Leonardo

Roger F. Malina, Executive Editor

Sean Cubitt, Editor-in-Chief

Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, 2008

White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960–1980, edited by Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert, and Catherine Mason, 2008

Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media, Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, 2010

Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution, George Gessert, 2010

Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, Laura U. Marks, 2010

Synthetics: Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956–1975, Stephen Jones, 2011

Hybrid Cultures: Japanese Media Arts in Dialogue with the West, Yvonne Spielmann, 2012

Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, Karen O’Rourke, 2013

The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, revised edition, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 2013

Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles, Erkki Huhtamo, 2013

Relive: Media Art Histories, edited by Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, 2013

Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, 2014

Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain, Pasi Väliaho, 2014

The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels, Sean Cubitt, 2014

The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology, Frances Dyson, 2014

The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema, Gloria Sutton, 2014

Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, Laura U. Marks, 2015

Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048, edited by Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parikka, 2015

Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic, Seb Franklin, 2015

New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978), Armin Medosch, 2016

Screen Ecologies: Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region, Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams, 2016

Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities, Gary Hall, 2016

Social Media Archeology and Poetics, edited by Judy Malloy, 2016

Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art, edited by Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen, 2016

Machine Art in the Twentieth Century, Andreas Broeckmann, 2016

See <http://mitpress.mit.edu> for a complete list of titles in this series.

Machine Art in the Twentieth Century

Andreas Broeckmann

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Broeckmann, Andreas, author.

Title: Machine art in the twentieth century / Andreas Broeckmann.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2016. | Series: Leonardo book series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016017052 | ISBN 9780262035064 (hardcover : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262336093

Subjects: LCSH: Art and technology. | Art, Modern—20th century—Themes, motives.

Classification: LCC N72.T4 B76 2016 | DDC 700.1/05—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017052

ePub Version 1.0

Series Foreword

Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (ISAST)

Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, and the affiliated French organization Association Leonardo have some very simple goals:

To advocate, document, and make known the work of artists, researchers, and scholars developing the new ways that the contemporary arts interact with science, technology, and society.

To create a forum and meeting places where artists, scientists, and engineers can meet, exchange ideas, and, when appropriate, collaborate.

To contribute, through the interaction of the arts and sciences, to the creation of the new culture that will be needed to transition to a sustainable planetary society.

When the journal Leonardo was started some forty-five years ago, these creative disciplines existed in segregated institutional and social networks, a situation dramatized at that time by the “Two Cultures” debates initiated by C. P. Snow. Today we live in a different time of cross-disciplinary ferment, collaboration, and intellectual confrontation enabled by new hybrid organizations, new funding sponsors, and the shared tools of computers and the Internet. Above all, new generations of artist-researchers and researcher-artists are now at work individually and collaboratively bridging the art, science, and technology disciplines. For some of the hard problems in our society, we have no choice but to find new ways to couple the arts and sciences. Perhaps in our lifetime we will see the emergence of “new Leonardos,” hybrid creative individuals or teams that will not only develop a meaningful art for our times but also drive new agendas in science and stimulate technological innovation that addresses today’s human needs.

For more information on the activities of the Leonardo organizations and networks, please visit our websites at http://www.leonardo.info/ and http://www.olats.org.

Roger F. Malina

Executive Editor, Leonardo Publications

ISAST Governing Board of Directors: Nina Czegledy, Greg Harper, Marc Hebert (Chair), Gordon Knox, Roger Malina, Tami Spector, Darlene Tong.

Acknowledgments

In a way, this book has been in the making for over twenty years. When I started my first job at the V2_Organisation in Rotterdam in 1995, my assignments were the preparations for a symposium for the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) and a program for the “Next 5 Minutes—Tactical Media” conference. For the latter I wrote a text which became the basis for my contributions to later V2 programs, like the event series on “Machine Aesthetics” (1997), and to the DEAF editions on “The Art of the Accident” (1998) and “Machine Times” (2000); this text was also the beginning of the trajectory that led me to write this book. I therefore remain deeply indebted to my former colleagues at the V2_Organisation, Alex Adriaansens, Joke Brouwer, Marc Thelosen, and Peter Duimelinks, for providing the most stimulating environment a young, runaway academic could wish for.

On the many trails and detours that I have taken since, the most important inspiration has always come from my work with artists, some of whom also feature in this book. It is a great privilege to be in conversation and exchange with those who continue to work, and with those who can share their memories of artists they lived and worked with. I want to single out Vera Molnar who welcomed me in her studio in Paris, and Eléonore de Lavandeyra Schöffer who keeps the memory and archive of Nicolas Schöffer. On a sad note, the untimely passing away of Seiko Mikami in early 2015 must remind us of the transience of our endeavors.

The first notes for this book were written during a residency at the Banff Center, Canada, and important parts of the research were done at Kunstbibliothek Berlin and Staatsbibliothek Berlin, with additional research conducted at Museum Tinguely in Basel. Online resources like Media Art Net, Archive of Digital Art, Monoskop, Ubuweb, Thomas Dreher’s History of Computer Art, and Wikipedia have greatly supported my research, and I salute the individuals who maintain and develop sites like these, often more or less single-handedly.

The possibility of actually writing and finishing the book arose with the generous invitation by Claus Pias and Holm Keller to come and work at Leuphana University in Lüneburg where the teams of the EU-Innovation Incubator, the Centre for Digital Cultures, and the Leuphana Arts Program—especially Timon Beyes, Tina Ebner, Yuk Hui, and Alexandra Waligorski—provided both a supportive and an intellectually challenging work environment. I have greatly benefited from the academic context provided by Leuphana University’s Institute of Philosophy and Art and the university’s Kunstraum, and from the continued support of Ulf Wuggenig, Beate Söntgen, and Susanne Leeb. My colleagues at Leuphana’s Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM)—notably Götz Bachmann, Rolf Grossmann, Wolfgang Hagen, Erich Hörl, Jan Müggenburg, Claus Pias, Sebastian Vehlken, and Martin Warnke—have offered an intellectual home which, cybernetically, provided crucial feedback and helped to clarify things that an art historian normally does not readily come across.

I am particularly grateful to those people who volunteered to read what was, at that point, clearly an unfinished manuscript, especially Joke Brouwer and Yvonne Wilhelm, both of whom generously offered critique and advice. Individual chapters were read and helpfully commented on by Alex Adriaansens, Götz Bachmann, Sylvia Broeckmann, Inge Hinterwaldner, Martina Leeker, Yukiko Shikata, Florian Sprenger, and the reading group of the Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL) in Lüneburg. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers at MIT Press, one of whom was particularly critical and whose feedback was thus the most helpful toward improvements. Moreover, I had the opportunity to discuss some of the ideas that did or did not make it into the book during seminars with students at Zurich University of the Arts, at Danube University Krems, and at Leuphana University.

Closer to the publication date, a number of people were helpful in finding and providing images and permissions to publish them. Andrey Smirnov of the Theremin Center Moscow shared his research and the patents of Ary Sternfeld; Luca Zaffarano was most forthcoming with images and information on Bruno Munari; and Yukiko Shikata helped me find images and rights in Japan, in addition to the photographer of images that date back over thirty-five years. And near the end, Janet Leyton Grant, Paula Woolley, and Matthew Abbate helped to get the manuscript into shape.

At the MIT Press, I am grateful to Sean Cubitt and the editorial board of the Leonardo Books series for accepting the proposal, and to Doug Sery and Susan Buckley for elegantly supporting the production process.

The life that goes on off-screen was most importantly maintained by my family and my friends Tilman Lingesleben, Petra Kirberger, Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Hübler, and Timothy Druckrey, as well as by my partner in crime in the jardins des pilotes, Stefan Riekeles. And all of it would not have been possible without the continued support, care, and intellectual challenge that I enjoy from my wife, Sandra Kuttner.

Prologue: First Encounters

My fascination with the aesthetics of machines began with a number of encounters. Maurizio Bolognini’s Sealed Computers (1992)—an art installation of desktop computers, networked, audibly running, yet without monitors, so that it is impossible to know what is being computed, or whether there is a conversation, or even a conspiracy, going on between them—has been the clearest example for me to explain what it is that got me interested in the topic (figure 0.1). The astonishment and irritation one feels about these machines’ autonomy; the impossibility of understanding what is going on; and this impossibility, this irritation, serving as the aesthetic hinge of our experience, forcing us to acknowledge the distance that we have as the audience of an artwork from something that unfolds right in front of our eyes, or in other cases perhaps even through our interaction—responses like these, in myself and in others, got me thinking about machines. Here are some other examples that can set the scene.

Figure 0.1 Maurizio Bolognini, Sealed Computers (Computer sigillati) (since 1992), installation view, Atelier de la Lanterne, Nice, France, 1997. Copyright © the artist.

The woman in the film touches the surface of a blimp tenderly (figure 0.2). She caresses the soft white material, it dents, and slowly moves away from her hand, restoring its full, round shape. It drifts upward, she follows it with her eyes, her hands half lifting it, half trying to stay in touch; don’t fly away!

Figure 0.2 Daria Martín, Soft Materials (2004), 16 mm film, 10 minutes 30 seconds, film still (female dancer with blimp). Copyright © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

Some moments later the scene has changed: a man lies on the floor next to a robot and carefully touches its array of small pipes (figure 0.3). They move like a wave, and it is impossible to tell whether they are responding to his touch or whether he is following their mechanical movement. An intimate and oblique interaction.

Figure 0.3 Daria Martín, Soft Materials (2004), 16 mm film, 10 minutes 30 seconds, film still (male dancer with pipes). Copyright © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

Three further scenes from Daria Martín’s film Soft Materials (2004) show the same man and woman with other apparatuses: the woman playing with her own long dark hair and with the whiskerlike hair of a small robot; the man holding a robotic hand that tenderly touches and squeezes his skin, he moves and positions the hand so that it can stroke his shoulder, his arm, his face; the woman standing, her torso bent down, making movements which mimic the simple robot next to her that is designed to jump up and down, waving two winglike elements.

In each of the scenes, the man and the woman are naked, which turns their encounters with the technical apparatuses into elemental events. They have been filmed in spaces that look like scientific research labs—not the most obvious sites of such intimate interplay, though the right places for the controlled observation of an encounter between different species. In the exhibition, the film is looped so that the sequence of scenes, each a few minutes long, repeats endlessly. Martín’s film presents the encounter between humans and technical apparatuses as an erotic adventure, playing on the voyeuristic desire of the viewer, as much as on the disconcerting existential difference between humans and machines, and the apparent indifference of the machines.¹

Let’s move on. Huddled on a large wooden platform which has been built into an exhibition space, some visitors gaze into a Plexiglas-covered terrarium. It is brightly lit, and inside is a shallow landscape of metal and other material granules (figures 0.4, 0.5). Heavy vibrations and sounds are emitted from the platform, a material drone sound that fills the entire space. The sounds are related to movements in the landscape of granules, to waves and eruptions which move through the material and which seem to be effected by magnets underneath the materials. As the magnets under different parts of the landscape are consecutively activated, portions of the materials that respond to the magnetism rise up in bizarre forms, wiggle, and fall back into passivity after passing on their energy, so it seems, to the neighboring materials. The patterns in which the magnets are activated can be manipulated by means of several MIDI controllers that lie on the platform. The visitors wrap themselves in industrial, if not infernal, noise while creating a weird, small-scale spectacle in the miniature desert.

Figure 0.4 Herwig Weiser, zgodlocator (2000), installation view, Trinitatiskirche, Cologne. Copyright © the artist.

Figure 0.5 Herwig Weiser, zgodlocator (2000), detail. Copyright © the artist.

The installation is Herwig Weiser’s zgodlocator (2000). It uses the granulated materials from recycled computer hardware that, when it has become redundant, is destroyed and ground up, after which the different materials are separated for reuse. From such postindustrial materials, Weiser has created the small landscape as a moving image of the afterlife of computers. It is here combined with an elaborate and somewhat massive technical installation that controls the activation of the matrix of magnets, including a large and heavy rack in a glass case, placed next to the platform, with separate units for each of the magnets.

If Daria Martín’s film is about the intimate encounter between humans and machines, and about both the tenderness and the strangeness of such an encounter, then Weiser’s installation suggests a scenario in which what remains of the machine after its dereliction, and what materially precedes it, is far from a form that could be addressed as a subject, as a partner, or as a counterpart. While the apparatuses in Martín’s laboratories can easily be mistaken for living or sentient entities that interact with their human visitors, Weiser confronts us with an environment which mobilizes a technical materiality that seems to lie both beyond and before its use as hardware. Additionally, Weiser’s work conveys the fascination of the artist working with such raw and heavy-duty stuff, the wonderment of the visitors bringing the granulated machine landscape to life, and my own captivation as I observe this scene of wonder.

It was experiences like these which made me want to investigate people’s relationships with machines as they have been articulated in twentieth-century art. This study rests on a foundation of artworks. In most cases, these have not been created in order to make a particular theoretical point, or to confound an argument, but they articulate specific, singular aesthetic positions and play on the margins of more general discourses about technology. This is therefore first and foremost a book about art, and an attempt at describing a certain engagement of artists with technical systems. “Machine art” is neither a particular artistic movement nor a genre of work, but rather a myth, or a rumor, that has been around for a hundred years, no more. The contemporary understanding of the “machine” is extremely diverse, and has changed in parallel with the development of technological systems. A question that motivated this research was whether the introduction of the computer led to a radical break in such conceptions, which would have resulted in a concomitant break in the artistic work on technology—or whether we can find continuities throughout the twentieth century that connect works made around 2000 to developments of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as to the avant-gardes earlier in the century. I was curious to see whether it was possible to elucidate the art historical lineage of works like those by Bolognini or Weiser, and how such a reconstruction would change the perspective on recent developments in the arts which imagine themselves primarily as driven by new media technologies.

Besides the ambiguity of Bolognini’s installation, the robotic eroticism in Martín’s film, and the playful apocalypse in Weiser’s work, another aspect of the human encounter with technology is the confrontation with artificial and intelligent technical entities, staged in an exemplary fashion by David Rokeby’s installation n-cha(n)t (2001, figure 0.6). Upon entering the room, one hears several humanlike voices reciting a text in unison, like a choir. The text appears to be an open-ended meandering of English words, following syntactical rules yet in a poetic form that verges on the nonsensical. The calm recital comes from loudspeakers which are attached to an array of computers that hang in the space and are combined with flatscreen monitors. The monitors each show a part of a human head in profile, with the ear in the middle, surrounded by some centimeters of hair and neck, yet the face and any other individualizing features fall outside of the image frame. The most recent words that have been spoken appear as legible white text at the top of the monitor screen.

Figure 0.6 David Rokeby, n-cha(n)t (2001), installation view, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts. Photo by Don Lee, Banff Center. Copyright © the artist.

There are microphones in front of the screens, inviting the human visitor to speak into them. When this happens, the respective computer unit interrupts itself and stops talking, on the screen a hand is raised and covers the ear, and the text display shows the words that a speech-to-text module in the computer has decoded from the visitor’s voice. These words are then integrated into the meandering discourse of this particular unit. In turn, this change also disturbs the discourse of the others, which appear to have been “listening” to their neighboring units. For a short while, the confusion of the voices builds up, each now reciting a different string of words. Yet, after some minutes, the different units resynchronize and gradually return to the unisonic chant, oblivious to any human presence, or interlocutors—until the latter reappear by speaking, yelling, or clapping in front of one of the microphones.

We will return to Rokeby’s work in chapter 3. For the moment, the two main aspects of the installation are the autonomous communality of the networked computers and the separation between their sphere and the sphere of human interlocutors. The programmed communication between the computer units gravitates toward a state of communal harmony and choral equilibrium so long as they are not disturbed by outside sonic intervention. The communication among the computers is taking place on a different channel—a hard-wired local area network—while the voice-based interventions of the human visitors are enabled by sound-sensitive microphones and a speech-to-text interface. Rokeby’s installation thus sets up the encounter between humans and machines not as one of intimacy or of utter material strangeness, but as an encounter that is both social and deeply antagonistic.

Note

Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted material are by the author.

1. See Daria Martín, “In Conversation with Yilmaz Dziewior and Beatrix Ruf,” in Daria Martín, exh. cat. (Zurich: Kunsthalle Zürich; Hamburg: Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2005), 73–85.

1 Introduction: The Phantom of “Machine Art”

What is “machine art”? If we go by the historical use of the expression, there is no conclusive answer to this question. In fact, there are a surprisingly small number of instances when artists and writers have used the term explicitly in order to affirm the existence and relevance of some machine art, and among these few instances, there are several quite divergent and inconsistent definitions of the term. A short chronological review of the most relevant of these statements shows that the underlying concepts of the machine and of art both vary hugely.

“Tatlin’s Machine Art”

At the peak of their activities in the summer of 1920, the Berlin Dadaists organized the “First International Dada Fair” (Erste Internationale Dada-Messe). The humble exhibition space presented a large variety of works, paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures, and assemblages, all combined in an overwhelmingly congested installation. One of several slogans printed on white cardboard panels claimed: “Art is dead. Long live Tatlin’s new machine art [Die Kunst ist tot. Es lebe die neue Maschinenkunst Tatlins]” (figure 1.1). Vladimir Tatlin was, at this time, one of the most famous and internationally known Russian avant-garde artists who were influencing art and art politics in the young Soviet Union. However, it is not immediately apparent what George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and their fellow Dadaists meant when they took Tatlin as a proponent of what they called “machine art.” It is unlikely that the Berlin Dadaists had seen any recent works by Tatlin when they printed their famous slogan.¹ Yet they had read a review by a young Russian art critic, writing in 1920 in a journal on recent trends in art that was titled after Moscow’s famous art district, Ararat. In his review “Der Tatlinismus oder die Maschinenkunst” (Tatlinism, or machine art), Konstantin Umanskij wrote what in Berlin was taken as a manifesto:

Figure 1.1 “First International Dada Fair” (1920), George Grosz and John Heartfield (“Art is dead. Long live Tatlin’s new machine art”). Image courtesy of Berlinische Galerie, Berlin. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ, and The Heartfield Community of Heirs / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2015.

The beginnings of Tatlin’s “machine art” go back to the year 1915. Vladimir Tatlin, the founder of this direction, has not only created new words for the language of art, but also a new language of art. More … The image is dead—thus the claim of “Tatlinism.” The image surface is too confined for the three-dimensional, the solution of new problems requires more elaborate technical means, and finally the necessity to create “images,” “artworks” that merely entertain the layperson—or rather repel him—is considered critically. Art is dead—long live art, the art of the machine with its construction and logic, its rhythm, its constituent parts, its material, its metaphysical spirit—the art of the “counter-relief.” It regards no type of material as unworthy for art. Wood, glass, paper, sheet metal, iron, screws, nails, electrical appliances, glass splinters for sprinkling the surfaces, the mobility of individual parts of the work, etc.—all these are declared as legitimate means of the language of art, and its new grammar and aesthetics demand of the artist a broader technical training and a closer bond with his powerful ally—the grand machine.²

The counter-reliefs that Umanskij mentions are small wall-mounted assemblages which Tatlin had created since around 1914. He used different materials, such as wooden boards, sheets of metal, and thread, and arranged them in three-dimensional configurations. Tatlin had trained as an artist, and in the revolutionary spirit of the day the counter-reliefs were his self-declared “Tatlinist” way of rejecting the hegemony of the flat surface of painting and its representational illusions. He had visited Paris in the spring of 1914 and had seen assemblages of paper and other materials in Pablo Picasso’s studio. But by integrating poor and industrially made materials into his assemblages, Tatlin was attempting to make a more radical break with artistic representation than he had found in Picasso’s cubism.³

Tatlin is one of those historical figures who have had to serve as projection screens for ideas that have, rightly or wrongly, become associated with their names.⁴ He initially promoted “Tatlinism,” i.e., the innovation of art through the detachment of technical materials from their industrial context in order to turn them into artistic materials. This transfer of technical materials into artistic media, and the dispensation of the artist’s subjective intention and control over the artwork, constitute the core of what the Berlin Dadaists understood as “Tatlin’s Machine Art.”⁵ Nevertheless, Tatlin himself soon rejected this approach because it preserved art as a practice outside of the overall processes of social production: as a teacher at the national art school, in the early 1920s, he therefore published the slogan, “Down with Tatlinism!”⁶

The Futurist Aesthetic of the Machine

Italian futurists had celebrated the arrival of the machine age ever since the publication of the first futurist manifesto by Filippo Marinetti in 1909. However, the most explicit treatment of the new “mechanical art” was formulated after the First World War by the second-generation futurist Enrico Prampolini in his manifesto “The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art.”⁷ Prampolini posited the machine as a new symbol of aesthetic inspiration which could elucidate the way in which artistic invention and production took place. The functional features of machines—such as their productivity, their repetitive movements, or their automatism—should be adopted for artworks not as physical principles, he argued, but rather as conceptual aspects:

The aesthetic virtues of the machine and the metaphysical meaning of its motions and movements constitute the new fount of inspiration for the evolution and development of contemporaneous plastic arts. … The plastic exaltation of The Machine and the mechanical elements must not be conceived in their exterior reality, that is in formal representations of the elements which make up The Machine itself, but rather in the plastic-mechanical analogy that The Machine suggests to us in connection with various spiritual realities.⁸

The futurists approached the notion of the machine by focusing on its symbolic meanings, with which an artistic practice would seek to associate. This machine would not produce art by itself, but would form a conceptual and metaphorical frame of reference for a new aesthetic.

Philip Johnson and Alfred H. Barr’s Machine Art

In the spring of 1934, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held the exhibition “Machine Art” curated by Philip Johnson, the founding director of the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design since 1930 (figure 1.2). The show contained around 400 items of US industrial design from contexts such as the office, the kitchen and home, science, and industry. In his introductory text for the catalog, Johnson contrasts “the history of machine art” to that of handicraft, praising the machine-made designs for their “precision, simplicity, smoothness, reproducibility,” aesthetically fitting “an age geared to machine technique.”⁹ In a brief historical overview, Johnson denounced nineteenth-century attempts by designers to reproduce craftlike appearance in machine-made objects, and described the variety of European influences on American designs of industrial objects.

Figure 1.2 Josef Albers, cover of the exhibition catalog Machine Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (1934). Offset lithograph, printed in black, 25.4 × 19.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art Library. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence 2015. Cover Design © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

In his text, Johnson used the term “machine art” only in the one instance just quoted, and otherwise focused on the emergence of a design equivalent of the International Style in architecture—to which he and MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. had devoted an exhibition two years earlier. In contrast, Barr in his own text for the catalog made extensive use of the term in a provocative though not merely polemical attempt to propose “machine art” as a new art historical category. To support this proposition, Barr offered an aesthetic evaluation, a statement on the role of the human artist, and an art historical contextualization.

In his foreword, Barr emphasizes the aesthetic clarity of machine-made objects: “In addition to perfection of shape and rhythm, beauty of surface is an important aesthetic quality of machine art at its best. Perfection of surface is, of course, made possible by the refinement of modern materials and the precision of machine manufacture.”¹⁰ Barr explicitly confronts the art theoretical implications of elevating machine-made products to the status of art. While the shape and appearance of the objects are determined by their functions, the artist-designer is ascribed a passive and unheroic role:

Many of the finest objects in the exhibition … are produced quite without the benefit of artist-designer [sic]. Their beauty is entirely unintentional—it is a by-product. Nevertheless they satisfy through their “integrity,” “due proportion” and “clarity,” the excellent thomistic definition of the beautiful as “that which being seen, pleases.” Many other objects … are the result of conscious artistic intention. For in a great many useful objects function does not dictate form, it merely indicates form in a general way. The role of the artist in machine art is to choose, from a variety of possible forms each of which may be functionally adequate, that one form which is aesthetically most satisfactory. He does not embellish or elaborate, but refines, simplifies and perfects.¹¹

Barr’s provocation lies in the fact that he proposes an art form that achieves beauty not through the artist’s intention and creation, but through the demands of functionality in industrial production, and without the influence of art history: “Good machine art is entirely independent of painting, sculpture and architecture. But it may be noted in passing that modern artists have been much influenced by machine art.”¹² He mentions the Italian, English, and Russian futurists who were “romantically excited by the power and speed of machines,”¹³ and comments in a footnote that the exhibition “Machine Age,” held in New York in 1927, had been inspired by the same romantic sentiment.¹⁴ In his list of contemporaneous artists who deal with aspects of machines, Barr does not mention the trope of “Tatlin’s machine art,” or the Berlin Dadaists’ antibourgeois appropriation, or American composer George Antheil’s machine music, but merely writes: “The Russian constructivists, Tatlin, Gabo, Pevsner, employed the technique, the materials and something of the structural feeling of machinery.”¹⁵

However, for Barr the machine is not only a functional object, but a force that has a direct impact on human life. The struggle with nature that romanticism addressed through the concept of the sublime has been supplanted by an analogous antagonistic struggle with industry and technology: “It is in part through the aesthetic appreciation of natural forms that man has carried on his spiritual conquest of nature’s hostile chaos. Today man is lost in the far more treacherous wilderness of industrial and commercial civilization. On every hand machines literally multiply our difficulties and point our doom. If, to use L. P. Jack’s phrase, we are to ‘end the divorce’ between our industry and our culture we must assimilate the machine aesthetically as well as economically. Not only must we bind Frankenstein—but we must make him beautiful.”¹⁶

Bruno Munari’s Art of Machines

Barr’s concern about an increasingly powerful technological system was echoed by the Italian third-generation futurist Bruno Munari who, in his 1938 “Manifesto del Macchinismo,” warns of the dangers of an all-powerful machine for whom people will be “little slaves” “in a few years’ time.”¹⁷ Munari speaks about machines as though they were an animate and sentient companion species: “We live among machines, they help us with everything we do in our work and recreation. But what do we know about their moods, their natures, their animal defects, if not through arid and pedantic technical knowledge?” Munari worries about people’s lack of understanding of these alien beings and their behavior, and yet he also sees the danger of people’s imagination being “afflicted” by the utilitarian spirit of machines: “The machine of today is a monster! The machine must become a work of art! We shall discover the art of machines!”

Yet, unlike Alfred Barr’s acquiescent call for assimilating the machine and “making it beautiful,” Munari suggests a stronger, more active role for the artist who, he contends, should understand and change the mechanical world. And countering Prampolini’s plea for an artistic practice that submits to the aesthetic concept of machines, Munari argues for an oppositional aesthetics of dysfunctionality and uselessness:

Artists are the only ones who can save mankind from this danger. Artists have to be interested in machines, have to abandon their romantic paintbrushes, their dusty palettes, their canvases and easels. They have to start understanding the anatomy of machines, the language of machines, their nature, and to re-route them into functioning in irregular ways to create works of art with the machines themselves, using their own means.¹⁸

Munari’s own delicate and playful kinetic sculptures, the Macchine inutili (Useless machines) of the 1930s and 1940s, are emblematic of such an attitude that is simultaneously critical and optimistic (figure 1.3). Understanding the aesthetics of machines meant, for Munari, developing the basis for an artistic counterpractice.

Figure 1.3 Bruno Munari, Macchina-arte N. 1, drawing, published in Bollettino, no. 11 (Movimento Arte Concreta, 1953). ©1953 Bruno Munari. All rights reserved to Maurizio Corraini srl. Mantova.

