn, “The Predator” takes inspiration from the special effects-laden Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name.

On view through Nov. 18, the piece looks like something Sigourney Weaver might have encountered in “Alien”--a giant, quivering, wormlike creature made of painted and silk-screened vacuformed plastic, 30 feet long by 10 feet tall.

Thickly striated, constructed of panels supported by metal rods, “The Predator” is gouged by rough-edged openings. In places it sports jagged strips of plastic resembling ragged ribs. Its skin is almost transparent, occasionally smeared with Halloween-colored daubs of paint.

Inside, Marcaccio’s printed imagery flows like a roiling, primordial sea. Sometimes simple black grids hold sway, echoing the installation’s digital origins. Lynn designed “The Predator” with animation software. He birthed it using a computer-assisted manufacturing process.

Mostly, though, patterns of prehistoric-looking plant shapes predominate. Images of evolution for a new kind of art, the artists presumably thought. But like Dr. Frankenstein, they have created a hybrid whose parts don’t quite mesh.

Marcaccio’s imagery seems a decorative element that floats on the surface, not fully incorporated into the essential nature of the piece. The work does not feel like a single, organic whole. Instead, what we get is a large, nicely decorated, walk-in sculpture that took quite some time to prepare.

Marcaccio and Lynn first conjured “The Predator” when they were artists in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. Both have extensive resumes. Both like to tinker with form, surface and process.

The project’s nod to cinema and its incorporation of technology sound appealing but do not evidence themselves enough in the finished product.

In all, “The Predator” feels seriously retro, and not just in a cinematic sense. It resembles stabs at experimental inflatable architecture made in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Still, Lynn and Marcaccio do stir some intriguing thoughts. Is this how we might eventually live, inside just such an organic, air-sensitive shelter? Is this what our interface with art, or art-as-life, might be? Or is this best reserved for the Sci-Fi Channel?

The chief rewards of “The Predator” are its allusions to the murky future of life and our pop culture-derived fears and fantasies of same. That, plus a peek at the thought process of two irreverent artists.

Perhaps in the future they will build a better beast. In the meantime, their “Predator” is fleeting fun, in a funky, overblown kind of way.

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“The Predator.” University Art Gallery, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, UC Irvine, 712 Arts Plaza/101 HTC. Free. Through Nov. 18. (949) 824-6206.