Ecology Machine

The final chapter develops the hypothesis that towards the end of the twentieth century there is a fundamental shift in the understanding of the machine, and thus also of machine art. This shift is effected by the emergence, since the 1960s, of the paradigms of systems thinking and of ecology which conceive nature, the environment as well as the human body as systemic factors and inscribe them into a technological understanding of the world. The chapter looks at early examples of ecological art, especially by Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, and Otto Piene, which show how closely related are the conceptions of ecology and technology in their works. Detailed analyses of later works by Knowbotic Research, Marko Peljhan and Seiko Mikami show how the systemic, environmental understanding of technology increasingly decouples the relation of machine and human subjectivation. Seiko Mikami’s work in particular questions the position of the human body and its faculties in relation to technical systems which in her installations change from being neutral media interfaces into autonomous, solitary machine subjects, articulating the “ecological” crisis of the machine as a crisis of human subjectivity.

Epilogue: Fantasies of Destruction

The short epilogue of this book on machine art revisits some of the key themes of the book by introducing the accident as a notion that features not only in critical discourses on technology like that of French theoretician Paul Virilio, but also in a variety of artistic practices. Gustav Metzger’s concept of “auto-destructive art” marks a prominent example of the critical stance that artists have taken against the imagined, destructive and anti-human power of technology. The author reflects on the question why Metzger’s promise of a “machine art” that would articulate auto-destructive and auto-creative art, remained unfulfilled. By way of conclusion, it speculates whether the experimental machine artworks by Austrian artist Herwig Weiser provide this articulation by questioning the very logic of technics and by inventing alternative techno-logics for the materials and concepts of a contemporary technoculture.

Body Machine

This chapter deals with the way in which the meaning of the machine is intertwined with that of the human body. Throughout modernity, the human organism has been understood both as a model for the conception of mechanical systems and as the site of a subjectivity which is undermined by such technological systems. This charged terrain has been the subject of the entire artistic career of the Australian artist Stelarc. His work is analyzed in detail and taken as a point of entry into a historical presentation of conceptions of the body, from the mechanical through the cybernetic, and in the work of artists like Oskar Schlemmer and El Lissitzky, as well as in the more recent, deconstructive approaches by Wim Delvoye, or Seiko Mikami. The chapter also outlines how the notion of an encapsulated human body merging with its technical environment can be found not only in the cybernetic fantasy of Oswald Wiener’s “Bio-Adapter”, but also in similar proposals by authors as different as Kazimir Malevich, Max Bense, and Vilém Flusser.

Image Machine

This chapter deals with the role that vision and images play in the conjunction of technics and aesthetics in the twentieth century. Based on an analysis of the fundamental technicity of human visual perception, it discusses the complicated notion of the “image” and that of the “medium” in art. The chapter begins with a detailed analysis of the concept of “operational images,” which pinpoints the tension between images that are produced to be seen by human eyes, and technical vision systems that are independent of human vision and human intervention. The author then presents artworks by artists including Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, and Julien Maire which articulate the complex aesthetics of visual media techniques. A discussion of early computer graphics artists like Vera Molnar, and more recent works by Antoine Schmitt, JODI, and others, exemplifies how issues like seriality, chance, and control have concerned visual artists working with different media supports ever since the 1920s. Finally, an analysis of works by David Rokeby, Wolfgang Staehle, and David Tomas serve to further outline the particular aesthetics of machine images and automated vision systems.

Toward the Art and Aesthetics of the Machine

This chapter provides an analysis of the basic aspects of an “aesthetics of the machine”. It focuses on two pivotal moments in the twentieth century history of machine art, one being the 1968 exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age”, curated by Pontus Hultén. The other example is the opening scene of Filippo Marinetti’s first futurist manifesto, published in 1909, in which the advent of futurism is marked by a symbolically charged car accident that preceded Marinetti’s hymn to the new technical culture. From here, and drawing mainly on artistic examples from Hultén’s exhibition (incl. Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Tinguely), the author highlights five distinct aspects that have characterized the “machine aesthetic” until the 1960s: the “associative” reference to the social meanings of technology, often used to make a provocative claim against the assumptions of artistic ingenuity; the “symbolic” reference to mechanics as a way to describe aspects of human culture and psychology; the “formalist” appraisal of the beauty of functional forms; the play with “kinetic” functions as a way to broaden the expressive potentials of sculpture; and the “automatic” operation of machines that underpins their functional independence and their existential strangeness.

Algorithm Machine

This chapter discusses the ways in which twentieth-century artists have engaged with the aesthetic dimensions of algorithms and machine autonomy. It extends the narrative on the history of machine art from the previous chapter, beyond the program of Hultén’s 1968 “Machine” exhibition. It explains how the dialogue between art and cybernetics has evolved from the 1950s cybernetic artworks of Nicolas Schöffer, through the 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” and Jack Burnham’s concept of Systems Aesthetics, to the more contemporary software and robotic artworks of Max Dean, Seiko Mikami, and others. A focus is placed on the work of Canadian artist David Rokeby who has explored the aesthetics of the human encounter and interaction with technical systems since the 1980s. The analysis aims at adding two further aspects of the aesthetics of machines to the list of five such aspects developed in the previous chapter: one is the aspect of “interactivity”, which adds the dimension of a charged dialogue and exchange between human and machine; and the other is the aspect of “machine autonomy”, which becomes a determining factor in the human experience of increasingly independent and self-referential technical systems.

Introduction: The Phantom of “Machine Art”

This introductory chapter maps the conceptual context for the treatment of machine art that follows in the other chapters of the book. The chapter first presents the most important, partly conflicting definitions of the term “machine art” that have been deployed by different authors in the twentieth century, including Vladimir Tatlin, Alfred Barr, Bruno Munari, and the Berlin Dadaists. The chapter then outlines the most important concepts of the “machine”, a notion that has been used to denote technical, sociopolitical as well as psychological phenomena. The author proposes a general conception of the “machine” as a particular type of relation between individuals and the structures, or apparatuses, that bring about human subjectivities. The introduction concludes with a section on the gender aspect of human relations with technology, using the myths of the bachelor machine and the cyborg to describe supposedly gender-specific forms of access to the construction and usage of technical systems.

Prologue: First Encounters

This short chapter at the beginning of the book introduces the theme of Machine Art by describing four artworks that pinpoint the encounter of humans with technical systems. The works by the artists Maurizio Bolognini, Daria Martín, Herwig Weiser, and David Rokeby, present different degrees of strangeness and intimacy, interaction, control and machine autonomy, circumscribing some of the key aspects of human–machine relations.