“Beyond Machine Art”

Twenty years after the 1967 founding of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT in Cambridge by György Kepes and others, the art association Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany, organized an anniversary exhibition, “Otto Piene und das CAVS” (1988). In an essay for the exhibition catalog, German art historian and curator Manfred Schneckenburger described his recent visit to the center. Schneckenburger had been the curator of Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, during which Piene and a whole team of artists and engineers from the CAVS had presented the large-scale Centerbeam installation performance.¹⁹

Schneckenburger used the phrase “Jenseits der Maschinenkunst [Beyond Machine Art]” as the title of his essay, and referred to “constructivist machine art” as the main historical counterpoint for the artistic research conducted at the CAVS:

The research here is not [as at other MIT departments] into mathematical formulas, the laws of physics, or chemical combinations, but into art, into the technical, aesthetic knowhow for new image worlds, beyond panel painting and woodcuts, but also beyond constructivist machine art, beyond the processes, attitudes, concepts, with which art has erupted into ever new morphologies and aggregate states.²⁰

While the focus of work at the CAVS lies on kinetic art, sky art, telecommunication, and media, Schneckenburger writes that “the utopia from the early, heroic time of modernity, the constructivists’ dream of the genuine creativity of new media and the beauty of technics, is over. Whether one shoots laser canons or communicates via satellite—these are no engineer-artists whose brain, as in Hausmann’s collage Tatlin at Home, consists of cogwheels, screws, and wires. New media are not invented here … but aesthetically researched. Art and technology are not celebrating a euphoric wedding, but they enter into a hopeful marriage of convenience.”²¹

What is significant for our current inquiry into concepts of “machine art” is that Schneckenburger rather inaccurately refers back to the Russian constructivists of the 1920s and interprets their aesthetic approach to machines and machine parts as “the dream of the beauty of technics”—an approach that was really championed not by Tatlin et alii, but by Barr and Johnson in New York in 1934. And Schneckenburger’s suggestion that the constructivists’ search for new materials in art expressed “the dream of the genuine creativity of new media” has its historical place not in the 1920s, but in the post-Greenbergian art discourse since the 1960s. Even though the constructivists and their contemporaries did in fact experiment with “new media” such as film, photography, radio, and typography, it was not the technical novelty in and of itself that motivated their aesthetic exploration.

After the full affirmation of “machine art” in its different, iconoclastic variants by the Berlin Dadaists, by futurists, and by the design formalism of Barr and Johnson, and after the growing concern since the 1930s about the antihuman tendencies of machine systems, we can see how after the 1960s the notion of machine art would become associated with an (imaginary) art historical moment onto which the sense of a misguided techno-utopianism was projected. Rhetorically, and somewhat deceptively, Schneckenburger uses the assertion of the “constructivists’ dream” in order to contrast the claim that the engagement with lasers, satellites, and innovative materials at the CAVS was inspired not by that same dream, but by aesthetic curiosity and pragmatism.²²

The inconsistent use of the term “machine art” that can be gleaned from these few examples is symptomatic of the vagueness with which the artistic engagement with technology has been framed discursively throughout the twentieth century. In the second chapter, I will analyze a number of these practices in order to develop a more consistent and analytical description of an aesthetics of the machine in art, focusing especially on its associative, symbolic, formalist, kinetic, and automatic aspects. Before we get there, though, we will have to look more closely at the complex terminology of the “machine,” which itself is a rumor—and a symptom—rather than a well-defined concept.

Concepts of the Machine in the Twentieth Century

The notion of the machine has many interpretations and is applied in many contexts. A complicated tension exists between the word’s use and its meaning: when the term “machine” is used, it most often appears to designate a particular thing, an object, a mechanism, or a process, and yet in many of these cases the concept actually designates not a particular class of objects, but a relationship that human subjects have to the world. I will try to explain this relationship in the following pages by briefly reviewing different types of machines, and by showing how the concept of the machine is connected to the constitution of the modern subject. In the present context, this can only be done in a cursory fashion, but the discussion should provide us with a basis for a differentiated approach to the forms and meanings of art practices that engage with technics.

A word about the terminology that I employ. The semantic field of machine, technology, apparatus, device, medium, etc. is complex, inconsistent, and often contradictory. It would not make sense to try to correct this, because the murkiness of the field merely emphasizes the multilayered and contradictory ways in which people speak about and make sense of the technical aspects of their world. There is a constant blending of technical, social, psychological, biological, etc., registers in our language, and the notion of the machine is indicative of the translation of concepts between these areas. Later I will discuss in more detail my own suggestion for how the concept of the “machine” can be understood in a more or less precise way. Suffice it to say now that I try to use the term restrictively and present it primarily in contexts where it is used by others. The same applies for “apparatus,” which is an ambivalent term used either for a concrete, circumscribed mechanism (or “device”), or for complex concatenations of such mechanisms into what others have referred to as “machinery” or a “mega-machine.” We will revisit some of these usages in a moment. The terms “technical” and “technics” refer to the concrete structures, material or conceptual, of making things work. “Mechanics” and “mechanical” indicate that force is conveyed in these structures by physical elements—a concept that is sometimes also used metaphorically to describe a simple, transparent effect. Technics are invented, conceptualized, and built by “engineers,” whereas machines are operated and tended by “machinists.” Somewhat unusually, I reserve the term “technology” for the theoretical reflection on technics and for its ideological preparation. Put simply, technology is the abstract form in which people think about technics, and it is the ideological form that makes people think about their world in technical terms. While the machine operates and conveys force, the “medium” enables communication and conveys meaning.

A useful entry point into a discussion of different machine types is the philosopher and logician Gotthard Günther’s essay “Die ‘zweite’ Maschine” (The “second” machine).²³ Günther employs a concept of the machine that is derived anthropologically and with reference to German philosopher Arnold Gehlen, who, for instance in his book Der Mensch (1950), had dealt with the relation of humans to their environment (Außenwelt) and with the transformation of this environment by means of tools. Animals also use certain parts of their environment to improve the functions of their own bodies in specific situations, but only humans produce a tool for a specific future purpose. While the animal, at best, uses its environment in a tool-like manner, Günther explains, the human develops “an autonomous tool as an independent form of existence between himself and the environment [Umwelt]. Such a creation requires that the creator relinquishes something and fixes it in an objective medium.”²⁴ The refinement of the techniques of tool making and the increasing use of synthetic materials “lead to an obvious detachment of the tool from the natural context of the world.”²⁵ The machine is a technical appliance that assumes a form of autonomy from its human creator. Günther continues:

Our language very precisely expresses this process of autonomization which takes place in this development: a tool is handled. A machine is tended. At least this is true of the older types of machines. A new type of machine, like the servomechanism, does not even require tending any more, but only occasional maintenance. A thermostat which controls the temperature in a modern apartment does not have to be tended in order to function properly. This mechanism directs its working mechanism itself. It possesses a spontaneity that is independent of the human.²⁶

Günther distinguishes between what he calls the “first” or “Archimedean-classical machine,” which can be traced back to the lever and which works with mechanical and moving parts, and the “second,” “transclassical machine,” which has no moving parts and which, like a thermometer or an electrical transformer, works through the exchange of atoms, electrons, or electromagnetic fields.²⁷ This non-Archimedean machine Günther also calls a “cybernetic machine,” “which no longer generates physical work procedures (this is left to the classical mechanism), but conducts and ‘critically’ steers such work procedures.”²⁸

Günther emphasized that at the time he was writing his text, in the early 1950s, such cybernetic machines did not yet exist: “Thus the idea of the cybernetic machine aims at the realization of a mechanism which can record data from the external world, process them as information and then pass them on as control impulses to the classical machine. Besides, the latter is not absolutely necessary. A calculating machine, for instance, provides arithmetic information directly.”²⁹ As analogies for the “first” or classical-Archimedean machine and the “second” or transclassical machine, Günther proposes the human arm and brain, respectively. An important aspect of the “second” machine is that it not only processes but also “produces” information.³⁰ And in a further characterization of such transclassical machines, Günther’s colleague at the Biological Computing Lab, the cybernetician Heinz von Förster, developed the distinction between the “trivial” machine, whose output can be deducted expectedly and unambiguously from the input, and the “nontrivial” machine, whose output cannot be predicted because it is determined by variable internal states of the machine.³¹

In addition to these two machine types—the isolated technical object with a limited functional autonomy, and the cybernetic, controlling and self-controlled device or system—we can easily identify at least three other conceptions of machines that are used in the course of the twentieth century. The mega-machine, alternatively referred to as machinery, apparatus, or state machine, is associated with authors such as Lewis Mumford, Karl Marx, and Louis Althusser; the machine of mathematical calculations and algorithms was described by Alan Turing; and the abstract and autopoietic machines of desire and heterogenesis were conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, following Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.³²

The US historian and critic Lewis Mumford spoke about machines extensively in his books Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Myth of the Machine (1967–1970), both of which express his skeptical attitude toward the influence of technology on human life. Mumford distinguishes between specific machines, like the printing press or the power loom, and “the machine” in general: “When I use the term ‘the machine’ I shall employ it as shorthand reference to the entire technological complex. This will embrace the knowledge and skills and arts derived from industry or implicated in the new technics, and will include various forms of tool, instrument, apparatus and utility as well as machines proper.”³³

Based on such a generalized understanding of the machine complex, Mumford develops the concept of the “mega-machine,” which encompasses political, economic, military, and bureaucratic techniques. For Mumford, the mega-machine is a regime that subordinates humans through a multiplicity of individual procedures, yet remains invisible as a total structure.³⁴

While Mumford thus applied the concept of the machine to the workings of large, sociotechnical infrastructures, mathematician Alan Turing, also working in the 1930s, proposed the concept of a “machine” which could solve all calculable problems by a limited number of programmed steps of calculation. From this conception emerged the idea of a “Universal Machine” that would be able to simulate all other machines. Turing understood the mathematical relation of numbers as an abstract form of mechanics, and thought of the algorithm that determines the operational steps as a computational machine, in the sense of a single-purpose apparatus. In his 1950 text describing what has become known as the Turing test, which asks whether a distinction can be made between machines and humans, Turing made an important qualification: all machines except digital computers were excluded from this test, and the machines that the Universal Machine could simulate were supposedly only the mathematical machines of the Turing type.³⁵

In the 1960s, Chilean biologist and cybernetician Humberto Maturana introduced another application of the notion of the machine, which was later developed as a philosophical concept by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in the 1970s. Maturana and his colleague Francisco Varela described living systems as autopoietic machines. These machines form systems of elements that are always already connected in comprehensive and multiple couplings.³⁶ Guattari and Deleuze took this understanding of the autopoietic self-production and reproduction of machinic systems, which Maturana and Varela had chiefly applied to explain the viability of living systems, and applied it first to psychological contexts—especially through the concept of “desiring machines”—and later to a broad range of social, natural, technical, and psychic phenomena. Rather than by the noun “machine” and its connotation of a given structure or assemblage of parts, Guattari and Deleuze’s understanding is best represented by the adjective “machinic,” which describes the heterogenetic, open, and dynamic processes of coupling and decoupling that can occur in such diverse environments. In the micromechanisms of these machinic processes, there is, as historian of science Henning Schmidgen outlines, “always one machine which brings forth an energy flow, and another machine which is coupled with it and which makes a cut, tapping into the energy flow.”³⁷ This cut (coupure) of one machine into another takes the form of an event or incident, and it happens immediately. It is significant insofar as it transposes expressive material from one machine to another and ruptures the semiosis of the second. The machinic cut is the interface; it is a field of potential agency and a field of potential subjectivation.

Unlike Günther’s conception of the machine as an autonomous mechanism, Mumford’s image of the machine as a totalizing structure, and Turing’s focus on the rational functionality of arithmetics, Guattari and Deleuze’s goal in adapting the machine metaphor was to find a description for processes of subjectivation and desire that would wrest these processes free from Freudian or other fixations, connect them to social and ecological strata, and open them up to polyvalent realizations and transformations. The Austrian theorist Gerald Raunig concludes:

From this perspective, Guattari’s extensive concept of the machine is a strategy to pitch the machine both against the danger of structuralization and state apparatization, and against the effects of identitarian closure of concepts of community: instead, the machine is taken as a nonidentitarian conceptual container for everything that escapes stratification and identification, and that at the same time invents new forms of the concatenation of singularities.³⁸

This conception of the machine is a deliberate attempt at unhinging the dichotomous understanding of “human and machine” or “organism and mechanism.”³⁹ Raunig explains:

The issue is no longer the confrontation of human and machine, or their possible and impossible correspondences, extensions and replacements of one by the other, or ever new relations of similarity or metaphorics between humans and machines, but the concatenations and the question of how humans can constitute a machine together with other things. These “other things” may be animals, tools, bodies, utterances, signs, or desires, but they become machine only in a process of exchange.⁴⁰

While the motivation for such an appropriation is understandable, we can question how successful this bending of the machine concept and the reversal of its connotation have been. After a flurry of adaptations of the term in the 1990s, especially in the immediate wake of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, the machine’s technical and mechanical connotative undercurrents have persisted.⁴¹ In their respective contexts and discourse communities, the five machine concepts summarized here—the mechanical, the cybernetic, the totalitarian infrastructure, the mathematical, and the heterogenetic—exist side by side, and people deploy them for their respective conceptual and ideological impact.

There have been other analytical attempts at reaching a conclusive understanding of what a machine really is. In his comprehensive study of the cultural history of the “spirit of the machine,” Vom Geist der Maschine (1999), German cultural historian Martin Burckhardt describes the machine’s relation to the human unconscious, and thus elucidates its phantasmatic significance in an extensive sweep from the prehistoric time of the Mesopotamian civilization to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing. Burckhardt points out the tendency to conceive of machines as things, even though they are always preceded by “a blueprint, a construction plan”:

Accordingly, one could understand the machine as a “constraint of thought” [Denkzwang] which has only taken the form of a thing. This objectification has turned the “constraint of thought” into a “practical constraint”—and thus into what we call a “machine” in the more narrow sense of the word. Such a constraint of thought does not necessarily have to get articulated in the form of a material automaton; it can just as well be realized in a social organization, or it can take the form of a sign system, i.e. of a merely symbolic machine. If we look for a point of intersection of all of these phenomena, it would probably be the aspect of intrinsic necessity [Zwangsläufigkeit] which provides the impression that we are confronted with a machine.⁴²

There is a clue at the end of this passage to the aspect that I want to highlight here: the machine always seems to be something that “we are confronted with.” It is not only a metaphorical concept that can relate to many different constellations of intrinsic necessity, but the machine always has the human subject as a companion, and highlights the relation that human subjects have toward technology.

In his study of metaphor as a rhetorical form, German philosopher Hans Blumenberg points out that in order to understand the speculative considerations of an author, it is important to retrace his or her frame of reference from which certain ideas and metaphors are taken. Such “background metaphorics” (Hintergrundmetaphorik) grounds what can be comprehended and known.⁴³ The chapter which Blumenberg introduces with these reflections deals with the pair of opposites of the organic and the mechanical, and especially with the metaphor of the machine whose history Blumenberg follows from Greek antiquity to the Enlightenment.

Blumenberg’s brief presentation of this history is sketchy and breaks off before the chronology reaches La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine (1748)—where the story, as Blumenberg suggests, gets “too thick” (wo es zu dick wird).⁴⁴ But Blumenberg can nevertheless show how the application of the machine metaphor, from the antique machina mundi through the image of the world as a clockwork to that of the human body as machine, appears in multiple and at times conflicting variations. According to Blumenberg, two critical questions are always who or what sets the rules of the mechanism, and whether this mechanism is animated from within or directed from outside. Until the eighteenth century, these questions had a mainly theological inflection, but they have become mainly anthropological questions since then.⁴⁵

This anthropological aspect of the machine is associated with seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, who not only formulated the dictum of cogito ergo sum as the core of a modern and self-reflexive subjectivity but also likened nature to a clockwork, and described the human as well as the animal body as machines made by God in a manner more complex and more miraculous than all the machines and automata that humans could build.⁴⁶ The beginning of the modern machine discourse is thus marked by the theoretical constructability of humans and their similarity to machines. Since Descartes, the assimilation of machines to the human form—anthropomorphism—is complemented by the idea of the assimilation of the human to machine form—mechanomorphism.

The Cartesian assumption that the functions of an organism can be explained mechanistically is, as the historian of science Georges Canguilhem has argued, historically based on the construction of automata. The comparison of the body with a machine presupposes human-made apparatuses and the physical detachment of these apparatuses, which are no longer held and handled as tools and extensions of the body. Canguilhem explains: “As long as the concept of the human and animal body is inextricably ‘tied’ to the machine, it is not possible to offer an explanation of the body in terms of the machine. Historically, it was not possible to conceive of such an explanation until the day that human ingenuity created mechanical devices that not only imitated organic movements … but also required no human intervention except to construct them and set them going.”⁴⁷ From this early moment onward, humans associated with machines the danger of being submitted to an alien, nonhuman entity, or the danger of becoming a machine or like a machine and losing one’s humanity. Inversely, the machine is the manifestation in which technology can become like humans. The troubling thought of such a confusion, or fusion, of human and technology generated disgust and resistance.

In his text on “Machine and Organism,” Georges Canguilhem criticizes Descartes’s theory of a mechanomorphic conception of the human organism and instead argues that the machine is predicated on the principles of the organism. Canguilhem shows that the Cartesian conception of the organism as a machine is based on the instantiation of a fundamental distinction between body and soul, between matter and the ability to make distinctions. The use of animals, like the use of humans as slaves, and the mechanization of life are predicated on their devaluation as inanimate.⁴⁸

Canguilhem’s text, published in 1952, presents a philosophical and epistemological argument that responds to its contemporary political context. Canguilhem refers to developments in industrialized labor and to efforts of rationalization which are “for all intents and purposes, a mechanization of the body.”⁴⁹ In his view, Taylorism has reached a limit and requires instead an adaptation of machines to the human organism. Canguilhem insists on a human-centered conception of the machine as produced by humans for humans, with a particular purpose.⁵⁰ In the same year that Gotthard Günther announced the imminent arrival of a “second machine” that would fundamentally change technology, Canguilhem insisted that cybernetic machines, servomechanisms, or electronic automata would “shift the relationship between human and machine, without however changing its meaning.”⁵¹ Fundamental to this relationship, Canguilhem argues, is the idea that the machine has a fixed and definite finality and no creative power, so that one machine cannot replace another, nor can it repair itself. Whereas life endures monstrosities, technology does not: “There are no monstrous machines. There is no mechanical pathology.”⁵²

Others begged to differ, including two with whom we are already familiar. Two decades earlier, Alfred Barr had warned of the Frankensteinian nature of machines, and Bruno Munari’s manifesto, written in 1938 but published in the same year as Canguilhem’s essay, directly contradicted him by claiming, “the machine of today is a monster.” Munari also constructed the Useless Machines which, like the purposeless mechanisms that Jean Tinguely was beginning to build around this time, precisely sought to pathologize the mechanical.

A more comprehensive theory that denounced the systemic monstrosity of machines was the critique of capitalism by philosopher and economic theorist Karl Marx. Formulated a century earlier than the ideas of Canguilhem, Barr, and Munari, Marx’s thinking was still prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, at a moment when not only the Cold War but also the struggle between socialist and liberal capitalist ideologies were at their peak. In the face of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, Marx had written a seminal text, “Fragment on Machines” (1857–1858), in which he describes the “machinery” of tools, human workers, and technical apparatuses that are articulated to form “fixed capital,” the machine being a means for the production of surplus value.⁵³ Labor and knowledge—physical, mental, and mechanical work—are all subsumed in the machinery, as well as in the modes of subjectivation and socialization. In Marx’s reading, it is not the machine that serves the worker, but the worker who serves the machine:

[Once] adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.⁵⁴

Conspicuously, Marx equates the metabolism of the human body with that of the machine. The human body is fully integrated into the machine, which operates autonomously and is subjected to and animated by capital:

In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker’s means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker’s activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine’s work, the machine’s action, on to the raw material—supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil, etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.⁵⁵

While there is dissent among scholars of the machine on whether such integration is a dehumanizing form of submission or a positive form of cooperation between human and machine, the direct and necessary coupling and companionship of human and machine are undisputed. Unlike Marx, who claims that knowledge and intellectual work also become subsumed into the machinery, Canguilhem distinguishes technics from knowledge and claims that they are in dialogue and borrow solutions and questions from each other. Similarly, the research of experimental psychologists like Hugo Münsterberg, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, or Alexei Gastev into the “scientific management” of labor and “psychotechnics” at the beginning of the twentieth century explores the movements and behavior of humans with the aim of optimizing work processes in industrial production. Gastev’s Institute for the Scientific Organization of Work and the Mechanization of Man, founded in Moscow soon after the Russian revolution, conducted physiological experiments toward the ergonomic improvement of the human body, putting the needs of the machine and of the human body on a par: “We have to put the living work machine under equally favorable conditions as the automatic machine,” Gastev wrote.⁵⁶

The same conflict was addressed by the architecture and art historian Sigfried Giedion in his epochal study Mechanization Takes Command (1948). Trying to avoid moral judgment for or against mechanization, Giedion focused on the progressive technical development in handicrafts, agriculture, and the home. His treatment of mechanization implies that it externalizes and replaces human work and human activity. The concept of the machine is conspicuously absent from Giedion’s text. His study is primarily dedicated to the design and improvement of procedures, and he presents individual devices or technical installations as agglomerations and materializations of procedural knowledge. Giedion mentions the ethical problems associated with the assembly line and the scientific management of labor which, he writes, can be deployed in opposite economic systems: “Their implications, like those of mechanization as a whole, are not unilaterally tied to any one system. They reach into the depths of a basic human problem—labor—and the historical verdict will depend on how far one may expect of the human being to become part of an automaton.”⁵⁷

Once again, human and machine walk hand in hand—whether harmoniously or handcuffed.

A third example from the same mid-century period when Canguilhem and Giedion were thinking about machines and bodies also testifies to the intimate companionship of the human subject with the machine. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, published the book The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950, in which, as suggested by historian N. Katherine Hayles, he carefully sought to distinguish the dehumanizing oppression afforded by the “first machine” from the cooperative interaction with the cybernetic machine. Hayles writes:

Reinforcing the boundary work that assimilates the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic machine into the same privileged space are the distinctions Wiener makes between good and bad machines. When machines are evil in The Human Use of Human Beings, it is usually because they have become rigid and inflexible. Whereas the cybernetic machine is ranged alongside man as his brother and peer, metaphors that cluster around the rigid machine depict it through tropes of domination and engulfment. The ultimate horror is for the rigid machine to absorb the human being, co-opting the flexibility that is the human birthright.⁵⁸

The same formation of a tense intimacy was also replicated in discussions, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and machine consciousness. Gotthard Günther ends his 1952 essay by considering the technical realizability of cybernetic machines, and critically dismisses the idea that machines can achieve a form of self-consciousness.⁵⁹ Two years earlier, Alan Turing had stated: “I believe that at the end of the [twentieth] century, the use of words and general educated opinion will be altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted”—imputing, as David Rokeby has remarked, not that machines would be able to think like humans, but that the conceptions of thought and computation would have converged so much that they could no longer be meaningfully distinguished.⁶⁰

Such a convergence lies at the base of cybernetics, “a science which thinks, without immediately thinking that it is a human who thinks,” as media historian Claus Pias has commented.⁶¹ In a seminal study, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (1943), Norbert Wiener’s colleague Warren McCulloch developed a notational mix of mathematical expressions and neuronal interactions, and concepts which were at the same time neurophysiological, philosophical, and computer-technical—“concepts that work and function, that confound theoretical and practical entities at the same time, that model neuronal structures and simultaneously construct artefacts.”⁶² In McCulloch’s theory, Pias continues, “both simply coincide. The human as a special case of the information machine, and the information machine as a special case of the human. Thus, both of these categories collapse.”⁶³

The meaning of the term “machine” in examples like these slides between the technical-concrete, and the metaphorical. Yet, while other terms are regularly brought into play when specific technical details have to be described, the concept of the “machine” is always deployed in contrast to the human. Whereas the “technical,” in its different guises, exists independent of the human, “the machine” is invariably coupled to “man.” Two aspects are therefore constitutive for the notion of the machine: its coupling to the figure of the human, and its conception as a condition of human self-definition. Historians of science Erich Hörl and Michael Hagner make this point in relation to Canguilhem’s considerations on machine and organism: “As early as 1953 Georges Canguilhem expressed the assumption that all machines might possibly have been designed after the prototype of organs and organisms. This assumption would not only imply that in human history the biological is characterized by the prosthetic, but it also shows that there is nothing beyond the inextricable relationship of human and machine, irrespective of the question which of the two is the prototype for the other.”⁶⁴

This tight linkage has a technological dimension in terms of the interdependency of machine and organism, and it has at the same time a psychological condition. Like Canguilhem, Gotthard Günther identifies the moment of detachment between human and tool or mechanism as constitutive of modern subjectivity, a moment which, in Günther’s account, engenders the possibility of the modern machine:

The same process of detachment takes place on the subjective side. The tool makes itself independent from its creator. The lever that primitive man pushed under a rock still needed the arm that pushed it down. The mill wheel that is driven by the water in the village stream is already independent of the human source of power. While the detachment of the tool from nature resulted in the creation of synthetic materials, i.e. in a wholly new type of physical existence, on the subjective side this detachment of the tool leads to the machine. A wind or water mill is not a tool any more, but a machine. A machine is nothing other than a tool that has become autonomous—within certain limits.⁶⁵

Günther thus describes the modern subject and the machine as originating from the same moment of detachment, and the machine as a result of this process of subjectivation.

It is an open question whether this formation of subject and machine is supplanted by the technological paradigm introduced by cybernetics and the computer. The historian of science Andrew Pickering has claimed that cybernetics has been a watershed that has drawn up a separation from modernity and the unquestioned validity of its distinctions between spirit and matter, soul and body, nature and culture, human and machine.⁶⁶ My own preliminary answer would be that there has indeed been such a rupture in the conception of technology, even though it did not happen all at once but has been taking place over a period of decades. But part of this rupture is also the gradual devaluation of the concept of the machine, so that, unlike Pickering, I would argue that the modern distinction between human and technics has passed away, and that human and machine have been jointly transformed into new, posthuman forms of subjectivation. The mechanical conception of the machine persists in many areas of technology, including cybernetics and computing: even references to Turing’s and Norbert Wiener’s notions of the machine inherit the mechanical conception of its workings. In that sense, even the cybernetic notion of the machine remains symbolic of a mechanical machine.

There is a surprising contradiction between the passionate determination with which the notion of the machine has been used throughout the last century and the striking diversity of its meanings. Each instance of its use seems to have had the potential of generating a new facet of not only what a machine can be but what it actually is. An important conclusion that can be drawn from the polyvalent and metaphorical use of the term “machine” is that the machine can never be taken for granted. The machine is not given, but it has to be constructed, made, built. My exploration here is an attempt to put the machine between quotation marks and to see how it is being constructed in different instances, and as what.

A more general conception of the machine that I want to propose here attempts a formal description of the relationship between humans and technology, and of the role that the machine plays in that relationship. For a long time, I had thought that “a machine” is not just a particular type of technical device or conceptual mechanism, one that must have specific features in order to qualify as a machine proper. If this were the case, the use of the term would be so chaotic and unreliable that it would be a more or less redundant term—its meaning swamped in noise. However, people speak of machines with so much insistence and passion that there seems to be something particular that they want to express. My first interpretation was, therefore, that “machine” is the word we use in the face of technical systems that are too complex to grasp and too all-encompassing to address, threatening humans to subside in an uneven, overwhelming encounter. Thus, when confronted with a technical system whose automatism is, by its very nature, beyond intuitive human understanding, we would say, “ah, a machine,” making it appear as if there were “one thing” that we had in front of us, something that can be used and switched off, something that is domesticated, at least through this act of naming, even if its functions are beyond comprehension and direct control. This interpretation would work for classical, mechanical machines like steam engines, power looms, and airplanes, and it would also explain why people sometimes speak of postmechanical electronic and digital systems as “machines”—trying to get a symbolic handle on something that is, on a physical level, unfathomable.

There is a similar terminological difficulty with the concept of the “apparatus.” Like “machine,” the term “apparatus” is used in a variety of ways, not least in various European languages, but two different interpretations stand out. The first is that of a relatively simple technical device that does not have the complexity and autonomy of a machine, while in the second interpretation “apparatus” is used for the complex assemblage of multiple machines and systems, technical or social. This second conception was worked out by Louis Althusser when he spoke about the “ideological State apparatuses” (appareils idéologiques d’État) which interpellate human individuals as subjects. Michel Foucault discussed this same conception as the dispositif (translated as “apparatus”) that is composed of technical, social, and institutional infrastructures and practices.⁶⁷

In an essay on the question “What Is an Apparatus?” (2006), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben analyzes and extends Foucault’s conception of the dispositif.⁶⁸ In his explanation, Agamben suggests a diagrammatic relation between apparatuses, living beings, and subjects, which—as I want to suggest—can also serve to pinpoint the appearance of the “machine.” Agamben writes: “I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”⁶⁹ The effect of this working of apparatuses on living beings are, “between these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a subject that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses.”⁷⁰ Similar to Althusser’s concept of interpellation, subjectivation here emerges as a product of the dispositifs at work. In Agamben’s interpretation, technology is one of the ways in which this production of subjectivity takes place, where apparatuses crowd the spaces of social practice with “instruments, objects, gadgets, odds and ends, and various technologies. Through these apparatuses, man attempts to nullify the animalistic behaviors that are now separated from him, and to enjoy the Open as such, to enjoy being insofar as it is being. At the root of each apparatus lies an all-too-human desire for happiness. The capture and subjectification of this desire in a separate sphere constitutes the specific power of the apparatus.”⁷¹

A more thorough analysis of this passage would have to look closely at the relation between apparatuses and technologies, and at the references to the “desire for happiness.” In our current context, I would only like to adopt the diagram proposed by Agamben (figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4 Diagram a (A. Broeckmann, after Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” 2009).

I propose adding the concept of the machine to this diagram: if the “subject” wants to address the “apparatus,” if it wants to say something about the apparatus and its workings, it will in all likelihood choose the concept of the “machine” (figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5 Diagram b (A. Broeckmann).

The “machine” does not occupy the position of a technological Other, but it is, like the “subject,” a product of the “apparatus,” named and constructed by the subject. The subject (which usually identifies itself as a “living being”) speaks of the machine as though it were on the Outside, an Other, yet it is the subject’s technological doppelgänger, a complementary product of the workings of the apparatus.

This latter diagram (figure 1.5) is useful for explaining the awkward relationship that people, as human subjects, maintain with machines.⁷² It makes it clear that “machine” is not a technical category but a social one, and that it is a symbolic concept rather than the descriptive term for a concrete class of technical items. Another aspect of the diagram is that it shows clearly that it is always a subject that speaks of a “machine”; what it designates as the “machine” is a projection in the direction of the very apparatus that brings forth the subject.

With this notion of the machine in mind, we might even be able to construct a tentative definition of “machine art”—namely, as those artistic works and practices that implicitly or explicitly articulate the relation between subjects and machines—their relation understood in the sense of the diagram explained above. If a machine can never be taken for granted but needs to be constructed, and if a machine is actualized in the very instant when it is addressed, machine art does just that: it constructs machines (these screens that subjects set up in front of the apparatuses that construct them) and makes them explicit.⁷³ Works of machine art encourage us to not take the apparatuses for granted, but to problematize them by making the sibling ties between subjects and machines visible, or feelable—in the modes of comfort, pain, or humor. The artistic encounter with machines is therefore characterized by strangeness (and familiarity), by distance (and proximity), by rejection (and love, or intimacy).

Machine Love

Given all the humanistic worries about overly powerful and dehumanizing machines, it is no wonder that we can find a significant number of cases in which people provocatively express love for machines or a desire to be a machine. The avant-garde attitude of dispelling the myth of the artist as a creative subject is given an existential twist. Pop artist Andy Warhol repeatedly lay claim to such an image of the self as a machine: “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” This attitude combines a postmodern melancholia with Warhol’s branded pose of indifference: “I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody. [Being a machine means] … you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.”⁷⁴

Similarly, German playwright Heiner Müller, in his text “Hamletmaschine,” refers to the machine as a condition of escape. It is the escape of man from woman, and the escape from sociality and a public sphere that is represented in the play by three TV sets which are set up on stage, playing live programs.⁷⁵ Their monitors turn black after this statement: “My thoughts are wounds in my brain. My brain is a scar. I want to be a machine. Arms for grasping legs for walking no pain no thought.”⁷⁶

Such a scenario of a robotic contraption with arms and legs, unsensing and unthinking, is the counterimage to the vision of a machine consciousness that has haunted many discussions about information technologies since the middle of the twentieth century. We find the topos of “being a machine” in Alan Turing’s 1950 speculations on “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” on which Roland Puccetti commented in 1967: “[Anyone] who wants to claim machines can think must be willing to ascribe consciousness to them: which is supposed to be fantastic. In his classic essay on the subject Turing tried to counter this objection by arguing that the only way to know whether a machine is conscious is to be the machine, and either have or not have conscious thoughts. One can deny consciousness to other humans, he went on, on the same solipsistic grounds one denies it to machines.”⁷⁷ Yet, in his search for an answer to the question of whether machines can think, Turing undertakes not so much an existential quest as a logical speculation, writing: “The only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking.”⁷⁸

Closer, however, to our previous discussion of the tense relationship between humans and machines, closer than these cases of wanting to become a machine, are the declarations of love toward machines that we find throughout the twentieth century. One area in which such intimacy is desirable is in the scientific management of labor, which seeks to initiate close encounters with machines and tools. For instance, Alexei Gastev, the Russian activist of optimizing bodies, wrote that the contemporary craftsman—and not only the future machinist—could be guided toward a close relationship with his working instruments: “We will not only feel love toward the machine—that machine which for us is often [yet] a theoretical fantasy—but also toward the tool.”⁷⁹

At the close of the twentieth century, and in continuation of Gastev’s and the Gilbreths’ work, sociologists struggled with the changes that the computerization of industrial work processes was bringing to the relationship between workers and machines. While processes of automation were earlier assumed to cause a dramatic abstraction and alienation from labor, sociologists now thought of a new type of learning and working that was ecological, adaptable to changes, and responsive to the limitations of the specific machine or installation at hand. The key phrase of this method is “subjectivating labor agency” (subjektivierendes Arbeitshandeln), a form of working that addresses the unique specificities of tools and products. As sociologists of labor Fritz Böhle and Brigitte Milkau write, “Importantly, in the context of this form of agency, things (including for instance machines) are construed as ‘subjects.’ … This does not necessarily imply that human characteristics get projected into them; rather, they are not only regarded as determined by external or internal influences and thus predictable, but they are accorded a certain momentum of their own (or this is presumed).”⁸⁰ Subjectivating labor agency takes into account the peculiarities and moods of materials, tools, and machines, and suggests a conception of machine love that the sociologist Dieter Hoß describes as “sensuous or ‘participative’ perception, a sympathetic attachment to the environment, an empathy for, or feeling oneself into things and processes, i.e. a ‘mimetic and identificatory comprehension of movements and forms,’ and possibly an emotional tie to the things (‘my machine’).”⁸¹

The writer C. S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves (1960), deals with the many different forms of loving relationships that are characterized by giving and taking, by beauty and appreciation, by need and pleasure, by passion, fury, and sickness. Lewis distinguishes between four main types of love: storge (or the affection that exists, for instance, between family members), philia (friendship), eros (romantic, or sexual attraction), and agape (unconditional love, charity). “Philia” perhaps best typifies the feeling that Hoß advocated for the sensuous new laborer.⁸²

Whereas Lewis, like many other theorists of love, considered emotions or relationships only between humans, philosopher Max Scheler insisted that love is a human sentiment that one can have not only in relation to other humans. True love, according to Scheler, is not “anthropopathic” but is originally directed at “objects of value” (Wertgegenstände), and is thus also possible, for instance, toward nature, or works of art, or God.⁸³

In other instances, love toward machines is expressed in rather casual and far less dramatic and provocative ways than Warhol’s or Müller’s claims of wanting to be a machine. Maybe the declarations of love are not always taken seriously, but the affirmative way in which they are made suggests that the claim in itself is not seen as outrageous, but rather as a normal, factual statement. Curator Pontus Hultén, for example, remembers artist Jean Tinguely’s passion for hardware stores in Manhattan:

At the time when Tinguely began to build machines of this kind [1960], he was living on Walker Street in New York, close to Canal Street, the former headquarters and main outlet for the great American mechanical industry from the eighteenth century on. There were still many old shops with a glorious past dealing in machines and accessories. It would be a mistake to believe that Tinguely scorned them; it would be more correct to say that he loved them.⁸⁴

Hultén also quotes Tinguely as having said, in 1962: “For me the machine is above all an instrument that permits me to be poetic. If you respect the machine, if you enter into a game with the machine, then perhaps you can make a truly joyous machine—by joyous, I mean free. That’s a marvellous thing, don’t you think?”⁸⁵ It is hard not to read erotic undertones into such joyous and liberating play between the artist and his machines.

In other instances, such as discussions of creative work with computers, the figure of the hacker has been described as “the intimate admirer of new technologies,”⁸⁶ while the Internet and software artist Cory Arcangel is described as “[devoting] all his love to machines and code,” and as “[fitting] in [in] an age in which people stroke their iPhones, iPads and iPods at least as tenderly as their lovers.”⁸⁷ And media researcher Saul Albert uses the words of love to describe his first experience with the iconoclastic website of the Dutch-Belgian artist couple JODI, in his “Introduction: How My Computer and I Fell in Love with Jodi” (1998):

What? Damn!, you … you … (I jump up from my desk and start hurling abuse at the computer which looks like it is in the middle of a big, juicy crash.) It’s … Oh! mmmm! And that was it, we were smitten. It slowly dawned on me that my computer, far from crashing, was whispering sweet bytes down my modem to a server it truly identified with: at www.jodi.org.⁸⁸

Importantly, all of these examples describe emotions toward technical objects that do not pretend to be something other than they are. The understanding of machine love proposed here is reserved for the sentiments toward apparatuses that do not mimic humans. It therefore does not include the automata with which, in the tradition of the myth of Pygmalion, romantics have been falling in love precisely and only because they are not immediately recognized as artificial beings. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Olimpia is loved not because she is a machine, but despite the fact that she is a machine. This view of machine love also leaves aside the broad spectrum of mediated love, as in the electronic music band Kraftwerk’s song “Computer Love” (1981), which refers to the use of bulletin board systems that, since the late 1970s, also offered sexual content.⁸⁹ Or the “Love Letters” which the MARK I, one of the early 1950s computers, was programmed to output as an exercise in artificial text production.⁹⁰ In these cases, the computer is not the object or the subject of love but its medium. The same applies to a third type of love-related machines, those whose function is to induce orgasms, like Andrei Platonov’s “Anti-Sexus,” the “Orgasmatron” in Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper (1973), or the “Excessive Machine” that Jane Fonda enjoys in Barbarella (1968). These are utilitarian apparatuses, and not themselves the objects of love.⁹¹

At least in the precybernetic world, machine love is genuinely human, and in fact destructive to the machine world. The robots in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R.—Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) realize their superiority and destroy all humans, save for some slaves for maintenance services. In the epilogue between two of the robots (named Primus and Helena), feelings begin to emerge and lead to a tender love scene. Like a virus, the new sentiment spreads among the robots and makes them take on human nature. A human onlooker foresees the end of the machine dictatorship, and the return of human life: “Our buildings and machines will fall to ruin, the systems and the names of the great will fall like leaves, but you, love, you flourish in the ruins and sow the seeds of life in the wind. … Life will not perish!”⁹²

In contrast to this salutary vision of love, Lewis Mumford is sure that machine love is altogether pathological: “The point is that the machine is not a substitute for the person; it is, when properly conceived, an extension of the rational and operative parts of the personality, and it must not wantonly trespass on areas that do not belong to it. If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.”⁹³

Media theoretician Marshall McLuhan shares Mumford’s view that love of machines is a sign of human pathology, though he is less damning with regard to its consequences. In a short chapter of Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan discusses the “Gadget Lover” and his “narcissism and narcosis.” He describes how medial and prosthetic extensions of body functions are externalized by the human and thus experienced as outside one’s own body. As an example, McLuhan refers to the myth of Narcissus who fell in love with his mirror image because he did not realize that it was in fact his own image. McLuhan calls this type of self-induced ignorance “narcosis”:

It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motorcar.⁹⁴

McLuhan lays out this maze of metaphors to suggest that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between man and his technical extensions and environment, and that man and machine are caught in a reciprocal relationship in which one appears as the extension, prosthesis, and image of the other. (We will return shortly to the question of gender and how this scenario might differ for women.) What is experienced individually as love of a machine or gadget is instead a narcissistic entanglement of human and machine in which the machine clouds its erotic agency in the form of practical or economic gratification.

Claus Pias has criticized this conception as an inappropriate representation of the concept of the cybernetic machine, which McLuhan discusses later in his book. Pias writes: “The question is not, who is the extension or supplement of what, or who—by being more original—can be more powerful or legitimately narcissistic. This is not about a possible hierarchy of the two terms, but about the knowledge, the operation or the medium that brings forth and maintains both. It is about the cybernetic collapse of the hypothesis of extension itself, when human and extension or apparatus and extension can no longer be distinguished because they no longer have to be distinguished.”⁹⁵

The machine that McLuhan has in mind, and man’s loving entanglement with it, is precybernetic. In contrast, the erotics of cyberlove—as proposed by Pias—appears more cerebral: “The apparatuses of cybernetics with which one can maybe fall in love are … not projections of the human, but projections derived from such machines themselves.”⁹⁶ Pias even questions whether cybernetic machines can be the objects of love at all, if they cannot be addressed and used directly, but operate at the interstices: “Machines are not used, but they themselves organize the borders or interfaces between those units which one may want to call human and nature, human and apparatus, subject and object, psyche and techné.”⁹⁷

According to Gotthard Günther, cybernetics assumes, unlike classical metaphysics, that the matter of the world is not originally ruled by chaos, which would have to be designed and formed, whether by divine creation or engineering, and through which an Other could emerge, a machine that could confront us. Instead, cybernetics assumes that all matter always already contains (all) information.⁹⁸ Can we deduce from this that, for cybernetics, the world is an autoerotic machine? Günther suggests, “In the retort, nature plays with itself. But in the creation of the electronic brain, man yields his own reflection to the object and learns to recognize his function in the world in this mirror of himself.”⁹⁹

Machinists and Engineers

In the context of the social meaning of technology, the convention of referring to the modern human subject as “man” has a particular inflection, since the relations of men and women toward technology seem to be conspicuously different. The field of technological art is a case in point: the engagement with technology seems to be an almost exclusively masculine endeavor, while examples of female “machine artists”—understood in a more narrow sense of the term—are few and far between. It is somewhat embarrassing to reiterate such clichés, but throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries women are often identified with machines, while such machines are conceived and built by men. To cite only the most famous examples, we have Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel Ève future, in which the hero falls in love with the machine-woman Hadaly, an “electrical phantom” from which he can later liberate himself, or the female machine creatures in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Der Sandmann and in Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. And before Alan Turing developed the idea of a test to determine the indistinguishability between human and machine, the first version of this test was conceived, as Katherine Hayles reminds us, to distinguish between man and woman. The Turing test that we know of today thus resulted from a simple replacement of woman by machine.¹⁰⁰

An exemplary text that combines the tropes of machine love, male creativity, and the equating of woman and machine was written by the French-American photographer Paul Haviland and published in New York in Alfred Stieglitz’s journal 291 in the fall of 1915. Haviland’s text, “We Are Living in the Age of the Machine,” read in its entirety:

We are living in the age of the machine.

Man made the machine in his own image. She has limbs which act; lungs which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs electricity. The phonograph is the image of his voice; the camera the image of his eye. The machine is his “daughter born without a mother.” That is why he loves her. He has made the machine superior to himself. That is why he admires her. Having made her superior to himself, he endows the superior beings which he conceives in his poetry and in his plastique with the qualities of machines. After making the machine in his own image he has made his human ideal machinomorphic. But the machine is yet at a dependent stage. Man gave her every qualification except thought. She submits to his will but he must direct her activities. Without him she remains a wonderful being, but without aim or anatomy. Through their mating they complete one another. She brings forth according to his conceptions.

Photography is one of the fine fruits of this union. The photographic print is one element of this new trinity: man, the creator, with thought and will; the machine, mother-action; and their product, the work accomplished.¹⁰¹

The blandness with which Haviland presents the equation of man as creator, engineer, lover, and of woman as creature, machine, mother, leaves one somewhat dumbfounded. But these generalizations are not merely a cliché, but indicative of a pattern which appears to be powerful enough to infuse even twenty-first-century cyberfeminist manifestos, as we will see shortly. I have no suggestion for how to best explain the operations of these patterns. But to illustrate some of the parameters that contribute to the three-valued logic of man, woman, and machine, here are two stories, one about the bachelor machine, and one about the cyborg.

Bachelors

When the French literary scholar Michel Carrouges worked out the concept of the “bachelor machine” for his publication Les Machines célibataires in 1954, he borrowed the term from artist Marcel Duchamp to pool a number of artistic and literary conceptions which tie together motifs of love and death, and which always contain sexual and mechanical as well as female and male components. Carrouges called the bachelor machine “a fantastic image that transforms love into a technique of death.”¹⁰²

In one of the notes in the Green Box (1934), a collection of Duchamp’s remarks about the forms to be used in his major artwork The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), also called The Large Glass (1915–1923), Duchamp had casually referred to the structure in the lower part of the work as “the bachelor machine”:

The principal forms of the bachelor machine are imperfect: rectangle, circle, parallelepiped, symmetrical handle, demi-sphere = i.e. they are mensurable (relation of their dimensions among themselves. and relation of these principal forms to their destination in the bachelor mach.) In the bride, the principal forms are more or less large or small, have no longer, in relation to their destination a mensurability: a sphere, in the bride will be of some radius or other (the radius given in the representation is fictitious and dotted.)¹⁰³

This is the only explicit mention of the term “bachelor machine” in Duchamp’s writings, a rather remarkable fact given the concept’s career in the course of the following decades.

In picking up the term, Michel Carrouges sought to generalize the concept by relating it not only to Duchamp’s image but also to literary examples from a whole spectrum of writers, including Franz Kafka, Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry, Jules Verne, and the Comte de Lautréamont. In comparison to Duchamp’s casual remark, Carrouges’s description reads like a fully worked-out concept:

Contrary to real machines and even contrary to imaginary but rational and useful machines (like the Nautilus of Jules Verne or science-fiction rockets) the Bachelor Machine appears to be impossible, useless, incomprehensible, insane. At times she is not discernible at all, in those cases where she is one with the surrounding landscape. The Bachelor Machine can therefore consist of only one peculiar, strange and unknown machine, or of an apparently useless arrangement of parts. It can unify a lightning rod, a clock, a bicycle, a train, a dynamo, and even a cat or any part of an object or its remains. It is of no importance.

The Bachelor Machine is not connected with any purpose, like a machine that is subject to the physical laws of mechanics or the social demands of usefulness. The Bachelor Machine is a simulacrum, one encounters in a dream, in the theater, in cinema or at the practice sites of Cosmonauts.¹⁰⁴

This generalizing and broadening of the scope of the term brought an understanding of the bachelor machine that it would not have had based on Duchamp’s remarks alone. When the concept was used by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in 1972 for their seminal study Anti-Oedipus, their main reference for conceptualizing the bachelor machine as a particular type of desiring machine was therefore Carrouges, not Duchamp. The modern myth created by Carrouges was then further fleshed out in an exhibition that Swiss art curator Harald Szeemann organized, under the title “Junggesellenmaschinen / Les Machines célibataires,” for the Venice Biennial in 1975.¹⁰⁵ This exhibition, which traveled to seven other European cities through 1977, also provided a visual narrative for what had mainly been a literary theme in its treatment by Carrouges.

In a critical appraisal of the bachelor machine, art historian Hans Ulrich Reck and artist-philosopher Oswald Wiener highlighted three main aspects that characterize the concept. First, Carrouges’s understanding of the bachelor machine relies on the rejection of generative or procreative sexuality, and thus on a rejection of the woman.¹⁰⁶ More generally speaking, the bachelor machine is conceived as a solipsistic “replacement of the Other.”¹⁰⁷ Second, the celibate status of the machine suggests the dream of an ultimate creativity, namely that of an immaculate procreation, and of transcending the limitations and imperfections of one’s own genotype.¹⁰⁸ And finally, fear of death is implied in the bachelor machine’s promise of overcoming death in a world without pain.¹⁰⁹

While Hans Ulrich Reck objects to Szeemann’s use in his exhibition and catalog of machine metaphors without reflecting on contemporary technical developments,¹¹⁰ Oswald Wiener more globally insists that it does not make sense to consider as a “machine” something that does not have a material substrate; it is possible, he claims, to do this in art and literature, but there it amounts to nothing more than “metaphysical enthusiasm.”¹¹¹

For Wiener, the main fuel of the bachelor machine is not “the mistrust against artificiality and mechanization,” as Reck contends, but “the fear to be such an artificial thing oneself.” The bachelor machine is fueled by the desire to hold onto something human that cannot be mechanized: “In the sense of a vague self-conception, one trusts the feeling of not being a machine oneself.”¹¹²

In contrast, Dieter Daniels, in his comparison of Turing’s Universal Machine and Duchamp’s bachelor machine, concludes from his analysis of The Large Glass that the work shows “how closely the wish to build machines is linked to becoming a machine oneself.”¹¹³ Daniels identifies as a core theme of The Large Glass, “this human wish to play the part of a machine, even perhaps to become one, in order to dispose of the incapacity for physical fulfillment in a sexual encounter, in order to encompass it in a form that is separable from one’s own agony of impotence.”¹¹⁴

The dissent between Wiener and Daniels, and the question of whether the bachelor machine signifies the desire for, or perhaps rather the fear of, being machinelike, point to the two sides of the same coin. What is significant is that the relationship of man and machine to which both writers point is symbolic, and that their conceptions consider the machine as an aspect of masculine psychology. The notion of the bachelor machine inflects the understanding of the machine as subjectified Other as a discourse on a neurotic self-conception of the male subject which presupposes the negation of the female and its replacement by a machine. What a feminine equivalent to this relationship with machines might be is up for debate.

Machinists

The bachelor machine is a male myth. In contrast, Donna Haraway’s discussion of the cyborg in her text “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) is a deliberate attempt to create a female myth, a political myth that helps to transform women’s relationship to technology.¹¹⁵ The cyborg is a cybernetic organism combining machine and organic aspects in a figure that Haraway traces both in science fiction novels and in the social reality of the late twentieth century. The claim to technology that Haraway makes for women is based on an identification with it, not on a distinction from it: “For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. … The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.”¹¹⁶

An important difference between Haraway’s view and Haviland’s equation of machine and woman is that whereas Haviland used the clichés of male superiority over women to describe men’s relationship to technology, implying that “the machine is like a woman,” Haraway reverses this claim and says, “woman is like a machine.” Haraway addresses the discourse on the relation of machine and organism which has occupied theorists from Descartes to Canguilhem, but she argues that the borders between human and animal, between animal-human and machine, and between the physical and the nonphysical, have been transgressed:

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.¹¹⁷

Haraway argues for a deliberate, pleasurable, and responsible confusion and reconstruction of such boundaries. She makes her argument within the historical horizon in which computation emerged and electronics were miniaturized, as epitomized by the integrated circuit. But the image of “women in the integrated circuit”¹¹⁸ is not all positive because, in Haraway’s view, the old forms of domination are replaced by network technologies that engender new forms of power: “The actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and communication called the informatics of domination.”¹¹⁹ She argues that we need to understand “what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds,” and one way of reaching such an understanding might be to look at another such confusion of boundaries: “Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these potent and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the social relations of science and technology, there might indeed be a feminist science.”¹²⁰ Such a cyberfeminist perspective could, Haraway suggests, “be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”¹²¹

The techniques that Haraway proposes for this reconstruction of relations and boundaries are networking, weaving, writing, and coding. “Weaving,” she says, “is for oppositional cyborgs.”¹²² The cyborg is a new personal and collective self that needs to be coded.

Given the scarcity of women artists in the field of “machine art,” it’s striking how many of those who engage with technology also work with textiles and weaving. We can think of artists like Varvara Stepanova, Gunta Stölzl, Anni Albers, or Ingrid Wiener,¹²³ but also of Orlan’s surgical reconfiguration of her own body, or of Tania Ruiz Gutierrez’s deconstruction and layering of video material in ways that open it up to symbolic meanings by visually coding or weaving multitemporalities into the texture of electronic images.¹²⁴ The figurehead of such female coding and networking practices is Ada Lovelace, who was the first coder to write a program for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.¹²⁵ The point of my argument is not to say that men are hunters and women are gatherers—not least because among such artists as Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rebecca Horn, Seiko Mikami, or Steina Vasulka, we find women who do things other than weave, code, and network.¹²⁶ But it is somewhat irritating that even in one of the founding documents of cyberfeminism, Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” a pattern is repeated that seems to permeate the discourse on modern technology: women use machines, but they don’t build them; and they are addressed as users, even programmers, of technology, as machinists but not as engineers.

Toward the end of her essay, Haraway reiterates the need for women to empower themselves through embracing the cyborg as a form of gaining technical skill:

What about all the ignorance of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men’s access to daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination—in order to act potently.¹²⁷

However, nowhere in the “Cyborg Manifesto” is there a challenge to attain what men seem to have access to, i.e., “knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play.” The essay ends with the famous plea to embrace the cyborg myth: “It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”¹²⁸ But this “building and destroying” remains vague and general, and the impression that the “Cyborg Manifesto” leaves us with is that technology is not something that women/cyborgs can make, build, and engineer, but rather something they use, code, and recode. My point here is not to reiterate an essentialist argument, but to point out that in this powerful myth on the relation between women and technology, the concept of “building things and taking them apart” remains the preserve of men.

This does not seem to have changed for the next generation of feminists, for whom it remains difficult to imagine themselves as engineers, rather than as weavers and machinists. In a manifesto on “Xenofeminism,” published by an international collective of feminists in 2015 under the name of Laboria Cuboniks, the authors argue for a new feminism that embraces the social and technological conditions of the twenty-first century.¹²⁹ In a paragraph devoted to a xenofeminist attitude to technology, the approach is, as in Haraway’s manifesto thirty years before, one of empowered users:

The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few. There are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can claim their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have never been more widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today. … Just as the invention of the stock market was also the invention of the crash, Xenofeminism knows that technological innovation must equally anticipate its systemic condition responsively.¹³⁰

The drive for technological empowerment is not a core argument of the manifesto, so it may well be that this section is less developed than other parts. Yet it is striking to see that the default position for the women addressed here is not to build machines and reinvent technology, but to take technology as a given and seek to operate innovatively and responsibly within its regimes.

The foundations of this mythical structure run deep. With the aim of critical analysis—and the prospect of ending with an example of the myth’s being successfully thwarted—British cultural theorist Nina Power comments on the integration of women into industrial production processes: “Women have always been desired by the machine. It needs them for their deftness, their smaller hands, their capacity to work quickly and, initially at least, to demand less for doing so. … Any appeal to the supposed ‘naturalness’ of women, or some sort of privileged relation to nature is as historically inaccurate as it is banal: Women make the best robots, as Metropolis shows us.”¹³¹ Power’s reference to a second movie from the 1920s suggests that the fusion of woman and technology—and thus also the gendered myth of the modern machine—is closely tied up with the labor regimes of industrialization:

There’s a scene in Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera which combines footage of women doing a variety of different activities: sewing, cutting film (with Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov’s wife and the film’s actual editor), counting on an abacus, joyfully making boxes, plugging connections into a telephone switchboard, packing cigarettes, typing, playing the piano, answering the phone, tapping out code, ringing a bell, applying lipstick. The cut-up footage speeds up to such a frenzy that at one point it becomes impossible to tell which activity is done for pleasure, and which for work. This is a vision, long before desktops, mobiles, call-centres and the invention of temp agencies, of the optimistic compatibility, perhaps even straightforward identification, of women with the boundless manifestations of technology and artifice.¹³²

Confirming the impression that women are not expected to be engineers, Power observes: “Rarely, of course, have women ever been on the side of construction (though Waterloo Bridge, the longest bridge in London, rebuilt by women during World War II, magnificently undermines the idea that women’s work is ‘small-scale’).”¹³³ But Power also offers the example of a woman, noise artist Jessica Rylan, who crosses over to the side of construction by building her own analogue synthesizers which Rylan uses in her live performances:

If the subterranean history of the relation between women, machines and noise has finally emerged overground as a new Art of Noise that seeks to destroy the opposition of the natural and the artificial, what performers like Rylan represent is an expansionist take-over of the territory. No longer will the machines dream through women, but will instead be built by them. They will be used not to mimic the impotent howl of aggression in a hostile world, but to reconfigure the very matrix of noise itself.¹³⁴

In relation to the myth of the machine, the radicalism of Power’s statement lies in the fact that, as a rare exception, she lays claim to the possibility of women constructing machines, and to the reconfiguration of the technological matrix. Because her machine examples are all precybernetic, Power does not address the crucial issue raised by Donna Haraway, namely how the gendered regimes of technology are changed by computational and networked technologies. Thus, the question remains open about which subject positions can be constructed in such a reconfigured matrix that abandons the specter of the mechanical machine.

In the twentieth century, the meaning of machines is closely tied to the histories of masculinity and femininity. The experience both of industrial labor and of the fragmentation and prosthetization of male bodies in the First World War played a crucial role in the constitution of machine metaphors and the machine system. This gendered foundation thus also sustains artistic work with technology, and the construction of machines by artists in particular.

Overview

The direct references to the notion of “machine art” quoted earlier in this introductory chapter give only a first impression of the aesthetic dimensions that have been associated with it. An analysis of the basic aspects of such an aesthetics of the machine forms the main part of the following chapter. The narrative begins with two pivotal moments in the twentieth-century history of machine art. The 1968 exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” by Pontus Hultén constitutes a metaphorical turning point whose curatorial concept was still built around a mechanical understanding of the machine, but also signifies the transformation of the conception of technology toward a more systemic and ecological paradigm. We then take a step backward in time and turn to another crucial moment in the development of the artistic conception of the machine. The advent of futurism brought a radical revaluation of the machine which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, comes into view not only as a motif of representation but as a method and principle of artistic creation. Marinetti’s publication of the first futurist manifesto in 1909 marks that moment. In its original newspaper publication, the manifesto was conspicuously prefaced by the story of a car accident that preceded Marinetti’s hymn to the new technical culture. In technology, as Paul Virilio has remarked, function and malfunction always go together,¹³⁵ and the machine is coupled not only to the figure of the human but also to their joint accident. The accident is something that human and machine have together.

For the longest time, the “aesthetic of the machine” has been a rumor rather than a well-defined concept. But its connotations are as divergent as are the different notions of the machine that we reviewed earlier. We will therefore investigate five aspects of such a “machine aesthetics” that characterized the work of artists building machines until the 1960s: the associative reference to the social meanings of technology, often 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. Many of the examples we draw on were presented in Hultén’s exhibition, which provided an encyclopedic overview without offering the analytical raster that I am proposing here.

The movement I have indicated of sliding back and forth between different instances in the history of the twentieth century is also characteristic of the narrative that I develop in the following four chapters. I want to point to the historical changes as well as to the genealogies of certain concepts and motifs. Importantly, I want to show how important aesthetic aspects of more recent, computer-based artworks are part of an art historical lineage that connects them, directly or indirectly, to developments in the 1950s and 1960s, and further back into the 1910s and 1920s. This larger argument is developed by focusing on specific domains of the artistic engagement with technology: in chapter 3, the focus is on algorithms and machine autonomy; in chapter 4, on vision and the image; chapter 5 deals with changing conceptions of the human body; and the final chapter discusses the emergence of the ecological paradigm of technology in art.

Chapter 3 takes its cue from 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 historical narrative of this chapter picks up, roughly, where Hultén’s exhibition had left it, i.e., in the 1960s and with the dialogue between art and cybernetics that Hultén was aware of, but that was more or less beyond the scope of his presentation of the history of the machine in art. Two aspects of the aesthetics of machines can be added here to the list of five developed in the previous chapter: one is the aspect of interactivity, which adds the dimension of a charged, at times tense, at other times playful dialogue and exchange to the human-machine relationship; and the other is the aspect of autonomy, which becomes a determining factor in the human experience of increasingly independent and self-referential technical systems.

The relationship between aesthetics and technics has been particularly pronounced in discussions about vision and images. The dependency of human vision—not least that of visual artists—on technical media has introduced the topic of the medium into discourses about art, and has raised the question of the technicity of visual perception, whether it is human or machine-based. Chapter 4 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. There has been an ongoing debate at least since the advent of photography in the nineteenth century about machines that make images and about the status of technical images in art. Technical imaging challenges the status of the human subject—whether as artist or as recipient—in a dual way, since it not only undermines the human privilege of making and interpreting images, but also affords an acknowledgment of the degree to which the particular physiological conditions of human vision are themselves part of the technical dimension of aesthetic experiences.

The meaning of machines is most crucially contested in relation to 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 fatally undermined by such technological systems. This charged terrain has been the subject of the entire artistic career of the Australian artist Stelarc, whose work serves as a point of entry in chapter 5 into a historical presentation of conceptions of the body, from the mechanical through the cybernetic. These excursions into different aspects of the body-machine relationship are grounded in the assumption, confirmed by evidence gleaned from the analysis of the examples, that the notion of the machine remains coupled to the physical body and to the paradigms of mechanics. The emergence of cybernetic conceptions of technology, when they actually overwrite such mechanical conceptions, therefore not only suggest an “end of the mechanical age,” but also put the constitutive relationship of human and machine into question. The various attempts by artists throughout the twentieth century at defining and innovating this relationship, transforming and pushing at the boundaries of what constitutes the human body, can be understood in this broader epistemological context.

The final chapter develops the hypothesis about a fundamental shift in the meaning of technology with the emergence of systems thinking and ecology in the second half of the twentieth century—a shift that also has a significant impact on the conception of the machine. The chapter looks at contemporary and historical examples of ecological art which not only show how closely related are the conceptions of ecology and technology, but also emphasize how the systemic, environmental understanding of technology decouples the diagram of subjectivation and necessitates a revaluation of human subjectivity. Two artists whose works are—in very different ways—exemplary for exploring the consequences of this crisis of the human-machine relation, and of subjectivity, are the Japanese artist Seiko Mikami and the Austrian Herwig Weiser. Their works straddle different domains covered in the various chapters of this book. Seiko Mikami questions the position of the human body and its faculties in relation to technical systems which in her installations, spanning over two decades, change from neutral media interfaces into autonomous, solitary machine subjects. Herwig Weiser, in contrast, questions the very logic of technics, inventing alternative techno-logics for the materials and concepts of contemporary technoculture.

In this book, I put forward a historical argument about machine art and machine aesthetics in the twentieth century, mainly in the field of visual and media art. Similar arguments could be developed with regard to, for instance, music and sound art,¹³⁶ for the aesthetics of the machine in theater and performance¹³⁷ or in film or architecture. I have decided against such an encyclopedic approach, and in favor of an attempt to put forward a more narrowly defined historical argument about the emergence and dissipation of concepts of the machine, as witnessed in the visual arts of the twentieth century. Works of robotic art are discussed especially with regard to the aesthetics of machine autonomy, while the artistic robots that mimic human and animal movements and behaviors are all but passed over; their theatricality draws on different aesthetic registers than those crucial for an aesthetics of machines developed here which, by their very nature, suspend such mimetic ambitions. This is therefore also not a book about media art, but one that attempts to develop a focused discourse about machines in art. It takes an art historical perspective that does not so much aim for a diagnosis of the present situation as it looks at a genealogy of thought and at historical conceptions that form correlates of our contemporary understanding of technology and its aesthetics.

The artworks discussed do not seek to illustrate an epistemological hypothesis. Rather, they make it possible to feel and think something that only becomes possible in the singular encounter with the work. Reading this book and looking at the images cannot replace your own experience that, with regard to most of the examples under discussion, requires you to be affected by the works directly. The hypothesis put forward here—that the crisis of the machine is also a crisis of subjectivity—is both an abstract concept and a concrete experience that the artworks can elicit. The more general question to ask may thus also become very concrete: In the face of an emergent ecological understanding of the world, the “constraint of thought” of the machine becomes dispersed into networks of interdependency where the phantasm of technical subjectivation and agency can no longer be fixated in one spot—the spot where the machine used to be, and from which it co-constituted the modern human subject. What, then, are the forms of subjectivity that emerge from the inscriptions of such an ecological field? It may well be that the notions of the body, the image, and algorithms, which structure our investigation, are part of the same technological episteme and might thus be withering away, together with the machine.

This book is an investigation into a rumor—namely, the rumor that there is something that can be called “machine art,” something that is probably neither a particular genre nor a well-defined field of artistic practice. I attempt an explication of the rumor, rather than offering proof of its truthfulness. If there is or was a machine art, it may have been something like this.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted material are by the author.

1. On the 1920 appropriation of the “Tatlin myth” by the Berlin Dadaists, see Hanne Bergius, Montage und Metamechanik. Dada Berlin—Artistik von Polaritäten (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 2000), 50–52. The assumption that the Berlin Dadaists knew little of Tatlin’s work in 1920 is confirmed by Timothy O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987), 186.

2. Konstantin Umanskij, “Der Tatlinismus oder die Maschinenkunst,” Der Ararat, no. 4 (Munich, January 1920): 12; accessed December 5, 2015, http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/ararat/4/.

3. Christina Lodder, “Soviet Constructivism,” in Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, eds., Art of the Avant-Gardes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 359–393.

4. See Andreas Broeckmann, “Escaping Gravity: Letatlin and Other Utopian Flying Machines in Twentieth-Century Art—Five Marginalia,” in Roland Wetzel and Anna Szech, eds., Tatlin: New Art for a New World International Symposium, Tinguely Museum, Basel (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), 291, for a suggestion on how to distinguish between Vladimir Tatlin (the artist), TATLIN (the self-styled myth), and “TATLIN” (the public myth beyond Tatlin’s control, of which the Dadaists’ appropriation is an example).

5. For a contemporary report about art production in the mid-1920s Soviet Union that extensively uses the notion of machine art and can serve as a document of how its myth was carved into discourse, see René Fülöp-Miller, Fantasie und Alltag in Sowjet-Rußland (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1978), 94–100.

6. Larissa Zhadova, ed., Tatlin (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 244. See also Tatlin’s biographer Anatolii Strigalev’s rejection of the designation of Tatlin as a technofetishist and an iconoclast: Anatolii Strigalev, “Vladimir Tatlin. Eine Retrospektive,” in Strigalev and Jürgen Harten, eds., Vladimir Tatlin Retrospektive, exh. cat. (Cologne: DuMont, 1993), 36. The formula of “Tatlin’s machine art” has persisted ever since, though not always employed as precisely as, for instance, by Felix Philipp Ingold, who points to the “Tatlinist” conservation of the art aspect: “Panamarenko does not want his flying machines to be understood as art (not as ‘machine art’ in the sense of Tatlin, or of the contemporary cyberneticians), but as a ‘logically’ conceived work in progress that is left to the autonomous laws of fantasy and permanently becoming and never complete.” Felix Philipp Ingold, “Künstler und/oder Ingenieur. Zu Panamarenkos Flugstudien und Flugobjekten,” in Panamarenko, exh. cat. (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1977), ch. 3, n.p. (my translation).

7. Prampolini’s text was based on an earlier version by Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini, “Manifesto dell’arte meccanica futurista,” La nuova Lacerba, no. 1 (June 20, 1922): 7. Prampolini’s version was published in English as “The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art,” in Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts 3, no. 3 (October 1922): 235–237; all quotations are from this translation. See also Maria Elena Versari, “Futurist Machine Art, Constructivism and the Modernity of Mechanization,” in Günter Berghaus, ed., Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 149–170, and the discussion in chapter 2 below.

8. Prampolini, “The Aesthetic of the Machine,” 237.

9. Philip Johnson, introduction to Johnson, ed., Machine Art, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934; rpt., New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), n.p. For a detailed account of the 1934 “Machine Art” exhibition, see Jennifer Jane Marshall, Machine Art, 1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

10. Alfred H. Barr Jr., foreword to Johnson, Machine Art, n.p.

11. Ibid., n.p.

12. Ibid., n.p.

13. Ibid., n.p.

14. The “Machine Age” exhibition was curated by art critic Jane Heap, editor of the Little Review; see Susan Noyes Platt, “Mysticism in the Machine Age: Jane Heap and The Little Review,” 20/1: Twentieth-Century Art and Culture 1, no. 1 (1989): 40; Anne Blood, “The Russian Section of the ‘Machine-Age Exposition’ (1927),” Burlington Magazine 154 (October 2012):13–15; and the comparison between the “Machine Age” and the “Machine Art” exhibitions in Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 149–199.

15. Ibid., n.p. In a variation on this formalist conception, the US poet and writer Ezra Pound published a text entitled “Machine Art” in 1930. The essay deals with the music that George Antheil had created for the experimental film Ballet mécanique, a project that Antheil had worked on with painter Fernand Léger and that had premiered in 1924. Besides piano and percussion, Antheil’s soundtrack used multiple instruments and sounds derived from industrial contexts, with the thumping of engines, the blowing of whistles, and the screeching of metal on metal accompanying the restless movement of machine parts. In his essay, Pound celebrated the machine as “form in motion,” and argued that the art it brought forth was no longer mere static “space art” like sculpture and architecture; instead, “we find ourselves on the brink of considering time and recurrence”—key aspects of what will become labeled as “kinetic art” twenty years later. Ezra Pound, “Machine Art” (1927–1930), in Pound, Machine Art and Other Writings, ed. M. L. Ardizzone (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 71. Thus, Pound’s notion of “machine art” implied a conception of the machine in operation as a dynamic aesthetic object, with the movement-producing motor at its heart (see Ardizzone, introduction to Pound, Machine Art, 22). See also Tony Tost, “Machine Poetics: Pound, Stein and the Modernist Imagination,” PhD diss., Department of English, Duke University, 2011.

16. Barr in Johnson, Machine Art, n.p. This skeptical note was struck, not coincidentally, in the same year that Lewis Mumford published his study on Technics and Civilization (1934; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), which expresses a similar worry about the necessity of taming what Mumford later called the “mega-machine.” Mumford’s book Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952) contains a chapter, “From Handicraft to Machine Art,” 59–84, that is a like-minded response to Barr’s foreword in the 1934 Machine Art catalog; Mumford writes: “The essence of machine art is the expression of function” (71). As artists “who have taught us most about the value of the machine in our day,” Mumford singles out Alfred Stieglitz, Constantin Brancusi, and Naum Gabo (82)—the latter two of whom had also been mentioned by Barr as references for contemporary artists inspired by the art of the machine.

17. Munari’s manifesto was first published in 1952; an English translation can be found on p. 101 of Miroslava Hájek, “Munari’s Machines,” in Bruno Corà et al., eds., Tinguely e Munari. Opere in azione (Milan: Mazzotta, 2004), 101–103.

18. Ibid., 101. For a related, situationist reflection on the effects of automation, see Asger Jorn, “The Situationists and Automation” (1958), in Ruth Baumeister, ed., Fraternité Avant Tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art and Architecture, 1938–1958 (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), 299–303.

19. Manfred Schneckenburger, “Jenseits der Maschinenkunst—Beyond Machine Art,” in Otto Piene und das CAVS, exh. cat., Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe (Berlin: Deutscher Künstlerbund, 1988), 20–24; cf. chapter 6 below.

20. Ibid., 20.

21. Ibid., 20–21.

22. Similarly, in a review of curator Erika Billeter’s exhibition about art in the 1920s (Erika Billeter, ed., Die Zwanziger Jahre. Kontraste eines Jahrzehnt, exh. cat. [Zurich: Kunstgewerbemuseum, 1973]), the German art critic Eduard Beaucamp refers to the machine cult of the 1920s and its “dream of a mechanized Elysium,” but he does so in a language that betrays his interest in denouncing the rather more contemporary Soviet Union, or Allende’s cybernetically inclined Chile (for example, he speaks of a “self-generating” and “self-regulating society”). See Eduard Beaucamp, “Streit der zwei Kulturen,” in Beaucamp, Das Dilemma der Avantgarde. Aufsätze zur bildenden Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 86–93; Originally published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 2, 1973.

23. Gotthard Günther’s essay “Die ‘zweite’ Maschine” appeared in 1963 as an annex to the second edition of a book first published in 1957, Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen. Eine Metaphysik der Kybernetik (The consciousness of the machines: A metaphysics of cybernetics) (Krefeld and Baden-Baden: Agis, 1963). The essay had first been written in 1952 and was published at that time as a commentary on the German translation of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel I, Robot; see Günther, Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen, 17. For a critical discussion of Günther’s text, see also Erich Hörl, “Die offene Maschine—Heidegger, Günther und Simondon über die technologische Bedingung,” Modern Language Notes (MLN) 123, no. 3 (2008): 194–217.

24. Günther, “Die ‘zweite’ Maschine,” 180.

25. Ibid., 181.

26. Ibid., 182.

27. Ibid., 183.

28. Ibid., 184. In organization studies, this principle would later be extended into the concept of “cyborganization,” in which the focus is not on the technical system that steers, but on the patterns of information that move between and constitute such systems. See R. Cooper and J. Law, “Organization: Distal and Proximal Views,” in S. Bacharach et al., eds., Studies of Organization in the European Tradition (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1995), 237–274.

29. Günther, “Die ‘zweite’ Maschine,” 186.

30. Ibid., 187.

31. Von Förster also reiterates the topos of automated technologies gaining power over human society, which had already worried Barr and Munari, and warns: “If we don’t act ourselves, we shall be acted upon.” Heinz von Förster, “Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception,” Instructional Science 1, no. 1 (1972): 31–43.

32. For an analysis of the “anthropology of technology” that does not distinguish between such different types of machines but views all machines (especially in industrial production) under the paradigm of automatism and of the emergence of a new type of processes, namely “machine processes,” that are generated as an addition to natural processes and processes of human agency, see Heinrich Popitz, Der Aufbruch zur artifiziellen Gesellschaft. Zur Anthropologie der Technik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1995), esp. 29–31.

33. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 12.

34. See Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967–1970). Cf. also Günther Anders, “Antiquiertheit der Maschinen,” part I (written in 1960) and part II (1969), in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), 110–127, which discuss (1) the “Promethean Shame” that humans feel because they have been born, not produced, and (2) the supersession of the individual machine of the nineteenth century and its coupling and integration with others into the “meta-apparatus,” the “universal apparatus,” or the “total” or “big machine” of the later twentieth century. Anders does not distinguish between “apparatus” and “machine,” but uses both terms more or less synonymously.

35. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, no. 59 (1950): 435–436. It is a matter of academic debate whether the conceptual model of the “machine” Turing had in mind was a calculating machine of the type conceived by Leibniz and Babbage; Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges, in Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 96–98, suggests that the model “machine” in 1935–1937 may well have been a typewriter like the one owned by Turing’s mother; see also Andrew Hodges, “What Did Alan Turing Mean by ‘Machine’?,” in Philip Husbands, Owen Holland, and Michael Wheeler, eds., The Mechanical Mind in History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 75–90. For a historical overview of “intelligent machines” in art, see in the same volume Paul Brown, “The Mechanization of Art,” 259–282; for a discussion of the transition from the classical to the cybernetic machine concept, and the role of mathematics, see Dieter Mersch, “Kunstmaschinen. Zur Mechanisierung von Kreativität,” Paragrana 14, no. 2 (2005): 183–202, esp. 187–189.

36. The following discussion is based in part on the summary of Deleuze and Guattari’s machine concept by Gerald Raunig, Tausend Maschinen. Eine kleine Philosophie der Maschine als sozialer Bewegung (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2008), 18–30. While Raunig’s analysis of the notions of the machine in Marx and Guattari is precise, and the reintroduction of the ancient concept of machina in a chapter on “Theatre Machines” (31–49) affords a useful broadening of the discussion, his attempts to apply the concept of the machine to social movements and to debates about the twenty-first-century precariat are less convincing. For an extensive analysis of the notion of the machine in the works of Guattari, Deleuze, and Lacan, see Henning Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen. Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan (Munich: Fink, 1997), esp. 42, 68–69, 75, 80–82. For a summary of the machine-related terminology by philosopher and Mille Plateaux translator Brian Massumi, see his A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 192 fn. 45.

37. Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, 29.

38. Raunig, Tausend Maschinen, 30. On the need for a critical historical approach to the concept of the machine, see also Félix Guattari, “Über Maschinen” (1990), in Henning Schmidgen, ed., Ästhetik und Maschinismus. Texte von und zu Félix Guattari (Berlin: Merve, 1995), 119f., and Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (New York: Penguin, 1984), 112. In an appendix to their book Anti-Oedipus (1972; London: Continuum, 2004), Deleuze and Guattari asked, “which societal machine enables and necessitates the appearance of specific technical, affective, cognitive, semiotic machines and their concatenation” (Raunig, Tausend Maschinen, 27). Gilles Deleuze later reiterated the idea of machines as social phenomena in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, no. 59 (Winter 1992): 6, where he offers an alternative numbering for, in this case, three different machine concepts: “Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society—not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines—levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses.”

39. See Raunig, Tausend Maschinen, 25.

40. Ibid., 28–29.

41. Brian Massumi has pointed out that “due to persistent subjectivist misunderstandings,” Deleuze and Guattari abandoned the term “desiring machine” in favor of the more neutral “assemblage”; see Massumi, A User’s Guide, 82.

42. Martin Burckhardt, Vom Geist der Maschine (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999), 17. Similarly, philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has described the machine as a cunning “trap set for the forces of nature”; see Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1990), 41–43). And ethnographer Lucy A. Suchman has pointed to the fact that human-computer interaction is organized around different, asymmetrical constraints which require the human user to understand the nature of the machine and the operations required to use it, while the machine is constrained by its design plan; see Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 118.

43. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 91–92.

44. Ibid., 108.

45. Jonathan Sawday, in Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007), has shown how tropes related to the concept of the machine and its inherent dangerousness (art, technology, human, nature, etc.) have not only been prominent since the nineteenth century, but were already present in the Renaissance discourses on technology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (including the mega-machine, intelligent or reasoning machines, and sex machines).

46. See Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism” (1952), trans. Mark Cohen and Randall Cherry, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 52–53.

47. Ibid., 49. On the history of automata, see Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). On robotic art, see Thierry Dufrêne, Outresculpture (Paris: Éditions Hazan, forthcoming).

48. See Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” 52.

49. Ibid., 63.

50. Ibid., 54.

51. Ibid., 56.

52. Ibid., 58.

53. See Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines” (1857–1858), in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 690–712. The fragmentary text was prefaced by a quotation from Marx’s contemporary, Charles Babbage. See Raunig, Tausend Maschinen, 18–30, for a succinct summary of Marx’s conception of the machine.

54. Marx, “Fragment on Machines,” 692.

55. Ibid., 692–693. This conception of total integration will inform much of the Marxist literature of the twentieth century; see for instance, Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923): “on the assembly line, the bodily integrity of the worker is broken up as much as the organic unity of the product, and the worker becomes ‘a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system.’” Cited in Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 184.

56. Gastev, cited in Fülöp-Miller, Fantasie und Alltag in Sowjet-Rußland, 48.

57. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 126.

58. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 105; see 66–67 for Hayles’s analysis of how, in cybernetics, language forms the crucial linkage between humans and machines.

59. Günther, “Die ‘zweite’ Maschine,” 189.

60. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 442; see David Rokeby, “Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media,” in Simon Penny, ed., Critical Issues in Interactive Media (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 133–158.

61. Claus Pias, “Das digitale Bild gibt es nicht—Über das (Nicht)Wissen der Bilder und die informatische Illusion,” Zeitenblicke 2, no. 1 (2003), http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2003/01/pias/, section 20.

62. Ibid., section 17.

63. Ibid., section 19.

64. Erich Hörl and Michael Hagner, “Überlegungen zur kybernetischen Transformation des Humanen,” in Hörl and Hagner, eds., Die Transformation des Humanen—Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 9.

65. Günther, “Die ‘zweite’ Maschine,” 181–182 (emphasis added).

66. This is one of the main themes of Pickering’s major study Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

67. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation” (1969), in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127–186.

68. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” (2006), in Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1–24.

69. Ibid., 14.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 17. Agamben’s dual, nested use, in this section, of the term “apparatus” for both technical instruments and gadgets, and for the systems that bring these gadgets forth to “crowd the spaces of social interaction,” appears somewhat contradictory. Agamben does not employ a differentiated concept of technology, and discusses rather anecdotally the mobile phone as a contemporary “apparatus” (16–17, 21). He also employs the concept of the “machine” rather casually and without offering a definition; the term is used several times in the context of “the governmental machine” (20, 22, 23) and seems to be conceived as the force that controls the apparatuses and puts them to work, thus reminding us of Mumford’s “mega-machine.”

72. For a discussion of the relation between humans and animals, and an analogy between animals and machines, see Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), where the “anthropological machine” is posited as the conceptual mechanism through which the human is created with and against the animal.

73. This is also the reason why art-making machines—which repeat the gesture of desubjectified art making—and automata and robots—which perpetuate anthropomorphic and zoomorphic encounters—are less relevant for the inquiry pursued in this book.As a strategic means against the phantasmatic claim to a digital universalism, i.e., the idea that everything can be digitalized and calculated, Dieter Mersch in “Kunstmaschinen. Zur Mechanisierung von Kreativität” posits the paradox, “especially because it traverses and explodes the binarism of digital systems, and thus points to the other, the nondichotomous and nondigitalizable” (198). Mersch writes that there cannot be creativity under the conditions of cybernetic machines, and argues for blowing the cover of the machine through art: “The site of such an invention is art. The Other—which gains its contour only in the passage, in the transition, and which reveals the trace of creativity like a silhouette—is set free in a break with all mechanicity not by art machines, but by the ironical and paradoxical ‘machines’ of the arts” (199). In this text, Mersch does not mention examples of concrete artworks. On the notion of the paradox, see also Günther, “Die ‘zweite’ Maschine,” 189, n. 5: “Paradoxes cannot be constructed as technical objects [Paradoxien aber sind nicht als technische Objekte konstruierbar].” But can they be constructed as artworks?

74. Andy Warhol, quoted in Gene R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters, Part 1,” Art News, no. 62 (November 1963), 26.

75. Heiner Müller, “Hamletmaschine,” in Frank Hörnigk, ed., Heiner Müller Material. Texte und Kommentare (Leipzig: Reclam, 1989), 48–49 and 45.

76. Ibid., 47.

77. Roland Puccetti, “On Thinking Machines and Feeling Machines,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science 18, no. 1 (1967): 42.

78. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 446, emphasis in the original. See also the case of “Joey, the mechanical boy” analyzed by Bruno Bettelheim in “Joey, the Mechanical Boy,” Scientific American (March 1959): 3–9. Cf. Stephen Thompson, “Joey the Mechanical Boy,” in The Transtechnology Reader (Plymouth, UK: Plymouth University, 2010): 85–97.

79. Gastev, cited in Fülöp-Miller, Fantasie und Alltag in Sowjet-Rußland, 50.

80. Fritz Böhle and Brigitte Milkau (1988), cited in Dietrich Hoß, “Maschinenträume und Traummaschinen—Aktuelle Bezüge einer kritischen Theorie des Technikumgangs,” in Rainer Erd, ed., Kritische Theorie und Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 330.

81. Hoß, “Maschinenträume und Traummaschinen,” 330.

82. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, 1960). Less harmoniously inclined, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that love and death are inextricably linked, and that the will to love is always wedded to the will to ruin and destruction. We will return to this motif when discussing the concept of the bachelor machine.

83. Max Scheler, “Liebe und Hass” (1922), in Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, Werke, vol. 7, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1973), 157–158. Scheler’s study was first published in 1913; we can only speculate why his anti-anthropopathic affirmation coincided with the futurists’ eroticized celebration of machines during those years. In an influential study of sexuality, Psychopathia Sexualis (first published 1886, multiple updated editions until 1924), Richard von Krafft-Ebing considered not only love and sexual relationships (and their “perversions”) between people, but also fetishization of body parts, objects, and materials—though not machines. Critic Peter Kroher reminds us that according to Jacques Lacan, Freud’s decisive discovery of libidinal energy, a precondition of psychoanalysis, was predicated on the appearance of machines; see Peter Kroher, “Libidinöse Energetik,” in Knowbotic Research, ed., Nonlocated Online: Digital Territories, Incorporations and the Matrix, Medien Kunst Passagen no. 3 (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1995), IIIa; and Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 73–74.As early as the eighteenth century, the philosopher Hermann Samuel Reimarus hinted at the strong (if negative) emotional movement that machines could call forth: he regarded a world in which machines would not produce their phenomena with explicit regard to a human observer as “dreadful” (scheußlich). See Horst Bredekamp, Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglaube. Die Geschichte der Kunstkammer und die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2002), 88; quoting Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Maschine und Teufel. Jean Pauls Jugendsatiren nach ihrer Modellgeschichte (Munich: Alber 1975), 90.

84. Pontus K. G. Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 172.

85. Jean Tinguely, quoted in ibid., 167.

86. Claus Pias, “‘Hollerith “Feathered Crystal”‘: Art, Science, and Computing in the Era of Cybernetics,” Grey Room, no. 29 (2007): 99; see also Claus Pias, “Der Hacker,” in Eva Horn and Ulrich Bröckling, eds., Grenzverletzer. Figuren politischer Subversion (Berlin: Kadmos, 2002), 248–270, where the “I Love You” computer virus is called a “global declaration of love [globale Liebeserklärung]” (248).

87. Kito Nedo, “Atonal mit Youtube-Kätzchen,” Berliner Zeitung, December 17, 2010.

88. Saul Albert, “Interactivity, Image, Text, and Context within Jodi.org” (1998), Nettime mailing list archives, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9804/msg00015.html; see also Inge Hinterwaldner, “When Windows Attack … Doors Won’t Help. Zur Hinterfragung von Bildlichkeit und Interaktivität in der Netzkunst,” in Birgit Mersmann and Martin Schulz, eds., Kulturen des Bildes (Munich: Fink, 2006), 373.

89. “Another lonely night / Stare at the TV screen / I don’t know what to do / I need a rendezvous / Computer love / Computer love / I call this number / For a data date.” Kraftwerk, “Computer Love,” from Computer Love/The Model, EMI 5207, 1981, 7-inch vinyl single.

90. See David Link, “There Must Be an Angel. Zu den Anfängen des Rechnens mit Strahlen” (2006), in Siegfried Zielinski and Eckhard Fürlus, eds., Variantologie. Zur Tiefenzeit der Beziehungen von Kunst, Wissenschaft und Technik (Berlin: Kadmos, 2013), 200–227.

91. See David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (New York: Harper, 2007), which focuses on robots as sex partners and related ethical questions. In the chapter “The Cyborgs among Us” of his book Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), Alvin Toffler speculated about the future challenge to determine “whether the smiling, assured humanoid behind the airline reservation counter is a pretty girl or a carefully wired robot.—The likelihood, of course, is that she will be both” (211). In a footnote, Toffler adds: “This raises a number of half-amusing, half-serious problems about the relationships between men and machines, including emotional and even sexual relationships. Professor Block at Cornell speculates that man-machine sexual relationships may not be too far distant. Pointing out that men often develop emotional attachments to the machines they use, he suggests that we shall have to give attention to the ‘ethical’ questions arising from our treatment of ‘these mechanical objects of our affection and passion.’ A serious inquiry into these issues is to be found in an article by Roland Puccetti in the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 18 (1967) 39–51.” (See Puccetti, “On Thinking Machines and Feeling Machines,” about the possible human feelings toward a “parahuman automaton.”)

92. Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920), University of Adelaide, e-books, 2014, accessed November 17, 2015, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/complete.html. An epiphenomenon of machine love is what Günther Anders diagnosed as the “promethean shame” that humans feel about their inferiority to machines, and about having been born, not made—an affect of confrontation and alterity that Anders compares to erotic love (“Über prometheische Scham” [1956], in Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 26). In Anders’s narrative, the feeling of shame is cast off when decisions about operations in the Korean War are left to the computer, and people say: “Since we are worse at computations than our apparatus, we are incalculable; thus, let’s not calculate.” Ibid., 61 (my translation).

93. Mumford, Art and Technics, 81.

94. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 56–57.

95. Claus Pias, “Die kybernetische Illusion,” in Claudia Liebrand and Irmela Schneider, eds., Medien in Medien, 51–66 (Cologne: DuMont, 2002), 59–60 (emphasis in the original).

96. Ibid., 60.

97. Ibid.

98. Günther, “Die ‘zweite’ Maschine,” 169.

99. Ibid., 173.

100. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, xii. For a historical account of gendered conceptions of technology with a focus on the eighteenth century, see Allison Muri, “The Woman-Machine: Techno-lust and Techno-reproduction,” in Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660–1830 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 166–225.

101. Paul Haviland, “We Are Living in the Age of the Machine,” 291, no. 7–8 (New York, 1915): 1, accessed November 17, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25311796. An aspect of the machine to keep in mind is that, whereas its grammatical gender is neutral in English, the word “machine” is feminine in French and German.

102. Michel Carrouges, “Directions for Use,” in Harald Szeemann, ed., The Bachelor Machines (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1975), 21. Carrouges had first used the term in the essay “La Machine-célibataire: selon Franz Kafka et Marcel Duchamp,” Mercure de France (1950), 261–281. In a letter from 1950, Duchamp wrote to Carrouges that he appreciated the attention Carrouges had given his work, but that he disagreed with the proposed interpretations of The Large Glass. Duchamp’s letter is quoted in Hans Ulrich Reck, Jean Clair, and Harald Szeemann, eds., Junggesellenmaschinen (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1999), 104–105.

103. Marcel Duchamp, “The Green Box,” in Marchand du Sel: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 44. See chapter 2 below for a description of the Large Glass. See also Jean-François Lyotard, “Partitions,” in Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, 39–61 (first published in the catalog of the “Bachelor Machines” exhibition).

104. Carrouges, “Directions for Use,” 21.

105. See Harald Szeemann, “Die Obsession eines Junggesellen—Und was sie ihn gekostet hat,” du, Europäische Kunstzeitschrift, no. 452 (October 1978), rpt. in Reck, Clair, and Szeemann, Junggesellenmaschinen, 48–49. See also Harald Szeemann, ed., Junggesellenmaschinen / Les machines Célibataires, exh. cat. (Venice: Alfieri, 1975); reprint of the catalog texts and additional materials are in Reck, Clair, and Szeemann, Junggesellenmaschinen. On the importance of the 1975 exhibition catalog for the construction of the myth, see Reck’s statements in Oswald Wiener and Hans Ulrich Reck, “‘Virtual Reality ist doch faktisch die Ève future par excellence.’ Oswald Wiener im Gespräch mit Hans Ulrich Reck,” in Reck, Clair, and Szeemann, Junggesellenmaschinen, 327, 329. Similarly, Pietro Bellasi suggests that the “bachelor machine” was not “discovered” but “invented” by Carrouges in 1954; Pietro Bellasi, “Cogitation of a Dreamer of Machines,” in Corà et al., Tinguely e Munari, 41. For a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the bachelor machine, see chapter 5 below.

106. In Wiener and Reck, “‘Virtual Reality,’” Oswald Wiener raises the question of what the analogous “spinster machine” might be (327). See also Meret Oppenheim’s 1975 letter to Szeemann, in which she protests the inclusion of her painting Votivbild (Würgeengel) (1931) in the “Femme Fatale” section of the exhibition (rpt. in Reck, Clair, and Szeemann, Junggesellenmaschinen, 43).

107. Wiener in Wiener and Reck, “‘Virtual Reality,’” 330–331; see also Wiener’s remarks on the “Bio-Adapter” (338). The body-machine artist Stelarc, whose work features prominently in chapter 5 below, appositely remarked: “What is significant is no longer male-female intercourse but human-machine interface. THE BODY IS OBSOLETE.” Stelarc, “Prosthetics, Robotics, and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies,” Leonardo 24, no. 5 (1991): 591–595; cited in Bernard Stiegler, “Stelarc and What’s to Come, or the End of Sexual Difference,” in Marc Partouche, ed., Art / cognition. Practiques artistiques et sciences cognitives (Aix-en-Provence: Cypres Ecole d’Art, 1994), 61. See also Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 108–112, for comments on Norbert Wiener’s use of metaphors of celibacy and erotics with regard to his anxiousness to preserve the boundaries of the subject.

108. Wiener in Wiener and Reck, “‘Virtual Reality,’” 328.

109. Ibid., 331.

110. Reck in Wiener and Reck, “‘Virtual Reality,’” 336.

111. Wiener in Wiener and Reck, “‘Virtual Reality,’” 330. Wiener also criticizes the drawing of parallels between the symbolic machines of art and scientifically based technical and conceptual machines, which he calls a “fabrication of powerless analogies” (339). On the phantasmatic dimensions of the relation of the machine and the unconscious, especially with regard to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing, cf. Burckhardt, Vom Geist der Maschine.

112. Wiener in Wiener and Reck, “‘Virtual Reality,’” 338 (“Man vertraut im Sinne eines vagen Selbstentwurfs dem Gefühl, selber keine Maschine zu sein”). This observation confirms my contention that the machine is a sign for the subject’s disavowal of the apparatus, which brings forth the modern subject and the specter of the machine as doubles of each other.

113. Dieter Daniels, “Duchamp—Interface—Turing: A Hypothetical Encounter between the Bachelor Machine and the Universal Machine,” in Oliver Grau, ed., Media Art Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 124. In this explicitly speculative essay, Daniels compares Duchamp’s bachelor machine with Turing’s Universal Machine, drawing parallels between the machines’ conceptions and their psychological foundations and impact. (He may have been responding to a remark by Hans Ulrich Reck in the 1998 conversation with Oswald Wiener, claiming that the connection between Turing and Duchamp had not been drawn.) For Daniels, “going back to the origins of the universal and bachelor machines [makes it possible to] find the common basis for … postmodern gender- and cybertheories”; both Duchamp’s and Turing’s machines become “recognizable as specifically masculine scenarios that revolve around an insurmountable distance from the female and … install a media-technical communication as a replacement for a physical encounter” (Daniels, “Duchamp—Interface—Turing,” 115). It is disputable whether Daniels’s argument makes sense in equating the “computer hardware” with the material object of The Large Glass and the notes of the Green Box with a “software program” that would run on that hardware. Moreover, The Large Glass cannot be reduced to a “diagram,” as Daniels approaches it, but has to be analyzed as a sculptural object, part of which can be understood and interpreted as a diagram.

114. Daniels, “Duchamp—Interface—Turing,” 126.

115. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985), in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 149–181. For discussions of such a cyberfeminist approach, see Rosi Braidotti, “Cyberfeminism with a Difference,” New Formations, no. 29 (Autumn 1996): 9–25, and Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding, and Michelle M. Wright, eds., Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), accessed November 30, 2015, http://home.refugia.net/portfolio/domain-errors. Matthew Biro, Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), offers a detailed analysis of the aesthetic strategies of Berlin Dada, especially the photomontages of Höch and Hausmann, and explores many gender-political aspects, among others. Biro’s bracketing of his investigation with the cyborg concept is historically not convincing, but his treatment of the construction of identity in relation to technologized bodies—not least those of maimed veterans—is compelling.

116. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 178, 180.

117. Ibid., 150.

118. Ibid., 165; see also 170ff.

119. Ibid., 163.

120. Ibid., 173.

121. Ibid., 154.

122. Ibid., 170; see also 163–164.

123. Ingrid Wiener, Karin Schick, Stephan Kunz, and Dieter Roth, The Tapestries of Dieter Roth and Ingrid Wiener: You Can Also Weave What You Do Not See (Bielefeld and Leipzig: Kerber, 2007).

124. See Raymond Bellour, “Moving Pictures,” in Tania Ruiz Gutierrez, ed., Elsewhere/Annorstädes/Ailleurs (Paris: Aliubi Atque, 2010), 23–43.

125. See Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1998). For the historical relationship between programming and textile production, see Birgit Schneider, Textiles Prozessieren. Eine Mediengeschichte der Lochkartenweberei (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2007).

126. See Judy Malloy, ed., Women, Art, and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

127. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 181.

128. Ibid. In the 1991 book edition of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway reproduces and briefly mentions the painting of a female Cyborg (1989) by Lynn Randolph (173 and plate 1), but she does not speak about it in her text: the image of a young woman facing the viewer, looking straight ahead from her gleaming symmetrical face, a lioness’s head lying wiglike on the top of her head, also looking at us, like a mask; the woman’s torso a flat integrated circuit, she appears seated at a desk which is a miniature mountain landscape out of which, in front of her, grows a computer keyboard; behind her, in front of a starry sky, a framed image, perhaps a computer screen, with graphic representations of cell clusters, spiral galaxies, and wireframe model landscapes—thus, microscopic, macroscopic, and virtual worlds; she holds her fingers on some of the keys, as though she was, endowed with the animal power of the lioness, controlling the universe that we see represented on the suspended screen.

129. Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, 2015, accessed November 20, 2015, www.laboriacuboniks.net. Ironically, the website opens with a short sequence from James Whale’s movie Bride of Frankenstein (1935) that shows the coming-to-life of the artificial Bride, invented and created by, of course, a male engineer.

130. Ibid., section entitled “Interrupt,” no. 0x08.

131. Nina Power, “Women Machines: The Future of Female Noise,” in Mattin Iles and Anthony Iles, eds., Noise and Capitalism (Donostia-S. Sebastiá, Spain: Arteleku Audiolab, 2009), 97–103, quoting 98–99.

132. Ibid., 100.

133. Ibid., 98.

134. Ibid., 103.

135. Paul Virilio, “Museum of Accidents” (1986), Public, no. 2 (Toronto, 1989): 81.

136. See Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). For the role of technology in the music of the early to mid-twentieth century, see Fred Prieberg, Musica ex machina. Über das Verhältnis von Musik und Technik (Berlin: Ullstein, 1960), which covers in particular the futurist movement, the mimetic musical representation of “machines” and machine sounds, musique concrète, and an international survey of electronic music in the 1950s. Prieberg’s understanding of the “machine” follows a mechanical, precybernetic paradigm in which the human musician decides and controls. The historical introduction focuses on literary examples of automata and robots.

137. See Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

2 Toward the Art and Aesthetics of the Machine

The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age

The transformation of conceptions of technology from the mechanical paradigm to that of cybernetics, and the accession of what Gotthard Günther has called “transclassical machines,” became increasingly palpable during the 1960s. This trend was pinpointed by an exhibition that K. G. Pontus Hultén, the Swedish curator and director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, was invited to organize at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where it opened in November 1968.¹ The exhibition title, “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age,” indicated the self-conscious and conceptual approach Hultén took toward the representation of machines from the perspective of a time characterized by fundamental technological change (figure 2.1). In its main part, the exhibition presented works by over one hundred artists from the early twentieth century through the 1960s. There were also some items by artists and inventors from the period since the Renaissance, including drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, a photograph of the defunct Duck (1733) automaton by Jacques Vaucanson, and an eighteenth-century automaton by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, as well as caricatures and objects from the nineteenth century that documented the early development of automobiles and cinematographic cameras. Hultén summarized the cultural history of machines in his introduction to the catalog and emphasized that while machines featured prominently in nineteenth-century literature, they were all but ignored by the visual arts. Consequentially, the exhibition proper starts with the celebration of the machine by the futurists at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Figure 2.1 Cover of the exhibition catalog The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, curated by K. G. Pontus Hultén, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (1968). Stamped on aluminum, printed in color, 24.8 × 21.6 cm. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, NY, Publications Department. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence 2015.

In Hultén’s career, “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” of 1968 was an important moment which tied together several of his previous interests and pointed toward the work he would later do as the director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the newly founded Centre Pompidou in Paris. But it was also just another show of this ambitious curator, in a year in which Hultén also organized an exhibition with work by Andy Warhol in Stockholm, and presented works of several Swedish artists at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Since the 1950s, Pontus Hultén had been one of the most influential international curators to feature what would become known as kinetic art in exhibitions such as “Le Mouvement” (Galerie Denise Renée, Paris, 1955) and the groundbreaking “Bewogen Beweging” (Dutch for “moved movement”) presented in 1961, first at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and then at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet and Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum. This latter exhibition was built around a large number of works by Jean Tinguely, but it also included earlier works by Alexander Calder, and a 1960 replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913), as well as more recent conceptual works by Robert Rauschenberg and cybernetics-inspired work by British artists like Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, and Roy Ascott.

In turn, “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” can be taken as a fitting continuation of the mission of the New York MoMA to construct an art historical narrative affirming the position of a particular US modernism. The exhibition took its departure from the founding moments of the European twentieth-century avant-garde and combined the works of European and American artists, yet it placed an obvious focus on works made in the United States. Consequentially, the exhibition concluded with a section organized by the New York-based initiative Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), which sought to foster a particularly “American” style of cooperation between artists and engineers.

Moreover, the demonstration that Pontus Hultén gave of “the machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age” and the late-avant-gardist expansion of the field of art by kineticism rested strongly on the experience of New York City as a site of technology. The three main anchor artists of the show—Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Tinguely—all had strong connections with the city. Here, Picabia had been converted to his mechanomorphic style in 1915 under the impression of a particularly dynamic urban technological environment; Duchamp had made the first public presentation of a readymade, Fountain (1917), here and had lived in New York throughout the period when he was working on the Large Glass; and Tinguely had staged a signature piece for the withering of the mechanical age in the sculpture garden of MoMA in 1960 under the title Homage to New York. Tinguely was assisted in preparing the Homage machine performance by Billy Klüver, a Swedish Bell Labs engineer who a few years later went on to found E.A.T. Klüver interpreted Tinguely’s appraisal of the city and his import of an aesthetics of dysfunctionality by pointing to the ambivalence of function and failure inherent to technics: “New York has humor and poetry, in spite of the presence of the machine, whereas in a purely technocratic society the machine must always be a functional object. Failures of the machine can therefore never be allowed, because control is the necessary element of that society. It is when the machine must function at any cost that there can be no Homage to New York.”²

The interest that Hultén brought to the notion of the machine was topical rather than technological. “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” was a distinctly art historical exhibition in that it presented works by futurist, constructivist, and surrealist artists from the modernist avant-garde, European as well as American, placing a focus on Duchamp and Picabia for the earlier decades, and concluding with a strong presence of works by Tinguely and other nouveaux réalistes and American neo-Dadaists, including Edward Kienholz, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg.

With its curatorial focus on artworks, Hultén’s exhibition differed significantly from other exhibitions that had dealt with the relation of art and technology in the twentieth century and that were still more or less well remembered in the 1960s. Before the Second World War, two New York exhibitions—“Machine Age” (1927), curated by Jane Heap, and “Machine Art” (1934), curated by Philip Johnson and Alfred Barr at MoMA—had both championed a functionalist conception of the “aesthetics of the machine,” the former relating works of the 1920s avant-garde artists to modernist architecture, and the latter exclusively showing works of engineering and design, as works of “machine art.” Hultén gestured toward this type of formalism, rooted in the appraisal of the applied arts since the late nineteenth century, by featuring automobiles in his exhibition. Besides the nineteenth-century cinematographic apparatuses, the inclusion of selected designer and racing cars forms the most significant exception to the artistic program of the show. Hultén viewed these cars as being on the borderline between technology and art, examples of a design practice in which beauty was a mere accidental result of the search for extreme functionality.³

Other international exhibitions that had dealt with the contemporary cultural significance of technology included “Man Machine and Motion” (1955), organized at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, England, by Richard Hamilton and Reyner Banham, and “This Is Tomorrow” (1956), curated by Bryan Robertson and built around a main exhibit by the British artists of the Independent Group at Whitechapel Gallery in London. “Man Machine and Motion” focused on thematic displays in four chapters about techniques of mobility on land, on the sea, in the air, and in space, with quite literal illustrations of the relationship between humans and technology.⁴ “This Is Tomorrow,” on the other hand, showed the Independent Group artists’ attempts to transpose their research about cybernetics, social theory, and popular culture into an exhibition environment that deliberately transgressed achieved conceptions of contemporary art and sculpture.

Hultén’s exhibition instead sought to integrate the machine-related artworks into a broader modernist narrative, which he saw at an important crossroads due to the emergence of computer technologies. As he affirms in the dedication that precedes his catalog introduction, it was meant to be a celebration of the machine and its reflection in artistic works: “This exhibition is dedicated to the mechanical machine, the great creator and destroyer, at a difficult moment in its life when, for the first time, its reign is threatened by other tools.”⁵ Hultén did not, however, seek to circumscribe or define a particular notion of “machine art,” a term which he uses only sparsely in the introduction or in the extensive catalog entries.

Although the exhibition dealt with many different aspects of the relationship between art and machines, Hultén reserved the denomination “machine art” for the reception of Tatlin’s work by the Dadaists:

The positions of the Dadaists towards machines varied widely. … Heartfield and Grosz, in Berlin, soon abandoned their initial Dadaist skepticism for an almost unlimited admiration for Constructivism and “machine art.”—The concepts of machine art held by the New York Dadaists and by the Russian Constructivists working in Leningrad in the years following the Revolution were extremely different.⁶

Here Hultén introduces the notion of “machine art” as though it were a specific concept, yet it is in fact never defined. According to Hultén,

Tatlin was eager to put his art at the service of the Revolution. He saw the future of the new society in the development of science and industry, and he wanted his art to be a spontaneous expression of the new society’s dynamism and to reflect the spirit of machine culture. … He concluded that “the most aesthetic forms are the most economical”; but his complex thought goes far beyond this statement and involves, as he said, “art going out into technology”—the fusion of art and life.⁷

Hultén’s exhibition included the 1920 photograph of Heartfield and Grosz with the sign celebrating “Tatlin’s new machine art” (figure 1.1). The adjoining catalog entry vaguely references “Tatlin’s ideas” about which, as Hultén speculates, the Berlin Dadaists knew very little, save for the mutual interest in “the radical overthrow of all traditional Western art.”⁸ In the entry accompanying El Lissitzky’s collage Tatlin Working on the Monument to the Third International (1921–1922, figure 2.3), Hultén affirms: “Obviously wishing to further the impression that Tatlin in his machine art worked according to strict mathematical principles, Lissitzky posed him as an engineer surrounded by mathematical symbols.”⁹ Notably, Hultén gives currency to the expression “Tatlin in his machine art,” even though he offers no argumentative foundation or references for the claim. Of Tatlin’s works, Hultén’s exhibition only presented a reconstruction of the Monument to the Third International and the Letatlin flying apparatus, neither of which the catalog discusses with reference to the notion of “machine art.” When speaking about the theater stage designs of Liubov Popova, Hultén claims, again quite schematically and clearly harking back to the Berlin Dadaists’ appropriation: “Ideas based on Tatlin’s new ‘machine art’ predominated.”¹⁰ And he equates Tatlin’s attitude with that of the Russian theater avant-gardist Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose formula Hultén quotes: “proletarization = industrialization of art.”¹¹

It seems remarkable that in the face of literally hundreds of artworks that deal with aspects of the machine, Hultén does not feel the necessity to define a broader notion of “machine art.” He also does not employ the term with regard to the work of Fernand Léger or the New York Dadaists, even though an ample number of works by Duchamp and several of Picabia’s machine paintings were included in the show. Hultén passes over Ezra Pound, ignores MoMA’s own “Machine Art” exhibition of 1934, and mentions Munari’s claim for an “art of machines” only in passing. Instead, Hultén sticks with the clichéd reading of the notion of “machine art” that loosely connects it to Tatlin, mediated through the Berlin Dadaists’ appropriation of Umanskij’s interpretation.

To complete the list, Hultén does not discuss even Jean Tinguely’s works as “machine art,” though they feature prominently in the exhibition and play an important role in Hultén’s understanding of the “machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age.” Instead, Hultén calls Tinguely’s sculptures “auto-destructive and auto-creative art machines,” and his automatic drawing apparatuses of the Metamatics series, “art-making machines.”¹² Machines can be or make art, but for Hultén, there is no particular genre called “machine art.”

In addition to its historical perspective, “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” also looked at the present. Some works toward the end of the exhibition, by artists including Hans Haacke, Takis, and Nam June Paik, employed new technical materials and media apparatuses and referred to recent developments, like systems aesthetics and video art. In addition, over a year before the exhibition opened, Hultén had set out the terms for a collaboration with Billy Klüver of E.A.T., then a quickly growing organization. Founded in the autumn of 1966 in the aftermath of the 9 Evenings performance series (1966) in New York, E.A.T. was devoted to cultivating new forms of cooperation between artists and engineers. In November 1967, E.A.T. had announced a competition for artworks made in collaboration between artists and engineers, whose best examples would be included in “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” exhibition at MoMA.¹³ Nine of these works were shown in an appendix to the main exhibition and were also included in a special section of the exhibition catalog, printed in blue instead of black ink. In addition, more than one hundred other works that had been submitted to the E.A.T. competition were presented in the exhibition “Some More Beginnings” at the Brooklyn Museum, shown during the running period of the MoMA exhibition into 1969.

If Hultén’s exhibition consciously marked the historical moment of the “end of the mechanical age,” the cooperation with E.A.T. indicated his curiosity about what might come afterward. Coinciding with “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age,” or immediately following it, were three exhibitions which pointed in similar directions. A few months earlier, “Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts,” curated by Jasia Reichardt, had opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, an exhibition which would travel to several venues in the United States and which presented examples of artists using electronic and digital technologies, exploring their aesthetic dimensions. Because “Cybernetic Serendipity” also included displays of computers, some critics sneered at it for looking like a trade fair. The second related exhibition, “Software,” curated by Jack Burnham at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1970, despite its title did not focus so much on computer art—which was present, however, in complex installations by, for example, Ted Nelson, and Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group from MIT—but sought to promote a conceptual approach in contemporary art that was inspired by systems theory, through works by artists like Les Levine, Joseph Kosuth, Hans Haacke, and Vito Acconci. A third exhibition that had been in the making for several years, and that also involved a number of the same younger artists, was Maurice Tuchman’s “Art and Technology,” presented in 1970 at LACMA in Los Angeles; it was also the result of an attempt, similar to that of E.A.T., to bring artists and engineering companies together.¹⁴

With hindsight, it could be argued that the effort to bring an art practice that was chiefly inspired by technological change into the contemporary art mainstream—a desire that has been expressed by artists and curators of electronic and digital media art for over forty years since—already failed at this early moment. It failed technically—as could be witnessed in Burnham’s accident-ridden show—and it failed, more importantly, with regard to the inscription of such work into art historical narratives. In the same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged the exhibition “Information” which, organized by MoMA curator Kynaston L. McShine, displayed technical vehicles and office machines on its catalog cover, but the show itself did not so much engage with the social meanings of technology as lay the foundations of a conceptual art that did not seem to require a critical reflection on the information technological paradigms it grew out of.¹⁵

With a few exceptions of artists who, after 1970, adapted to the rules of the contemporary art field—like Paik, Haacke, or Tinguely—computer or media art at best remained the add-on that it had been to Hultén’s “Machine as Seen” exhibition. Later examples—like the two Paris shows “Electra” (1983) and “Les Immatériaux” (1985), or the exhibits accompanying electronic and media art festivals since the late 1970s—cemented the detachment of media art from contemporary art, a detachment that has throughout been signaled by the marker of an affirmative approach to new technologies.¹⁶ Importantly for the context of a “machine art,” Harald Szeemann’s exhibition of the “Bachelor Machines” (1975–1977, presented first in Venice, and then in Brussels, Düsseldorf, Paris, Malmö, Amsterdam, and Vienna) focused attention on Marcel Duchamp and the symbolic conception of the machine that had inspired the Large Glass (1915–1923). Concomitant with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept of the “desiring-machines” in their Anti-Oedipus (1973) around the same time, it became possible for art and culture critics to speak about “machines” without referencing contemporary technology.¹⁷

The present study cannot do much to change this weathered terrain. It will suggest inscribing a number of more recent art practices that have critically engaged technology or the cultural significance of technological systems into a narrative that in Hultén’s exhibition ended in the late 1960s, but that—this is the thought experiment proposed in the following chapters—could be extended at least up to the end of the twentieth century. This extension is possible both because of the latency of the historical “machine” beyond the supposed “end of the mechanical age,” and because of its reconfiguration, rather than supersession, around the very period that Hultén proposed as machine terminus.

Chapter Summary

After its historical preludes, Hultén’s exhibition proper begins with the eruption of machine motifs in the art and poetry of Italian futurism at the beginning of the twentieth century. In order to better understand what amounts to no less than a foundational myth for the avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s, and for the artists working in their footsteps later in the century, we will leap backward in time and reread the story with which Filippo Tommaso Marinetti prefaced the publication of the first futurist manifesto in 1909. The remainder of this chapter provides an outline of the five key aspects of machine aesthetics (associative, symbolic, formalist, kinetic, automatic) which run through the discourses on art and technology, and which are here developed in relation to historical examples, most of which are taken from Hultén’s exhibition. Two further aspects that begin to emerge in the wake of cybernetics and that point beyond Hultén’s curatorial program (interactive, autonomous) will be introduced and added in the following chapter, on the algorithm in art. There is a certain chronological dimension to the appearance and prevalence of these aspects, but as we will see in the following chapters, they all persist in varying amalgamations, well into the present century.

The Race toward the Machine

A significant exception to the art historical program of Hultén’s 1968 exhibition was the inclusion of automobiles. Besides emphasizing machines as motifs in modern and contemporary art, the exhibition placed a special focus on motorcars, in the form of drawings, reliefs, and maquettes of early car culture and designs; Jacques Henri Lartigue’s famous distorted photograph of a 1912 racing car; actual models of, for instance, a 1931 Bugatti limousine, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car, and a Lotus racing car; as well as nouveau réaliste works about cars and their deformations and ruins by Edward Kienholz, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, and César. The inclusion of actual cars was an especially curious feature in an exhibition that otherwise did not include objects other than explicit works of art. It can be taken as a symptom of the pivotal role that the automobile played for the twentieth-century conception of the machine.

To explain this, we should return to the beginning of the century. It is one of the surprising facts in the history of machine art that there was such a sudden eruption of artists’ attention to machines around 1910. Given the important developments in industrialization since the eighteenth century, and the major engineering projects and the spectacular trade and world exhibitions of the nineteenth century, it is strange to observe that during this period, the artistic engagement with such technical phenomena was rare, and timid. Previously, only a relatively small number of exceptional and rarefied “artistic” automata had been produced, created by artist-engineers like Vaucanson, Jaquet-Droz, and von Kempelen in the eighteenth century. These were surprising and impressive apparatuses which challenged the conceptions of life and artifice, but they were far from a critical engagement with the technological regimes of the early phases of industrialization.

The nineteenth century saw an intensification of political and literary discourses about the replacement of human labor, bodies, and intelligence by machines,¹⁸ but there are surprisingly few examples of such reflections in the visual arts, which can almost be counted on one hand: Joseph Wright of Derby’s scenes of labor embedded in nightly landscapes, chimneys on the horizons of paintings by John Constable, or Claude Monet’s aestheticized view of coal shipping (1873), William Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844) and The Fighting Temeraire (1838),¹⁹ and the exceptional, realist rendering of Adolph Menzel’s Eisenwalzwerk (1872–1875).²⁰

An explanation for the eruption of the 1910s and 1920s might be the radical change that the automobile brought to the aesthetic experience of machines. Whereas technology in the nineteenth century had been dominated by large and impersonal engineering projects, the automobile brought a new dimension into the relationship that one could have with a machine. This was no longer the faceless steam-driven installation of steel that reshaped forms of labor and transportation, but a machine for the bourgeois individual to control, to enjoy, and to live with, fit for an intimate relationship which neither a locomotive, nor a factory plant, could ever have elicited.²¹ Many of the public debates about machines were soon dominated by the precarious relationships of workers to the machines in factories. But the spark that made it possible to think about the machine in a new way probably came from a motorcar.

The first futurist manifesto, published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in February 1909 in the French newspaper Le Figaro, was an ecstatic outcry that, even today, marks the early praise of a modern technological world which violently rids itself of an old and obsolete cultural tradition. Given its significance for setting the tone which would reverberate through many of the affirmative and critical discourses on machine art throughout the century, I want to quote it in detail. The first phrases of the manifesto still resonate with the exuberance that was driving the Italian artists:

We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.²²

The beauty that Marinetti sings about may be in the products of modern engineering, but its hero is the automobilist: “We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.”²³ Accordingly, the myth of origin that Marinetti relates in the introduction to the manifesto proper is a legend about himself and his friends, emerging from morose reflections about culture and philosophy, and hurtling themselves into the frenzy of unhinged mobility:

We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls.²⁴

The lazy bohemian idyll in the imagined company of the stokers, who are working at a distance, is interrupted, Marinetti recounts, by the sound of modern traffic:

Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through gorges to the sea. Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.²⁵

And then the spiritus rector of futurism sends himself and his friends on a race in their cars, a race that will end first as farce, and then as tragedy: “‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels! … We must shake at the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges. Let’s go!’”²⁶

The tragic ending came a few years later when many of the Italian futurists enthusiastically greeted the advent of the First World War, and when those who survived the carnage, as well as the second generation of futurists, supported Mussolini’s Fascist movement in the 1920s. The program for this variant of modern machine culture was formulated by Marinetti in the central passages of the 1909 manifesto: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.”²⁷ Or, as Marinetti and some artist companions put it in 1915: “War [is] Futurism intensified.”

The farcical ending of the inaugural futurist car race arrived more immediately, as Marinetti describes in the introductory narrative to the manifesto:

“Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!” The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming towards me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way—Damn! Ouch! … I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air. …

O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse. … When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!

A crowd of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already swarming around the prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish out my car, like a big beached shark. Up it came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom, like scales, its heavy framework of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort.

They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins!

And so, faces smeared with good factory muck—plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot—we, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth.²⁸

Thus, the first futurist manifesto and the story of machine art in the twentieth century are prefaced by a car race and an accident, by screeching breaks, physical pain, the smell of industrial waste and hot iron, and by an exalted futurist in need of helping hands that will turn over his capsized vehicle.²⁹ It is also the story of the modernist avant-garde, for as Andreas Huyssen writes, “no other single factor has influenced the emergence of the new avantgarde art as much as technology, which not only fueled the artists’ imagination (dynamism, machine cult, beauty of technics, constructivist and productivist attitudes), but penetrated to the core of the work itself.”³⁰ This engagement with technology could go either way, toward a positive aestheticization of technics or toward fascination and repulsion at the horrors of technics—a dualism which in Marinetti’s example is represented by the satirical celebration of both the enthusiastic race and the painful yet joyful accident. “Only the post-1910 avantgarde,” writes Huyssen, “succeeded in giving artistic expression to this bipolar experience of technology in the bourgeois world by integrating technology and the technological imagination in the production of art.”³¹ The development that was kick-started by Marinetti’s manifesto, among other texts, began to highlight not primarily the instrumental aspects of technology, but its broader cultural, epistemological, and aesthetic impact, undermining the bourgeois conviction that technology stood for a form of social progress from which art was securely separate. Getting into the car and onto the driver’s seat thus served to overcome “the separation of the cultural from industrial and economic reality, which of course was the primary sphere of technology,”³² a separation which had made it possible for artists of the nineteenth century to almost completely ignore this technical dimension of their social and cultural reality.

Aspects of Machine Aesthetics

The optimistic embrace of technology by avant-garde artists was not only a provocation for bourgeois art lovers of the early twentieth century, but has been viewed with skepticism by art critics ever since. The German-American art critic Benjamin Buchloh, writing in 1984 about shifts in the conception of faktura in the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s, denounced the “naive optimism towards the enlightening power of technology and media” that sometimes marred the critical perspective of people like the Russian artist El Lissitzky, or the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, as “mere machine aesthetic.”³³ This judgment was not delivered lightly, for both Lissitzky and Benjamin were counted by Buchloh among the pillars of a theoretical and artistic practice that helped to formulate a pertinent critique of modern mass culture. But the identification of positive aspects of technical developments has to be embedded, Buchloh argues, in an analysis that envisages their social and political aspects, and takes into account their negative effects—like the appropriation of avant-garde media strategies by the propagandists in Nazi Germany or in the Stalinist Soviet Union, or by US consumerism.

The aesthetic principle of faktura was conceived by the constructivists as a way of incorporating the technical means, procedures, and materials of artistic construction into their work, thus relating the work to actual space and social processes and to the broader conditions of production in society, turning faktura into a potent aesthetic correlative of industrialization. In the definition of “faktura” by Vladimir Markov from 1914, art ought to instill love for the material so that man is spurred to design it, both its forms and its sounds.³⁴ Aleksei Gan, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Varvara Stepanova, in their “Productivist Manifesto” (1921), devised an explicitly political program for constructivism and distinguished between three levels of creative practice: “tektonika,” as the materialist (ideological) frame of reference (communism, industry); “construction,” as the organization and form giving; and “faktura,” relating to the materials and their specific qualities. Faktura is thus also the aspect of creative practice which addresses different levels of sense perception—visual, tactile, or auditory.³⁵ In painting, for instance, “faktura” meant that the traces of specific procedures and materials on the pictorial surface were integrated as indexical, “techno-logical,” aspects of the work.

Buchloh described how Lissitzky, wresting himself free from his presumed initial naivety toward technological progress, sought to establish an “operative aesthetic framework” that focused on social, not technological change, and audience orientation.³⁶ Buchloh’s analysis, especially at the time he was writing in the early 1980s, thus contributed to the debate on the critical legacy of the modernist avant-garde. An aspect of his argument that deserves further critical attention, however, is that he believed the affirmative engagement with machines was reductive and characterized by a “naive optimism towards the enlightening power of technology and media,” an attitude that he epitomized in his reference to a “mere machine aesthetic.”³⁷

Instead of contradicting this assumption, I would like to suggest a more differentiated way of looking at the “aesthetics of machines” and the multiple ways in which artworks have reflected upon technology. Even if we draw our examples only from Hultén’s “Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” exhibition of 1968—which is neither explicitly critical nor affirmative of technology, but rather a manifestation that somewhat nostalgically sought to assimilate “the machine” into a postwar bourgeois self-conception—even here we see a variety of artistic approaches to technology that would have to be counted under Buchloh’s notion of a “machine aesthetic,” and that, instead of being naively optimistic, deserve a more analytical investigation.

In the following, I therefore want to propose five aspects or dimensions of a machine aesthetics, which characterize ways in which a particular artwork or practice relates to technology. The first is an associative form of relation, which refers to the social or cultural meanings of technology. This is a broad field, but it particularly focuses on a form of technological or machine-based making which, in the context of modern art, carries the connotation of a critique of artistic genius and artistic intention. A second aspect is the symbolic reference to technology, which uses a technical iconography for representing nontechnical phenomena like, for instance, psychological conditions or social relations. Third, the formalist aspect of machine aesthetics emphasizes the beauty of functional technical forms. A fourth, kinetic aspect is connected to the physical, mechanical movement of technical parts; it often implies the introduction of mechanical movement into sculpture, and tends to offer an at times humorous, or ironic, reflection on technical functionality. Finally, a fifth dimension of the aesthetics of machine art is based on the automatism associated with machine operations and the observation of automatic, self-controlled processes.

All of these aspects are, to varying degrees, machinic, in the sense that they adhere to the qualities ascribed to machines, to the moving, coupling, relaying, cutting, etc., in open constellations where their concatenations, effects, and ruptures can take many forms. This short list constitutes a proposal to structure different ways in which artworks relate to technology.³⁸ It suggests not different genres of machine art, but rather analytical dimensions which may appear to different degrees in individual artworks. The list of aspects also does not represent a chronological order, even though certain aspects may appear particularly prevalent in certain historical periods, or may have gained an increased potential from a certain moment onward, due to technical inventions—such as the boost that small-scale electrical motors gave to the integration of kinetic elements into artworks. Finally, the artworks discussed in the following sections are not chosen because they are “representative” of a particular type, but because they can best serve to explain and illustrate these aesthetic aspects of machine art, or an aesthetics of the machinic.

Associative

“All subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed,” wrote Umberto Boccioni and others in their “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting” (1910),³⁹ marking the futurist unconditional determination to associate with the emerging technical culture. The initial motivation for this embrace of machines, which the futurists shared with the Russian constructivists and the Berlin Dadaists, was the liberation from obsolete artistic forms and themes that seemed out of step with the new cultural sensibility. While this led both the futurists of the second, post-First World War generation and the constructivists to project a new conception of the human, only the constructivists (and the Dadaists in their turn) also emphasized the consequences for the status of the artist. Abandoning notions of artistic genius and the central status of the artist’s intentions, the constructivists put forth a conception of art making that would serve a society in transformation, where industrialization and the adaptation of workers to the technical apparatus appeared as a necessity that the artists supported with their means. For the Dadaists, instead, the association with the machine was a sign of the rejection of the old social order and its cultural conventions, but they took a dystopian, at times cynical, view of the machine and did not share the Russian artists’ hope for a positive transformation.

The main, twentieth-century section of Hultén’s “Machine as Seen” exhibition opened with a series of paintings and graphics by the Italian futurist Giacomo Balla, all dealing with the speed, dynamism, and noise of automobiles (1912–1913). The pictures have different sizes and techniques, but they all display Balla’s attempt at finding a graphic language for the physical and acoustic movement of cars, or rather, a rendition of the perceptual experience elicited by a car driving by. In the color paintings, strong contrasts of light and dark emphasize the graphic, schematic quality of the images. Most prominent are arched lines repeating in horizontal sequences, crossed by stacks of oblique straight lines at sequentially changing angles. Vortices and conic shapes representing clouds of dust, or of noise, intersect, propagate and oscillate, suggesting the simultaneity of visual and acoustic impressions. In these celebrations of machines, what we see are not the technical devices themselves, nor graphic representations of the driver’s perspective, but rather the aesthetic traces left on an onlooker as the cars speed past.

As in Marinetti’s prose, much of the artistic production of the Italian futurists conveyed an enthusiastic discovery of the contemporary technical world of modern cities, including factories, shipyards, and railway stations. Soon, Luigi Russolo followed suit with his art of noise and the “Intonarumori” (1914), which created technical sounds for the orchestra stage and aesthetically overcame the traditional cultural values associated with “classical” musical instruments.

The technical works described in Marinetti’s paean—the trains, steamships, airplanes, and bridges—are alive, and they resemble either humans or animals, including serpents, dogs, and horses. More than a decade and a long war later, the next generation of young futurists reversed that relationship from an anthropomorphic and zoomorphic conception of machines to a mechanomorphic conception of humans. In their “Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art” (1922), Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini wrote:

No more nudes, landscapes, figures, symbolisms—however Futurist they may appear—but the puffing of locomotives, the screaming of sirens, cogwheels and pinions, and that NEAT, DECISIVE mechanical sense which determines the atmosphere of our sensibility. The gears clear our eyes from fog and indecision; everything is more incisive, resolute, aristocratic, distinct. We feel mechanically and we feel ourselves built from steel, we too are machines, we too are mechanized by the atmosphere.⁴⁰

Thus, the Italian futurists radicalized their anthropological program by inscribing the human into the machine system. The human psyche and the machine essentially became one when Enrico Prampolini conceived art as “a process intrinsically tuned with the machine, the new rhythmic essence of ‘human psychology.’”⁴¹ This machine was no longer one metaphorically modeled after human and animals, nor one that served as a tool for the design and control of society, but was an entity of its own, with its own rules and potentials. As the young futurist Fillìa put it in 1927: “Mechanical nature, organized by man as function, is full of elements unknown to our senses and our desires. The Machine has multiplied, changed, and exasperated the fever of research in the interpretation of the universe. We cannot therefore think of the machine as a simple force, dependent upon human will. Mechanical nature derives from human nature but will soon overtake it.”⁴²

Promoting futurism as the dominant artistic ideology for Fascist Italy, Fillìa proposed a belligerent program for a futurist machine art that would instill the love of machines in preparation for a future war:

Futurist art completes the new Italian citizen, rousing in him love, lyric sensibility, and taste for all the manifestations generated by the machine. The next war will be unquestionably more mechanical and scientific than the previous one. The people whose sensibility today doesn’t adhere to modern life will find themselves weakened, nostalgic, and pessimistic, that is, practically useless, in the mechanical intransigent organization of tomorrow.⁴³

Such a displacement of humans from the center of the world was ideologically welcomed by the modernists of Fascist Italy, but was anxiously observed by others, including Lewis Mumford who from the same analysis developed the critical concept of the totalitarian “mega-machine.”⁴⁴ Importantly, Fillìa’s conviction is not a sign of “naive optimism” (to use Buchloh’s phrase) about the power of a technological transformation of society; instead, it demonstrates a strategic awareness of the type of subjects that a Fascist state requires.

Such convictions rarely found strong articulations in the futurist artistic practice. In quite a different ideological context, the wish to dissolve artistic practice into a new society driven by machines took shape in constructivism which, under the impression and pressures of the Russian revolution, understood the machine as a tool to be forged, and to be used in the material and social transformation of the world.⁴⁵ Before the First World War and inspired by the first generation of Italian futurists, Russian artists like Vasily Kamensky, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, David Burliuk, and Vladimir Mayakovsky had adopted both the utopian and the absurdist elements of futurism. They sought to overcome the stale bourgeois culture of the past, and to hurl themselves and their audiences into modernity. During the war, the political situation in Russia changed even more drastically than in the rest of Europe where monarchies fell and precarious democracies were born. The revolution of 1917 deposed the Czar and led to a draining civil war from which the Bolshevik revolutionaries emerged as winners. Immediately, the new leadership undertook a mind-boggling effort to transform the social and political structures of the empire; industrialization and the mechanization of labor were to be crucial driving forces in this process.

As one of the first artists to get involved, Vladimir Tatlin was commissioned in 1918 by the newly created Narkompros commissariat for education to reorganize the system of exhibitions.⁴⁶ For a decade, whether as head of the GINKhUK State Institute for Artistic Culture, or as a teacher in the national art schools in Kiev and Moscow, Tatlin remained in the midst of debates about the role of art in the new, socialist-to-be society. In 1919–1920, he worked on the design for a monumental sculpture which he conceived as emblematic of a new form of expression. Rejecting the regressive continuation of monumental figurative sculpture, Tatlin proposed the Monument to the Third International (1920) as a huge architectural construction which, had it been realized, would have stood 400 meters tall (figure 2.2). Its shape was that of an inclining cone, formed by a steel spiral tilted to one side, suggesting a dynamic forward and upward movement. Tatlin’s initial plan included the integration of three main spatial units inside the steel construction, which would have served as studios and installations for wireless telegraphy, radio broadcasting, and film making, turning the monumental tower into a full-scale “multi-media agitation center,” as art historian Maria Gough has commented.⁴⁷

Figure 2.2 Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International (1920), drawing, published in N. Punin, Pamyatnik II Internationala (Petrograd, 1920). RGALI Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, Moscow.

The Monument to the Third International combined the abstract composition of modern design with the promise of a modern steel construction that, if realized, would have been a more daring feat of engineering than the Eiffel Tower, that centenary monument to the bourgeois revolution of 1789. For the original conception, the multimedia installation inside—and thus the propaganda aspect of Tatlin’s proposal—was no doubt also crucially important, but its shape alone quickly made the Monument one of the signature pieces of Russian constructivism.⁴⁸

Despite his fame, Tatlin had no strong conception of an art of machines. The Counter-Reliefs that he had created since 1914—material assemblages placed on gallery walls and corners, wantonly breaking the picture surface and the established codes of cubist representation—used industrially produced objects and materials like screws, wire, and sheet metal, but they were not intended as “machines” in either a pictorial or a functional sense.⁴⁹ Similarly, the project that Tatlin worked on throughout the 1920s and first presented publicly in 1932, Letatlin, a flying apparatus that would have been driven by a human body lying inside the birdlike construction, was explicitly organic in its form and conception, and the opposite of an appraisal of technological advances in contemporary aeronautics.⁵⁰

Tatlin’s image as a “machine artist” was formed not only by the legends spread by the Berlin Dadaists or by portraits of him as a visionary engineer in images like Lissitzky’s collage Tatlin Working on the Monument to the Third International (1921–1922, figure 2.3). Tatlin also became identified with developments in the art scene around him whose leader he seemed to be—as when, in November 1921, twenty-five constructivist artists followed Osip Brik’s call to stop painting and join industrial production, or when Boris Kushner argued, in March 1922, for a concept of the artist-engineer who could be valuable for industry because of his special knowledge of materials and products.⁵¹ Equally contributing to what was thought of as “Tatlin’s machine art,” film pioneer Dziga Vertov, in his text “We: Variant of a Manifesto” (1922), advocated the synchronization of the human rhythm with that of the machine:

Figure 2.3 El Lissitzky, Tatlin Working on the Monument to the Third International (1921–1922), collage. Courtesy of Grovenor Collection, London.

Our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man.

In revealing the machine’s soul, in causing the worker to love his workbench, the peasant his tractor, the engineer his engine—

we introduce creative joy into all mechanical labor,

we bring people into closer kinship with machines,

we foster new people.⁵²

Against Buchloh’s remark we can affirm that by associating, even aligning their practice with the aesthetic principles of technology, artists like Vertov were not naively stumbling into the trappings of a “mere machine aesthetic,” but instead were seeking to develop such an aesthetic in order to engineer what they saw as a necessary social transformation. In his artistic practice, Vertov sought to overcome the superficial perceptualist approach to the modernist problems of multiperspectival space, or simultaneity, which Apollinaire and others had raised with regard to cubism. His understanding of montage was technical, aesthetic, and social. More than anything, constructivism emphasized a “culture of materials,”⁵³ expressed in Tatlin’s Counter-Reliefs as much as in Arseniy Avraamov’s monumental performances of the Symphony of Sirens, whose most powerful rendering in Baku in 1922 celebrated the fifth anniversary of the revolution on November 7 with the sounds of factory sirens, machine noises, and thousands of human voices.⁵⁴ If this might lead to the abandonment of art altogether, so be it: “Down with art, long live technic!,” wrote Gan, Rodchenko, and Stepanova in their “Productivist Manifesto” of 1921: “The collective art of the present is constructive life.”⁵⁵

The emerging differentiations are significant: whereas the futurists conceived of the machine as something to be shaped by, the constructivists thought of the machine as something to shape. And while artists like Malevich, Kandinsky, or the brothers Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo saw in art mainly a spiritual task, the productivists around Tatlin, Stepanova, and Rodchenko strove to employ art for designing technology in the service of the proletariat and to create a concrete and material harmony between the human and the machine. For the constructivists, the machine was, as art historian Hubertus Froning comments, “an element of liberation which makes man independent of the tyranny of nature and gives him the possibility to use his mind for creating a constructed world which he commands.”⁵⁶

We can sense the specter of the “machine artist”—although it is rarely given that denomination—rising from this conception in which the artist is not a decorator or propagandist, but an engineer.⁵⁷ Such a “structural and technical” constructivism was pitched against an artistic constructivism that was explicitly denounced as “suprematism” and “Tatlinism,” i.e., the Tatlinism of the Counter-Reliefs and their autonomous conception of artworks that Tatlin himself had rejected.⁵⁸

The theater stage was one of the transitional spaces in which constructivism articulated its artistic and sociotechnical program. While Aleksei Gastev’s laboratory was the birthplace of biomechanics as a Soviet variant of the scientific study and management of labor, Vsevolod Meyerhold developed his own “biomechanical” theater with its machinelike movements. What united them was that both sought to adapt human bodies to the functional and aesthetic affordances of machines. Tatlin’s stage production Zangezi (1923) included as participants “machines, humans, spotlights,” and—the poster announced—Tatlin himself as “Konstruktor.”⁵⁹ Friedrich Kiesler devised his own stage machinery in 1923–1924 for a performance of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R.—Rossum’s Universal Robots, in which concepts drawn from Hugo Münsterberg’s “psycho-technics” were combined with “robotic” machine laborers.⁶⁰ In turn, Oskar Schlemmer based the aesthetic conception of the Triadic Ballet on the conviction that, as he noted in his diary in September 1922, “today’s mechanization of life, through machine and technic, to which the senses cannot be immune, makes the machine that man is, and the mechanism that the body is, so insistently palpable and obvious.”⁶¹

Others were less affirmative and, as early as 1924, somewhat weary of the machine topos. When El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters prepared the double issue 8/9 of Schwitters’s MERZ journal, they played down the importance of the machine and shifted the topic toward an “aesthetics of functionality.” As for Khlebnikov and Malevich, the goal for Lissitzky and Schwitters was a balanced and harmonious relationship between nature and technology. They posited the machine as an agent of overcoming bourgeois culture, but not of abandoning a positive relation with nature, so that for them the machine was a counterconcept not to nature but to the “old man,” whereas the “new man” would have a constructive relationship to the machine.⁶²

On the whole, the constructivist attitude toward technology was affirmative and posited an intensified association with the machine as a necessary and progressive development. But while the constructivists, in Moscow and St. Petersburg as much as in Weimar and Dessau, sought to contribute to building a new, modern society, the Dadaists were busy deconstructing both the old and the new world. Their collages, photomontages, assemblages, and performances used machine elements not as signs of industrial progress or as materials for the creation of a “new man,” but as materialistic clutter in more or less fantastic, absurd, or dysfunctional assemblages.

The wooden, life-size human head of Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (1919–1920) for instance, also entitled Spirit of Our Time, has a number of mechanical and measuring devices attached to it, including a measuring tape, a ruler, and the opened up clockwork of a watch. Although each of the items is a means for ordering, measuring, and controlling the world, they are clustered around the head in such a way that they would provide no rational representation of the world, but a chaotic and conflicting plethora of information.

Similarly, in Hausmann’s collage Tatlin at Home (1920), the portrayed figure (who is not Tatlin, in fact) has had his forehead replaced by a cluster of various machine gear, including an automobile cylinder and a steering wheel (figure 2.4). In the background of the picture we see the photograph of a ship’s propeller—a sign of heavy-duty industrial engineering—and the image of a man turning out his empty pockets in front of a map of the German province of Pomerania—an ironic reference to the assumed modesty of the conditions under which the Russian machine artists were dreaming their grandiose dreams of modernization.

Figure 2.4 Raoul Hausmann, Tatlin at Home (1920), collage. Courtesy of Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

The exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” contained these and several other examples of Dadaistic assemblages and collages by Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, and George Grosz, as well as the infamous photo of Heartfield and Grosz holding the sign pronouncing “Long live Tatlin’s new machine art,” which had been taken during the preparations for the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920 (see figure 1.1). The Dadaists embraced the anti-art gesture of image montage and the integration of technical fragments into an artistic context; they described themselves as “monteurs” and “engineers” (“photomontage is an art of engineers”).⁶³ However, the understanding of machines underpinning this embrace was rather critical and dystopian, as expressed here by Raoul Hausmann:

What is the purpose of spirit in a world that processes mechanically, what is man? [He is] an instance, formed and spoken through his mode of production, his milieu. See. You believe you think and make decisions, you believe yourself to be an original—and what happens? The milieu … has thrown the soul-machine into gear and the whole thing runs itself.⁶⁴

This was the other side of the coin of renouncing the myth of the artist’s geniality, which not only played its role in the elevation of artistic production but also stood for an ideal of human work in general. The dystopian Dadaist moment expressed the necessity of marking the destruction of the old order, without being able or willing to affirm a new order in its place. The fact that this moment of transformation was flagged by assemblages of technical devices and by references to a type of art that never really existed, i.e., “Tatlin’s new machine art,” points to the ambiguity with which “the machine” was viewed at the time—as potent and unavoidable as it was imaginary and ungraspable.⁶⁵

Symbolic

A second aspect of a machine aesthetic is the symbolic use of a technical iconography for representing nontechnical phenomena. This dimension of machine-related artworks, prominent especially in the mechanical symbolism of Francis Picabia and the machine allegories of Marcel Duchamp, is based on the connotations of mechanical structures and movements—the restricted movements of a joint, the inertia of a spinning wheel, the complexity of relaying forces, the power of a spark in a combustion engine—in order to describe human and social relations.

Such a symbolic conception of machines and machine parts had been developed by the French painter Francis Picabia in his “mechanomorphic period,” a term proposed by his art historical biographer William Camfield, which began during Picabia’s second stay in the United States in 1915 and came to a close at the end of 1922.⁶⁶ Picabia’s first machine images were symbolic portraits presented as recognizable apparatuses and devices, such as a camera, a spark plug, or part of a railway engine, which he drew to represent specific people in his surroundings. He soon turned to more complex and self-designed technoid systems by which he sought to represent the complicated relationships between people, especially erotic encounters and tensions between men and women.⁶⁷ Many of Picabia’s paintings of this period appear to be autobiographical, according to their inscriptions and accounts by contemporaries, and testify to Picabia’s habit of using technical objects and parts, diagrams, and optical patterns as visual elements that elucidate the constellations and dynamics of interpersonal relations—a mechanomorphic form of portraiture.

In an interview that Picabia gave in New York in 1915, he explained:

I have been profoundly impressed by the vast mechanical development in America. The machine has become more than a mere adjunct of life. It is really a part of human life … perhaps the very soul. In seeking forms through which to interpret ideas or by which to expose human characteristics I have come at length upon the form which appears most brilliantly plastic and fraught with symbolism. I have enlisted the machinery of the modern world, and introduced it into my studio. Of course, I have only begun to work out this newest stage of evolution. I don’t know what possibilities may be in store. I mean simply to work on and on until I attain the pinnacle of mechanical symbolism.⁶⁸

The mechanomorphism of Picabia’s works in this period is a representation of interpersonal and psychological relations in the guise of a technical iconography. In his analysis of Picabia’s paintings, William Camfield insistently argues that these machines are not absurd and senseless, but that they have “definite function and content.”⁶⁹ The mechanisms are represented in a diagrammatic form that is, as Camfield claims, not so different from the formalized representations of technical systems whose function and purpose is often equally difficult to determine from the graphic configuration alone.⁷⁰ Camfield argues, “Picabia’s machines are not properly measured against ‘real’ machines, but when considered for what they are—symbolic representations of man and human situations—then his machines do ‘function,’ for whatever comment Picabia has couched in Voilà la femme is directed at women, not at science, technology, machines, or the value assigned human beings in the capitalistic societies of Europe and the United States in 1915.”⁷¹

A similar though more accidental form of machine symbolism was explored by the German painter Max Ernst in a series of prints and collages realized in the years 1919 and 1920, before he joined the Paris art circles. This was the only, short period in Ernst’s oeuvre during which technical elements featured prominently,⁷² possibly because of the strong impression of his encounter with weapons and transportation technology while on active service from 1914 to 1917 in the First World War, and possibly also because of his encounter with works by Duchamp and Picabia.⁷³

The collages Self-Constructed Small Machine, The Roaring of Ferocious Soldiers, and Farewell My Beautiful Land of Marie Laurencin (all 1919 or 1920) were based on rough print proofs on which the printer had randomly placed graphic elements which Ernst afterward connected and brought into a graphic structure with pen and ink. The resulting images seem poised between a composed graphic order which represents a technical object or installation, and a nonrational openness which is further accentuated by handwritten inscriptions and comments (“You who pass by: pray for DaDa,” “Help! Help!,” etc.). These inscriptions make it clear that what might at first glance be mistaken as drawings of complicated engineering projects are in fact constructions without a concrete technical purpose.⁷⁴

The “mechanical symbolism” which Picabia developed in close dialogue with Marcel Duchamp was temporarily adopted by artist colleagues in Paris—like Jean Crotti—and New York—like Morton Livingston Schamberg—and would later recur in works such as the Reaper (1949) series of drawings by British artist Richard Hamilton, or the Mechanical (1965) series of assemblages and drawings by German-American artist Eva Hesse. Most prominently, it has been the basis of the work of German artist Konrad Klapheck who, since the late 1950s, has been painting images of apparatuses and devices in a style that combines surrealist elements with those of New Objectivity, giving them poetic titles and thus suggesting a psychological, at times surreal reading of these “machines.”⁷⁵ Such symbolic machines are not “about” technology, and they do not intend to associate with and reflect on the role of technology in contemporary society in the way that futurist or constructivist artworks did. Instead, we can speak of the contraptions that Picabia and Klapheck depict as machines that are not technological.

Another variant of symbolic reference to an aesthetics of machines features in the work of Marcel Duchamp. In some of his paintings, Duchamp challenged established forms of pictorial representation, such as those developed by the cubist artists in the first decade of the twentieth century, by including a representation of movement, especially in Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). In a “futurist” style, the temporal structure of the static image was opened up by a sequential repetition of forms that resembled the multiple forms of moving objects captured by a chronophotograph. And even before the Nude, Duchamp had painted a Coffee Grinder (1911) that was a representation not of the device’s appearance, but of its mechanism and functioning principle. The casual painting of the Coffee Grinder is a technical diagram; unlike Picabia’s metaphorical portraits, it does not represent anything but the functioning mechanism of a coffee grinder.

In one trajectory of his work, Duchamp pursued this interest in functional and perceptual realism further, exploring the optical phenomena created, for instance, by the graphic designs on spinning disks and glass plates. These explorations were rooted, on the one hand, in an extensive engagement with the scientific research and theories of the time, and in the rejection of established, “retinal” forms of artistic representation on the other. The visual research and apparatuses of nineteenth-century scientists like Étienne-Jules Marey and Wilhelm Röntgen made visible aspects of nature which were concealed to the naked eye, and which could not be captured by traditional forms of pictorial representation. In his exploration of visual phenomena, these experiments took Duchamp from a painterly, cubist concern with percepts to an investigation of and concern with concepts.⁷⁶

The Dadaistic rejection of artistic conventions was epitomized by Duchamp’s gesture of selecting “readymades” from department stores and everyday contexts and declaring them to be art. This gesture derived from the same critical analysis of an art which, according to Duchamp, is unable to represent the relevant contemporary phenomena, and which operates on the placement of arbitrary objects, made or manipulated by humans, in the defined context of an art exhibition. In a whole series of such works, Duchamp humorously played on the conventions and expectations of the art system, his enigmatic titles and bylines to the works triggering a wealth of readings and interpretations.⁷⁷ And, as cultural historian Klaus von Beyme has remarked, even where mechanical objects were involved—as in the Bottle Rack (1914) or the Bicycle Wheel (1913)—“the readymade was not an expression of a machine cult, but merely a specific form of questioning traditional art.”⁷⁸

The most elaborate deliberation on the notion of the machine occurs in Duchamp’s major work, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), also called The Large Glass, which the artist started preparing in 1912 and then worked on for several years from 1915 onward, abandoning it and leaving it “definitively unfinished” in 1923. Materially, the work consists of two transparent glass surfaces, one placed above the other and both held in a strong metal frame. Flat visual objects have been placed on each of the glass panes in an elaborate mixed-media process that includes painterly and sculptural elements. These objects represent what Duchamp has referred to as the “Bride” in the top part, and the “Bachelors” in the bottom part of the work: The “Bride” consists of the image of a complex, almost sculptural form which combines the smooth shapes of a human body with the articulation of its parts in a mechanoid construction; next to this form we see a cloud-shaped object that extends horizontally along the top of the image surface, with three approximately square, windowlike openings inside the oblong cloud. The lower, “Bachelor” part of the work is dominated by the image of a chocolate grinder with an arch of seven cones floating above, and a construction of long rods at its top which connects the grinder to a line drawing of a sledge with a water wheel inside; to the left there are nine simple figurines, and to the right of the chocolate grinder are four circular graphic objects, apparently floating.

While working on The Large Glass, Duchamp made numerous written notes that refer to the symbolism and the functionality of the different visual elements. He wrote that he interpreted the functionality of the depicted “machine” and its parts as an assemblage of interlocking symbols, rather than as a physically operational technical mechanism. The first of these notes were “published” by Duchamp in only a few copies in 1914 as The 1914 Box. The more extensive Green Box was put together by Duchamp in 1934, but really gained efficacy only through reeditions of the notes and other texts in the late 1950s and 1960s.⁷⁹ These notes on The Large Glass are mostly enigmatic, fragmentary, and at times contradictory, and have led to a host of interpretations of the work and its philosophical, psychological, scientific, and other foundations.⁸⁰

For our present context, Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is significant not least because it probably represents the most extensively discussed “mechanism” in twentieth-century art. From the perspective of the art historical discourse, The Large Glass would have to count as a prime example of a “machine art” in which the symbolic aspect is dominant, because the depicted and described mechanism is not technical but allegorical in nature.⁸¹ The rhetorical figure of allegory, in which a human figure or an object is used to represent something else on the basis of certain similarities or literary references, is here employed to portray the complexities of relationships between men and women by means of mechanical and geometric objects and shapes.⁸² As in Picabia’s mechanomorphic images, the theme of the “machine” is called up not to reflect on the cultural significance of technology or the transformation of social relations through industrialization, but as an allegory for human subjectivity and the embroilment of sexual relations.

Formalist

While both the associative and the symbolic aspects of the aesthetics of machines hinge on the representation and iconographic transferal of meaning of technical objects and assemblages, the formalist aspect derives its aesthetic relevance directly from their concretely given, material form. It is based on the recognition of the forms of technical objects as beautiful, abstracting from, or disregarding, their technical function. The formalist aspect also tends to be related to actual objects, whereas the symbolic dimension often refers to mechanical principles or types, and the associative dimension often looks to a generalized notion of technology, or “the machine.” “Material formalism,” as art historian Jennifer Marshall has called it, which had been in the air since Marinetti’s first manifesto, culminated in Philip Johnson and Alfred Barr’s “Machine Art” exhibition of 1934 with its exclusive presentation of engineered and functional machine products (figure 1.2).⁸³ But it was also championed, for instance, by the conservative German philosopher Oswald Spengler, whose critique of modernity sided with such technical formalism against the expressionist and cubist tendencies of the 1910s: “For the highly intellectual, startlingly clear forms of a speedboat, a steel works, or a machine, I am prepared to sacrifice all the stylized nonsense of contemporary applied art, along with painting and sculpture.”⁸⁴

The currency of this formalist attitude, and the fact that the aspects of machine aesthetics—in this case, formalist and associative aspects—were not mutually exclusive but could be addressed in the same context, is documented by the publication history of the “Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art” (1922). A few weeks after the second-generation futurists Pannaggi and Paladini had first published it, the text was edited and extended by Enrico Prampolini and republished as “The Aesthetic of the Machine and the Mechanical Introspection of Art” in Theo van Doesburg’s journal De Stijl. An English translation followed in the journal Broom in October 1922,⁸⁵ and was reprinted in the American art critic Jane Heap’s Little Review in New York. Heap also used the text as a contribution to the catalog of her own “Machine Age” exhibition in 1927, which can be seen as a direct forerunner to Johnson and Barr’s show, the latter focusing on industrial design, whereas the former had chiefly drawn on the connection between contemporary art and architecture.

French artist Fernand Léger also advocated an aesthetic appraisal of the formalist aspects of technical objects. Léger had adapted his cubist style of the prewar period to the painting of technical themes like Propellers (1918) and The Mechanic (1920), employing curved geometric shapes and metallic tints of gray, blue, and red to represent his subjects in a technoid form. In collaboration with the American composer George Antheil, Léger realized the film Ballet mécanique in 1924, which combined composed music and sounds resembling the noise of factory machines and motorized vehicles with moving images of machine parts, consumer products, and geometric shapes, edited to form an overwhelming impression of the “mechanical ballet” of modernity.⁸⁶ The film uses cinematographic means such as montage, mirror reflection, and different forms of abstraction through enlargement or oblique camera angles, movement, repetition. These techniques appear like a cinematographic doubling of moving machines which are also featured in the film, alongside industrially produced objects, turning the machine into a formalistically viewed object by ignoring its material and functional aspects, and turning the cinematographic style itself into a mechanomorphic visual metaphor.

In a text written around the same time, “The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan, and the Artist” (1924), Léger emphasized that beauty is based on geometry and utility, on the visual qualities of machines and machine products, and on the material clarity of colors and surfaces. While Léger argued against any form of decoration, he regarded mechanical objects like automobiles or farm machines mainly from an aesthetic and design perspective. The world he was referring to was that of window displays and other public spectacles in which committed artisans appeared as true artists: “the advent of mechanical beauty, with all its beautiful objects not intending to be art.”⁸⁷ Like Marinetti, Léger chiefly aimed his attack at traditional art and its paradigms of ideal beauty and imitation inherited from the Renaissance: “The beautiful machine is the modern beautiful subject.”⁸⁸ He lamented that the people who design and build machines seemed unaware of the beauty of their creations and of the fact “that they are the true artists, that they have overturned all the received conditions of modern plasticity.”⁸⁹

Although the original futurist exuberance had been sobered ten years later when Barr was writing the introduction to the Machine Art catalog, he reiterated Marinetti’s and Léger’s conviction that a new aesthetic regime had been born from the cogs and wheels, the engines and infrastructures of the emergent industrial society. The formalist argument for a machine aesthetic was primarily geared, however, not to the affirmative appraisal of purely functional forms—this was a mere secondary effect—but to the rejection of a halfhearted modernism that upheld principles of artistic invention, genius, and value. Since this critique came from within the art scene, it is not surprising to find the contradictions that were inherent in an argument like Léger’s, who decided to nevertheless reserve an exceptional role for the artistic expert, or in Alfred Barr’s irony and provocation against the avant-garde art consensus which, of course, did not lead him to abandon the collection and exhibition of artworks that had supposedly been superseded by the machine as the supreme artist of modern times.

Kinetic

The aspect of physical movement—so essential for the operation of mechanical machines—was not reflected in Barr and Johnson’s exhibition of static objects. The shift from a static to a kinetic formalism was manifested by a text entitled “Machine Art” that Ezra Pound published in 1930, mainly in response to the music that his US compatriot George Antheil had written for the Ballet mécanique (1924). Pound stated that the beauty of the machine was expressed most fully when it was in operation, and its parts in motion. This formalist understanding of movement in mechanical devices differs from a more general aesthetics of kinetics, which reflects on the functionality and teleology of such mechanical systems, often employing humor to undermine the presumably necessary linkage between machines and their productive usefulness. In the artistic genre of kinetic art, factors like repetition and accidentality, or rhythmical and arhythmical recurrence of events and positions, ironize not only specific technical installations and their mechanical limitations, but the modern trust in the reliability and accuracy of technology in general.

The Swiss artist Jean Tinguely began building machine sculptures in the early 1950s and, by the 1960s, devoted his work most single-mindedly to the construction of kinetic and motorized sculptures. Tinguely’s approach had been inspired by the kinetic sculptures and rather freely moving mobiles of Alexander Calder—several of whose motorized mobiles from 1932 to 1934 would also be shown in the 1968 “Machine as Seen” exhibition—and perhaps even more immediately by the “useless machine” (macchine inutili) sculptures of the Italian artist Bruno Munari (figure 1.3). Munari’s “Manifesto of Machinism,” written in 1938 and published in 1952, was picked up by Tinguely during a visit to Munari’s studio in Milan in 1954, on the occasion of Tinguely’s first exhibition in the city. Tinguely adopted the manifesto as a foundational text of his own practice, given its combination of a critique of unbridled technification of human life and the consequent need to tame technology by creating poetic and absurd artistic machines.⁹⁰ Tinguely later responded in the same spirit of critical optimism: “For me the machine is first and foremost an instrument that allows me to be poetic. If you respect the machine and engage with it, it is perhaps possible to produce a happy machine, and by ‘happy’ I mean ‘free’; that would be a wonderful possibility.”⁹¹

Jean Tinguely is probably the twentieth-century artist most closely associated with the construction of machines as artworks. His reliefs, sculptures, vehicles, and environments are mostly made up of all sorts of found and obsolete technical materials which are combined into spectacular assemblages that move without aim and purpose. Until the 1990s, Tinguely produced an often humorous, atavistic, and idiosyncratic machine world that ran parallel to (and got more and more out of touch with) an ever evolving highly technological culture.⁹²

Tinguely explicitly positioned himself in the tradition of the prewar avant-gardes of constructivism, futurism, and surrealism.⁹³ His early Metamechanical Reliefs and Metamechanical Sculptures of the 1950s were influenced by Calder’s mobiles; however, unlike Calder’s light and floating structures with their rather open movement patterns, Tinguely’s works of this period display more determined, often clockwork-like mechanisms, offering fewer degrees of freedom to the moving parts.

Tinguely constructed his machines in series of variations on particular types, like the chaotically jiggling Balubas, the swaying Bascules, or the Chars that run back and forth on wheels or rails. One of the first such series that Tinguely worked on around 1954 were kinetic reliefs that he called Meta-Malevich. These have flat and geometric elements, white and red, which spin slowly in front of a black background, turned by an invisible electrical motor at the rear of the black surface. Tinguely here made an unusually explicit reference to the work of the Russian constructivist artist Kazimir Malevich whose abstract suprematist paintings of the 1920s had attempted to liberate the pictorial elements from a fixed and Euclidian conception of space. The Meta-Malevich assemblages motorized and dynamized this attempt of the by then “classical” Russian avant-gardist.⁹⁴

At the time of Hultén’s exhibition at the New York MoMA, Tinguely’s style had matured. Whereas in the later years, from around 1970 onward, he would adopt a more repetitive way of working which resulted in machines that at times turned into pastiches of his earlier inventions, in the 1960s Tinguely developed a distinct way of constructing kinetic sculptures from disused metal objects. Thematically, Tinguely used these sculptures to critique modernism, specifically addressing four phenomena of contemporary culture, namely art, technological functionalism, consumerism, and war.

From 1955 to 1959, Tinguely created a number of drawing machines which he called Metamatics and which all had some sort of mechanism for shaking and moving a drawing pen across a sheet of paper (figure 2.5).⁹⁵ The operation of the machine had to be aided by members of the audience who had to place and remove the paper, as well as select and attach the pen, and then activate the machine either by means of an electrical switch or by operating a manual mechanism, for instance a repurposed bicycle. The resulting drawings were chaotic scribblings which were determined only by the degrees of freedom of the mechanism, and which deliberately resembled the pictures of the contemporaneous abstract expressionism, ironizing its gestural and expressive seriousness in a playful and animated, yet inanimate machine performance.⁹⁶ Tinguely’s critique of artistic creativity was conscious and calculated; the Metamatics were hugely successful at the time and brought him his first solo exhibition in New York, at Staempfli Gallery, in 1960.⁹⁷

Figure 2.5 Jean Tinguely, Méta-Matic No. 8 (1958). Photo by Prallan Allsten, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

Soon after this early success, Tinguely was invited to create a large outdoor sculpture for the Swiss national exhibition Expo 64 in Lausanne. It is remarkable that in preparation for a national exhibition devoted to recent advances in commerce, culture, and technology, Tinguely was asked to produce what would undoubtedly be a chaotic, though fun spectacle of the scraps and dysfunctionalities of technology. The resulting machine, Heureka (1964), resembled a large bird or dinosaur, stood eight meters tall, and had several moving elements (figure 2.6).⁹⁸

Figure 2.6 Jean Tinguely, Heureka (1964), 780 × 660 × 410 cm, originally installed at Expo 64 Lausanne. Photo taken at current site in Zurich by Monique Jacot. Courtesy of Museum Tinguely, Basel.

Judging by a statement that Tinguely made two years later, the apparent technical atavism of works like Heureka was intentional:

Indeed, modern technology has become anonymous, ubiquitous, and discrete. Not least because it manages completely to hide the wheel and the circular movement, in a computer for instance, whereas my machines specifically rely on this principle of the wheel and circular movement. And because technology has become noiseless and masks itself behind design, shiny surfaces, and streamlined forms, it makes us forget that we are ruled by it and that we live in a technological age which, by the way, really only began three generations ago. My machine sculptures are supposed to bring this fact back to light.⁹⁹

Expo 64 was the first such exhibition in Switzerland since 1939. No doubt, Tinguely’s work was there, at “the end of the mechanical age” (to quote Hultén’s title), to display and point back to obsolete techniques. He thus also positioned himself against the formalist affirmation of the beauty of machines, epitomized in the 1934 “Machine Art” exhibition, and against the artists who, also in the 1960s, were beginning to address the contemporaneous state of technological developments. His machines could only formulate such a critical stance, Tinguely continued, “if between them and the technical apparatuses currently in use, there is a certain temporal incline. … Art would have to give up on itself if it attempted to keep up with the latest technical inventions. As a sculptor I have to strive for a form with a clear gestalt, while technology, as I just said, is moving away from such clarity into an ever more impenetrable anonymity.”¹⁰⁰

Besides artistic production and technological formalism, a third aspect of modern life that Tinguely critiqued through his machines was the mechanism of mass consumption and the overproduction of goods. This critique was conveyed through his machine Rotozaza, which was realized in three different versions. Rotozaza I (1967), the rather benign version, also shown in “The Machine as Seen,” resembled a short assembly line that was circulating and throwing out children’s balls. The work was particularly successful with children because, in order for the machine to function and the “wasteful” cycle of production and consumption to be upheld, the balls had to be fed back into the machine.¹⁰¹ In this symbolically loaded process, the products had to be offered back to the machine for it to work. In contrast, Rotozaza II (1967)—presented to the participants of the Second World Congress on Communication in a Changing World at the Loeb Student Center of New York University—transported and shook hundreds of beer bottles across a theater stage, before destroying them.¹⁰² The shards were swept together by a Chinese worker, while a performer, accompanied by a trumpet, sang Tinguely’s text, “Too much, too many.”¹⁰³

A fourth topic of critique that Tinguely addressed during the 1960s was the futility of warfare. An example of this is the machine sculpture Hannibal II (1967, figure 2.7).¹⁰⁴ It is a massive sculptural vehicle, painted all black, that runs on rails on top of a 70-centimeter-high black base. The total structure, including the base that the machine proper moves on, is about two meters high and five meters wide, but since the vehicle itself is over three meters long, it has little room for making its to and fro movement. When activated with a push button, the machine slowly sets itself in motion, a process that looks cumbersome and leads to a lot of rattling and complex internal movements of wheels and levers, but only a brief advance of the vehicle as a whole, and then a quick withdrawal, before the mechanism is switched off and the machine sets back to rest in its original position.

Figure 2.7 Jean Tinguely, Hannibal II (1967), 277 × 140 × 728 cm. Photo by Christian Baur, courtesy of Museum Tinguely, Basel. Basel Tourismus, Basel. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

Hannibal II is one of the Char sculptures, a name taken from the word “chariot,” which points to the vehicular nature of these sculptures. The laborious back and forth of the heavy machine and the pumping and pushing forward of a round pipe—which could be a tank cannon—has not only military but also sexual undertones, suggesting this chariot to be both a clumsy war machine and a love machine—though perhaps one of a bachelor who is as horny as he is lonesome.

Tinguely’s development from sculptures that stand, turn, or shake in one spot to the production of vehicles that have a choreographed internal and external movement was motivated, on a formal and technical level, by the necessity, especially since the Heureka sculpture of 1964, to build structures that were durable and could be maintained with some longevity. In the early 1960s in New York, Tinguely had started working with an electrical welding torch and ball bearings, the former enabling faster and stronger connections between metal parts, and the latter allowing for easier planning and coordination of repetitive movements and behaviors.

Such materials and tools made it possible for Tinguely to develop the narrative aspect of a machine sculpture in operation. In Hannibal II, the mechanisms, driven by an electrical motor and connected through multiple wheels and driving belts, are carefully constructed to run the sculpture through the same materially programmed routine each time it is activated. The narrative of the at first hesitant, then active, and soon resigning machine is built into its own mechanical structure; its inner construction merely needs to be activated by an electrical motor in order to execute this, and no other, course of events, a program of movements physically coded into the machine sculpture.

Jean Tinguely also produced a work that was of central importance for Hultén’s curatorial conception of the 1968 “Machine as Seen” exhibition and that took up more pages in the catalog than any other individual work. This work was the performance Homage to New York that Tinguely had presented in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art in March 1960. This was also the one artwork that was shown in the exhibition only in the form of documentation and a few sculptural fragments, because the machine that Tinguely had built for the performance deliberately destroyed itself in the process of the event.¹⁰⁵ The most detailed account of the preparations and the performance itself was given by Billy Klüver, the Swedish Bell Labs engineer and later E.A.T. founder, and was reprinted in Hultén’s exhibition catalog.¹⁰⁶ Klüver had supported Tinguely as a local scout, driver, and engineer during the preparations in March 1960, on which he half-jokingly commented: “As an engineer, working with him, I was part of the machine.”¹⁰⁷ The assemblage that Tinguely constructed for the performance was designed to self-destruct; Klüver commented that for Tinguely, “the self-destruction or self-elimination of the machine is the ideal of good machine behavior.”¹⁰⁸

Tinguely had collected metal, wheels, several motors and apparatuses, including an Addressograph, from scrap metal dumps, as well as a derelict piano that was to be played by several robotic arms. Together with Klüver, he built two Metamatics drawing machines, as well as a smoke generator and various percussion elements, prepared bottles with stinking liquids, and integrated a money-throwing apparatus that had been contributed by Robert Rauschenberg. Everything was prepared in such a manner that the mechanism would only have to be started and that its programmed movements would then unfold automatically until the end.¹⁰⁹

Eventually, this process took less than half an hour and was hampered, according to Klüver, by various accidents, mistakes, and miscalculations of the mechanics. While there were moments of anxiety about whether the programmed self-destruction would be carried out, Klüver claims that Jean Tinguely was perfectly happy when individual aspects of the machine—like a small carriage that was supposed to be released and drive into the garden pond—did not perform in the planned manner: “As a functional object, the suicide carriage was supposed to move; as a work of art, it wasn’t. This was typical of Jean’s relation to the motor. On other places in the machine, there were big motors that did practically nothing; and in one place, he used a motor as a counterweight! The motor was for Jean part of the sculpture.”¹¹⁰

Tinguely’s conception of technology was one of a continuum of material, sculptural form, and kinetic movement, of construction and destruction. As Klüver put it, no doubt paraphrasing conversations with Tinguely during the days of preparation: “No distinction can be made between the ‘random’ elements, the accidents, or the controlled parts of the spectacle. … There could exist no paradox, no question, no ‘nonsense,’ no a priori, and no chaos, in this spectacle. It was a definite demonstration, made with love and humor, and not a philosophical problem.”¹¹¹

It may well be that Tinguely was inspired by the functionalism of the well-oiled urban machine of New York City which had already fascinated Francis Picabia, half a century before—even though, according to Hultén, Tinguely had already had the idea for an autodestructive machine performance before he arrived in the city in January 1960 for the exhibition of four Metamatics at Staempfli Gallery.¹¹² In the following weeks, Tinguely met many artist colleagues, among them Marcel Duchamp, with whom he went to Philadelphia to see the collection of works by Duchamp in the Museum of Art. Hultén writes that Tinguely felt encouraged by his conversations with Duchamp,¹¹³ but it is unclear whether this encouragement also included lessons on the functioning of bachelor machines. However, the account that Klüver gives of a trip he made with Tinguely to the Newark city dump to find materials for the Homage machine strikingly assembles the bachelor and his bachelor friends, an absent bride, and a liberating mechanism under construction:

This large dump was Jean’s world. He kept finding the oddest objects and formations. Spilled-out paint would make a painting to be exhibited in some fashionable gallery. Someone had left a complete bedroom suite. If he could find a willing girl (which he admitted would be difficult), this would be a place where he would like to live. “I could, you know,” he said. He would spend his days in the dump as a completely free man. Out of the debris he would build large, involved constructions. Slowly he would convince the bums, living in small shacks on the dump, that what he was making was important. Eventually they would join him and help him build. Of course, art was never to be mentioned, and his construction would never be anything else but part of the dump. It is against the background of the anarchy and chaos of the Newark city dump that I see the growth of his machine [for Homage to New York].¹¹⁴

There are other indications that invite interpreting Tinguely’s efforts in preparing for his Homage to New York as a bachelor machine, such as the little carriage element that is supposed to commit suicide, or the consumption of the central piano by fire, a fire extinguisher that is accidentally disabled, and the fact that everything was supposed to run on electrical and mechanical control mechanisms—noli me tangere: “Nothing was to be touched during the operation of the machine.”¹¹⁵

With their commitment to expressive mechanical movement and their irreverence toward technical functionality, Tinguely’s works epitomize the kinetic aspect of a machine aesthetic. His penchant for obsolete materials, for the stage at which formerly functional parts are regarded as scrap metal and as trash, counterposes his work with the clear forms and shining surfaces that Johnson and Barr’s austere material formalism had highlighted as “machine art” in 1934.

Between these two poles, the works of the Hungarian artist and Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy take up a middle position. Moholy-Nagy began his artistic practice in Budapest after the First World War and under the influence of Russian constructivism, but his was a constructivism—to use Rodchenko and Stepanova’s terms—of elaborate construction and faktura but without materialist tectonics. Moholy-Nagy rehearsed the formal and medial repertory of constructivism in painting, photography, film, collage, and sculpture, culminating in the construction of the Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1922–1930), later also called Light-Space Modulator (figure 2.8). The conception for this work had started with graphic structures like his Kinetic Constructive System (1922), drawn in various versions (one of which was shown in Hultén’s “Machine as Seen” exhibition) which significantly resemble the conic spiral structure of Tatlin’s Monument of two years before.¹¹⁶

Figure 2.8 László Moholy-Nagy, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator) (1930). Aluminum, steel, nickel-plated brass, other metals, plastic, wood, and electric motor, 151.1 × 69.9 × 69.9 cm. Photo by Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, BR56.5 Copyright © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

Moholy-Nagy’s work is neither political nor humanistic, and it is affirmative about technology not for ideological reasons, but for purely pragmatic ones. It lacks any “machine” symbolism, or associations with the social context of technical progress and industrialization. The Light Prop, for instance, is described as “an apparatus for the demonstration of special lighting and motion effects.”¹¹⁷ And the film Light Display: Black—White—Grey (Lichtspiel: Schwarz—Weiss—Grau) (1930) features not the sculptural object as its hero, but rather the effects of light and shadow passing through and reflected by the moving Light Prop.¹¹⁸

In an exceptionally laconic tone, Moholy-Nagy, speaking about scenography, claims that the human “no longer holds a central position, like in traditional theatre, but should be deployed on a par with other means of design.”¹¹⁹ Moholy-Nagy exercised this principle in the Sketch of a Score for a Mechanized Eccentric (Partiturskizze zu einer mechanischen Exzentrik, 1922–1925), a vertical score of circa 120 by 16 centimeters, drawn in pencil and watercolors on cardboard, in six consecutive, foldable segments (figure 2.9, plate 1). The score is organized in three parallel vertical columns: one for actions of “form and movement” to the left, a light and color score in the middle, and a sound score in the right column. In the left column, arrows and geometric shapes and structures indicate partly organized, partly chaotic and conflicting movements which might be performed by human actors, or puppets, or machines. In the original drawing, two events are specifically highlighted: at one point, smells and sneezing powder are to be sprayed at the audience, and at the end, the black circle, which has featured repeatedly since the beginning like a dark moon, explodes.¹²⁰

Figure 2.9 László Moholy-Nagy, Sketch of a Score for a Mechanized Eccentric (1922–1925), collage. Courtesy of Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

This Sketch of a Score for a Mechanized Eccentric was first shown in an exhibition organized by Friedrich Kiesler in Vienna in 1924.¹²¹ It was part of a series of activities by Moholy-Nagy which also comprised a special issue of the Hungarian journal MA in which he included “Marinetti’s ‘theater of surprises,’ Schwitters’s MERZ utopia, the mechanical stage sets by Léger, Hirschfeld-Mack’s light play.”¹²² Without a strong concept of the machine as an independent actor, but with a clear sense of the aesthetic effect of a mechanical theater, Moholy-Nagy’s work thus points backward to the rupture of meaning and narrative first initiated by the futurists, and forward to the neo-Dadaist machines that Jean Tinguely would design three decades later. It is not hard to imagine the performance of the Mechanized Eccentric as a prototype for the equally eccentric Homage to New York (1960), in which Tinguely staged the movement, explosion, and self-destruction of another mechanical contraption.

Automatic

Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures were emblematic in Hultén’s exhibition of a type of artistic machines that sought to affirm their contemporaneity through a display of dysfunctionality and technological atavism. They aligned with a compressed automobile sculpture by the French nouveau réaliste César, with soft engines and devices by American pop artist Claes Oldenburg, and with neo-Dadaist assemblages by Robert Rauschenberg. Together, these works staged their resistance against technological developments which were, as Hultén claimed in his introduction to the catalog, fundamentally transforming not only art, but society as a whole. Hultén’s argument echoed the affirmative critique of people like Barr and Munari who had, in the 1930s, suggested that in the struggle against the looming domination by an “uncontrollable and independent” technology, art and artists could play a particularly influential role.¹²³

The reference to the uncontrollability and independence of technology points to an aspect of the aesthetics of machines which, importantly, also underpins all other aspects, i.e., the automatic dimension of machine operations—adding a fifth item to our list of aspects of a machine aesthetic. The automatism of machines is routed in the physical limitations, the singularity and necessity of their individual mechanisms, which force the ensemble of mechanisms that constitute the machine into a specific movement, or the performance of a specific function, whenever the machine is turned on and the force that drives it is applied to the technical assemblage. The aesthetic aspect of this automatism grounded the futurists’ and constructivists’ association to technology, as well as the efficacy of the symbolism in Picabia’s mechanomorphic paintings, the irritating beauty of machine parts recognized by material formalism, and the subversiveness of Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures.

The coda of Hultén’s exhibition presented a series of partly interactive, partly autonomous works that included robotic installations by Robert Breer and Thomas Shannon, a kinetic installation by Takis that used electromagnetism to create the continuous movement of two small objects, one black and one white, and an electronic audiovisual installation by Marian Zazela and La Monte Young which tested the perception of visitors, whose experience of the sounds would depend on their position in the gallery space. Two pieces by Nam June Paik (McLuhan Caged, 1967, and Rondo Electronique, 1966–1968) highlighted the aesthetic potentials of the cathode ray tube of contemporary television sets, pointing beyond a content-oriented critique of the medium toward its technoaesthetic, “apparative” conception. Finally, Hans Haacke’s Ice Stick (1966), a meter-high vertical column of ice that formed around a refrigeration unit, addressed the relationship between technology, the environment, and art.¹²⁴

The immaterial forces of electricity and of magnetism, the interaction between human visitors and machine actors relayed by sound waves, by touch sensors, or the physical manipulation of the TV’s cathode ray, and the stimulation of autonomous physical processes all marked a departure from the mechanical principles of kinetic art. The latter had already introduced factors like interaction, process, and feedback on a mechanical level, but in the works driven by electronic and other, nonmechanical systems, these factors became both more abstract, and more distinct.¹²⁵

The fascination with the automatisms of technical devices and systems is teased out by a mix of mechanical necessity, rationalism, functionalism, obscurity, fear, and empathy. Typical for this formation, which characterizes both Duchamp’s allegorical machines and Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures, and pinpointing the essence of the automatic aspect of a machine aesthetic is the description that Hultén offered of the kinetic sculpture by Robert Breer, Rug (1967), in which small motorized and battery-driven vehicles were hidden under a rug that could be seen to move enigmatically, mechanically animated: “We feel incapable of stopping the inexorable, uncompromising movements of the rug; its determinism repels us and inspires a vague uneasiness. At the same time, we could easily handle the light material and small-sized rug. We become inclined to protect this helpless creature. The conflict grows acute and complete; as so often, we oscillate between disgust and sympathetic inclination.”¹²⁶

The contemporaneous works of artists like Nicholas Schöffer, Gordon Pask, or Nam June Paik, who were represented in the exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” in the same year and deployed different forms of technical automatisms, drew on the same aspect of a machine aesthetic, if in a more sober, less romantically inclined mode. This was the aesthetic of cybernetic and other systems, and of what the philosopher of cybernetics Gotthard Günther had termed the transclassical machine with its autonomous, self-controlling processes. Given the black-boxing of the technical hardware in electronic and digital systems, the automatic aspect of machine art is often more prominent in such works, but, as I hope to show in the following chapters, it cuts across different periods and stages of technical development, pointing backward to pre-1950s concrete and constructivist art practices, and forward to the physical-mechanical automatisms in the work of Stelarc, and to the algorithmic automatisms prominent in David Rokeby’s projects, in the connective “machines” constructed by Knowbotic Research, and in Seiko Mikami’s perceptual and ecological installations.

The dialectic of repulsion and attraction, of unease and disgust, diagnosed by Pontus Hultén in Robert Breer’s kinetic and, apparently, autonomously moving sculpture is worrisome in several ways. One is the fear of a complete disappearance of the distinctness of the human subject and its complete assimilation to, or dissipation into, the machine. Cultural historian Jane Goodall quotes the Canadian cybertheorist Arthur Kroker, who “writes of the electronic era as an age of dark sorcery, in which the ‘possessed individual’ is emptied of agency by the invading vampiric powers of a machinic collective known simply as technology, ‘not technology as an object we can hold outside ourselves, but technique as us, as a grisly sign of the possession of body and mind!’”¹²⁷

The other side of this coin of automatism is the fear that whatever drives and animates the machine must be some alien force which feeds on human life energy. Feeling her way into the machinic paranoia, Goodall muses: “Surely a being that is empty of agency must draw it from somewhere, and the only source to which it is connected is its own creator, who after all, deserves what is coming to him because, not content with making objects that are agency neutral, he has created an agency vacuum that must—automatically, so to speak—seek to fill itself.”¹²⁸

A third, perhaps ultimately catastrophic scenario—besides technological subsumption and autonomous alien agency—has been suggested by French artist Gregory Chatonsky in a recent essay on the “solitude of machines.”¹²⁹ Chatonsky draws our attention to the algorithmic automata that populate the electronic networks and our technical environments, unobservable and solitary, and asks whether such a solitude is thinkable without the finality of being, a solitude without a relation to the world, a solitude without anybody:

Thus technological solitude must be conceived in an ahuman manner, a solitude with no living things, without mortality and yet not eternal because there exists a constellation between their infinitude and our finitude, in which both exclude each other, as odd-numbered solitudes. … These two solitudes are parallels and never meet. They intimate their irreducibility: (in)finitudes. We are affected by the distance of the solitariness of machines through a logic close to the sublime, the gap that implies an unassignable residue.¹³⁰

With Chatonsky, we can argue that the automatic aspect of a machine aesthetic and the indeterminacy of the machine allow or even force us to think of a new relation between aesthetics and ontology, to think of “a world without us, a deserted land, an ecology that is not always already an ego-logy.”¹³¹ The specter of such a world without humans runs like a red thread, if not as its backbone, through the history of machine art.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted material are by the author.

1. See Pontus K. G. Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968).

2. Billy Klüver, “The Garden Party” (1960), in Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 171. It would be interesting to consider Alan Sonfist’s eco-artwork Time Landscape of 1965–1978 in this context. In the course of this work, the artist converted a plot in Manhattan “back” into a biotope resembling the presumed landscape on the island before the city was built.

3. See Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 181.

4. See Richard Hamilton, ed., Man Machine and Motion, exh. cat. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Hatton Gallery, 1955).

5. Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 6.

6. Ibid., 12.

7. Ibid. In a variation, Hultén (ibid.) calls the purist aesthetics of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, in their La Peinture moderne (Paris, 1925), “machine aesthetics,” a notion that had earlier been picked up (and critiqued) by Reyner Banham in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960).

8. Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 112.

9. Ibid., 113.

10. Ibid., 132.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 166. The phrase “auto-destructive and auto-creative” is apparently taken from German-British artist Gustav Metzger’s 1960s manifestos and campaign for a new machine art movement; see the epilogue to this book.

13. For examples of the submission form to the competition and the exhibition, see Experiments in Art and Technology, exh. cat. (Salzburg: Museum of Modern Art, 2015). MoMA’s senior curator, Alfred Barr, and Pontus Hultén were listed among the supporting “agents” of E.A.T.

14. For a discussion of these exhibitions, and secondary literature, see chapter 3.

15. For a critical engagement with the history and significance of the exhibition, see Johanna Lettmayer, “Information (1970)—Zur Materialität der Konzeptkunst,” MA thesis, University of Vienna, 2009.

16. The triangle of Picabia, Duchamp, and Tinguely dominated Hultén’s retrospective “Machine as Seen” exhibition, while the triangular constellation of Duchamp, Tinguely, and Paik pointed forward to an artistic engagement with technology that would get represented in such exhibitions as “Cybernetic Serendipity,” “Software,” and “Electra.” Significantly, in 1968, Nicolas Schöffer’s cybernetic art installation CYSP 1 was shown in London at “Cybernetic Serendipity” and not at Hultén’s exhibition in New York, whereas Tinguely and Paik were represented in both shows.

17. More recent exhibitions in this field have included “Kunstmaschinen—Maschinenkunst” (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, and Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2007–2008), which focused on art-making machines since Tinguely, and “Ghosts in the Machine” (New Museum, New York, 2012).

18. See Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System,” Critical Inquiry, no. 21 (Autumn 1994): 203–227, esp. 211, 220, 225, for examples of how technical objects, machines, and workshops were presented as spectacles.

19. According to Canadian media theorist and artist David Tomas, Turner’s works point forward to a treatment of technical and industrial motifs that is not representational but “concrete”; see David Tomas, “Pictures of the New and the Materialization of Vision from the Age of Discovery to the Era of the Posthuman,” in Tomas, Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies (London: Continuum, 2004), 20–40, esp. 21, 39. He points to Turner’s proto-machinic painterly treatment of the subject of his images which is, according to Tomas, in some respect superior to the visual “style” of the futurists or of Duchamp in their representation of technical subjects; Tomas makes this point even more strongly in relation to Turner’s coach drawings (see ibid., 39).

20. For the iconography of the machine since 1870 and an art theoretical discussion of the notion of the machine in both nineteenth-century art and the modernist avant-garde, especially with regard to industrialization, see Marc Le Bot, Peinture et machinisme (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973).

21. William Camfield, writing about the historical context of Francis Picabia’s mechanomorphic paintings, confirms this interpretation by referring to Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 41–44, who points more generally to the abundance of machines in everyday life, including typewriters, telephones, electrical household appliances, and automobiles, from the second decade of the twentieth century onward, and to Banham, Theory and Design, 9–12, who “sets 1912 as the beginning of full mechanization and specifies the automobile as its symbol.” See William Camfield, “The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia,” Art Bulletin 48, no. 3–4 (1966): 309–322, this quotation on page 310.

22. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, trans. Robert Brain (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 21. For a detailed analysis of the founding myth of Italian futurism and of the prehistory of the first manifesto, see Manfred Hinz, Die Zukunft der Katastrophe. Mythische und rationalistische Geschichtstheorie im italienischen Faschismus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985), 57–67. For the prehistory of futurist machine conceptions, see Vera Castiglione, “A Futurist before Futurism: Émile Verhaeren and the Technological Epic,” in Günter Berghaus, ed., Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 101–124. The Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, in a volume of poems published in 1895 as Les Villes tentaculaires, portrayed the industrial city with its factories and railways, sounds and smells, as well as the resistance and revolt of the workers, describing the same phenomena—though without any exaltation—as the futurists would, less than twenty years later.

23. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 21.

24. Ibid., 19.

25. Ibid., 19–20.

26. Ibid., 20.

27. Ibid., 22.

28. Ibid., 20–21.

29. For the historical circumstances of Marinetti’s accident, which probably took place in June 1908, see Giovanni Lista, Marinetti (Paris: Seghers, 1976), 39. However, Cinzia Sartini Blum, in The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 53, dates the accident October 15, 1908, and includes an image of the incident from a contemporary press clipping.Another foundational avant-garde accident features in the Russian futurist opera Victory over the Sun, first realized in 1913 by Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Kazimir Malevich, and Mikhail Matyushin, which deals with overcoming nature by means of technical civilization. The signs of the new times are electricity, skyscrapers, locomotives, automobiles, and airplanes. Toward the end of the play, and as one of the dramatic highlights in an otherwise widely nonsensical narrative, there is a plane crash which the pilot, singing an onomatopoeic battle song, survives with a cheerful optimism that matches that of the Italian automobilists: “ha-ha-ha I am alive … only the wings are a bit strained and this boot!” Quoted after Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Sieg über die Sonne,” in Christiane Bauermeister and Nele Hertling, eds., Sieg über die Sonne. Aspekte russischer Kunst zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Fröhlich & Kaufmann, 1983), 73.

30. Andreas Huyssen, “The Hidden Dialectic: The Avant-Garde—Technology—Mass Culture” (1980), in Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 9.

31. Ibid., 10.

32. Ibid., 11.

33. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October, no. 30 (Autumn 1984): 100.

34. On faktura, see Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography.” László Moholy-Nagy, in Von Material zu Architektur (Munich: Albert Langen, 1929), distinguishes between those aspects of faktura brought about by nature and those brought about by machine.

35. See Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, “Programme of the First Working Group of Constructivists” (1922 [1921]), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993), 342. Christina Lodder, in Constructivism: From Fine Art into Design, Russia 1913–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 181–182, note 102, affirms that this “Programme of the Subsidiary Study Group of the First Working Group of Constructivists,” which I here refer to as “Productivist Manifesto,” was jointly written by Aleksei Gan, Stepanova, and Rodchenko in 1921.In his own conception of “Mechano-Faktura,” the Polish artist Henryk Berlewi criticized the focus on materiality in the Russian constructivists’ understanding and pleaded for a more conceptual, perhaps medial, approach to the effects of material faktura: “Today’s painting, today’s art has to be based on the production principles of the machine. The mechanization of faktura, the mechanization of the means of painterly expression, is the foundation of a new creative system. This does not only affect painting, but any form of creation.” (Henryk Berlewi, in Der Sturm 15, no. 3 [Berlin, 1924], 155ff; quoted from R. Stanislawski and C. Brockhaus, eds., Europa, Europa, exh. cat., vol. 3 [Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1994], 139.)

36. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” 100.

37. Ibid. (emphasis added).

38. For a reading of the “industrial aesthetic” that shaped the “technological sublime” in the work of post-Second World War US artists like Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Robert Smithson, see Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

39. Umberto Boccioni et al., “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 30.

40. Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini, “Manifesto dell’arte meccanica futurista,” La nuova Lacerba, no. 1 (June 20, 1922): 7; quoted from Maria Elena Versari, “Futurist Machine Art, Constructivism and the Modernity of Mechanization,” in Berghaus, Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 150. For analyses of this second generation of futurists, see Enrico Crispolti, “Il Construttivismo ‘meccanico’ di Pannaggi,” in Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo (Trapani: Celebes, 1969), 382–408; Hinz, Die Zukunft der Katastrophe, 190–194; and Versari, “Futurist Machine Art.”

41. Versari, “Futurist Machine Art,” 165.

42. Fillìa, quoted from Versari, “Futurist Machine Art,” 167. Marinetti considered medical surgery and industrial labor as the two most appropriate ways of transforming moral and affective humans into a “nonhuman and mechanized type who will naturally be cruel, all-knowing and pugnacious” (cited in Hinz, Die Zukunft der Katastrophe, 194; from Luigi Scrivo, Sintesi del futurismo. Storia e documenti [Rome: M. Bulzoni, 1968], 21, my translation from the German).

43. Fillìa, quoted from Versari, “Futurist Machine Art,” 168. It may well be that this futurist conviction that art could play a role in adapting people to the requirements of machine wars forms a root of the suspicion against technological art throughout the twentieth century.

44. See Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967–1968); and Klaus von Beyme, Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden. Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1905–1955 (Munich: Beck, 2005), 472–514. The catalog of “Die Zwanziger Jahre” (The twenties), a 1973 exhibition in Zurich curated by Erika Billeter, highlights the principle of the machine as one of the main myths of the avant-garde of the time; see especially the essay by Stanislaus von Moos, “Die Avantgarde und ihre Grenzen. Notizen zur Architektur von 1920 bis 1930,” in Erika Billeter, ed., Die Zwanziger Jahre. Kontraste eines Jahrzehnts (Bern: Benteli, 1973), 38–42. Throughout the catalog, the machine is mostly discussed as a general principle, not as a specific technique or apparatus. Only Billeter’s entry about applied arts is more specific about the technical transformation of working processes.

45. See Christina Lodder’s books Constructivism: From Fine Art into Design and Constructive Strands in Russian Art, 1914–1937 (London: Pindar Press, 2005).

46. See Anatolii Strigalev, “From Painting to the Construction of Matter,” in Larissa Zhadova, ed., Tatlin (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 23–24.

47. See Maria Gough, “Model Spectacle,” in Roland Wetzel and Anna Szech, eds., Tatlin—New Art for a New World—International Symposium (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), 253–257.

48. A model of Tatlin’s Monument, reconstructed for the occasion from photographs of the lost original, also featured prominently in Hultén’s “Machine as Seen” exhibition. Maria Gough, in “Model Spectacle” (253), recently argued that while the Monument was first planned as a media device, its model was soon turned into a spectacular sculpture for public display—taking it no longer as the promise of an architectural project to be realized, but as an item to be shown around, a constructivist icon for the new society.

49. See Strigalev, “From Painting to the Construction of Matter,” 18–22.

50. On Letatlin, see Zhadova, Tatlin, 147–151. Jyrki Siukonen, Uplifted Spirits, Earthbound Machines: Studies on Artists and the Dream of Flight, 1900–1935 (Helsinki: Suomalisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2001), states that the design may be utopian, but also refers to contemporary aeronautical research into flight powered by humans. See also Jyrki Siukonen, “The Dissident Bird: Remarks on Tatlin’s Fliegekunst,” in Wetzel and Szech, Tatlin—New Art for a New World, 287–290.

51. See Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 102–106.

52. Dziga Vertov, “We: Variant of a Manifesto” (1922), in Kino-Eye: Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 8.

53. Strigalev, “From Painting to the Construction of Matter,” 24.

54. Cf. Miguel Molina Alarcón, Baku: Symphony of Sirens. Sound Experiments in the Russian Avant Garde, CD, liner notes (London: ReR, 2008); Mel Gordon, “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910–1930),” in Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 197–243; and Arseniy Avraamov, “The Symphony of Sirens (1923),” in Kahn and Whitehead, Wireless Imagination, 245–252.

55. Quoted in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900–1990, 342.

56. Hubertus Froning, “El Lissitzky. Sieg über die Sonne,” in Hubertus Froning, M.-A. von Lüttichau, and G. Werthmann, eds., El Lissitzky—Sieg über die Sonne (Essen: Museum Folkwang, 2006), 8 (my translation). Cf. Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner’s “Realist Manifesto” (1920) for an idealistic variant of constructivism that is based on the exploration of space and time through the use of pure forms (repr. in John Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 [New York: Viking Press, 1976], 208–214).

57. As El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg put it programmatically in their trilingual magazine Veshch (Object): “Object will take the part of constructive art, whose task is not to adorn life, but to organize it.” Cited in Versari, “Futurist Machine Art,” 163.

58. For Tatlin’s rejection of “Tatlinism,” see Zhadova, Tatlin, 244. The idea of an antagonism between constructivism and suprematism/Tatlinism was repeated by Boris Ioganson in March 1922 (see Gough, The Artist as Producer, 109, also for Gough’s fascinating analysis of Ioganson’s conception of the constructivist inventor). Similarly, Nikolai Tarabukin (in From Easel to Machine, 1923) claims that “painting, as representational art, as it has always been, has become obsolete” (cited in Gough, The Artist as Producer, 127). Tarabukin continues: “In the future when, as a consequence of [the] increasing ‘Americanization’ of life, interest in pure art will have diminished, talented people will become practical workers instead of practitioners of pure art” (ibid., 138). Tarabukin took the German philosopher Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–1922) not as a pessimistic tract, but as warranting the constructivist embrace of technology. See Gough’s analysis (139–147) of how Tarabukin’s adoption of Spengler’s concepts of money and the machine, along with the newly emerging figures of the entrepreneur, the engineer, and the factory worker, point toward a future systems-theoretical understanding of technical systems or installations (the Russian ustanovka can mean apparatus, device, mechanism, or plant) without humans: “Thus, capital and the machine turn labor into pure process” (ibid., 144), and the work of the artist as an engineer of processes merges with that of Gastev and other scientific organizers of labor. Cf. Kendall Bailes, “Aleksei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–1924,” Soviet Studies 29, no. 3 (1977): 373–394, and Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia: Ideology and Industrial Organization, 1917–1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984). On Gastev’s conception of Taylorism, the ideological proposition for industrialization by Lenin, and the conception of technology by the Russian constructivists, cf. Lodder, Constructive Strands, 239–260; for the debate on construction and composition among the constructivist artists in Moscow in 1920–1921, see Lodder, Constructivism, 83–89, and Gough, The Artist as Producer, 21–59.

59. Cf. Linda Schädler, “Synthesis of the Arts: Tatlin’s Staging of Zangezi—A Total Work of Art?,” in Wetzel and Szech, Tatlin—New Art for a New World, 271–275.

60. For the relation of Čapek’s R.U.R. to Kiesler and Münsterberg, cf. James D. Graham, “An Audience of the Scientific Age: ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ and the Production of an Economic Conscience,” Grey Room, no. 50 (Winter 2013): 112–142; cf. also Gerald Raunig, “Theatermaschinen gegen die Darstellung. Eisenstein und Tretjakov im Gaswerk,” in Raunig, Kunst und Revolution: Künstlerischer Aktivismus im langen 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2005), 134–147. The futurist Mechanical Ballet, performed in Italy in 1922, included “stylized movements performed to the sound of two roaring motorcycles” (Versari, “Futurist Machine Art,” 160), and was an early appearance of the theme of the robot in art and performance. The two central figures, the machine and the proletarian, were represented inferentially: “a mechanized man portraying a machine and a cogwheeled centaur portraying the proletarian worker” (ibid., 161).

61. Cited in Andreas Hüneke, ed., Oskar Schlemmer. Idealist der Form. Briefe, Tagebücher, Schriften 1912–1943 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990), 95. Cf. Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (2003): 724–745. For Loew’s and Weininger’s designs of mechanical stages, created at the Bauhaus, see also Hedwig Müller and Patricia Stöckemann, eds., … jeder Mensch ist ein Tänzer. Ausdruckstanz in Deutschland zwischen 1900 und 1945 (Wetzlar: Anabas, 1993).

62. Lissitzky’s 1923 abstract, bricolage-style figure designs for the opera Victory over the Sun, published by the Kestner Gesellschaft art association in Hannover and also included in Hultén’s exhibition, resemble Francis Picabia’s and Max Ernst’s irrational machines, rather than the more symmetrical and anthropomorphic figurines of Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. For Schlemmer, the human body and its structure remains the main reference of the choreography, while Lissitzky imagines an abstraction from and overcoming of the human (cf. Froning, “El Lissitzky,” 14). Lissitzky’s New One (Neuer) is not a cyborg, but a proposal for a nonhuman, machinic actor (see figure 5.9 and plate 11).

63. See Hanne Bergius, Montage und Metamechanik. Dada Berlin—Artistik von Polaritäten (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 2000), 9. Bergius summarizes the specific, critical treatment of contemporary society by the Berlin Dadaists under the concept of “Metamechanik” (a concept that had been used by the Dadaists and whose origin and meaning Hultén had called “obscure” in a catalog entry; see Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 115). Reportedly, Grosz and Walter Mehring organized racing competitions of typewriters and sewing machines; see Beyme, Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden, 487.

64. Raoul Hausmann, “Dada in Europa, pp. 4371, 642 kg, A50,” Der Dada 3 (Berlin, 1920), n.p.; translation adapted from Martin Ignatius Gaughan, “The Prosthetic Body in Early Modernism: Dada’s Anti-humanist Humanism,” in Dafydd Jones, ed., Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 146.

65. Paul Klee’s drawing of the Twittering Machine (Zwitscher-Maschine, 1922), which was also included in Hultén’s exhibition and is sometime referred to in the context of the relationship between art and machines, holds a quite singular status in the oeuvre of Klee, who otherwise does not refer to “machines” or technical apparatuses in any significant way; even when he speaks about issues like movement or rhythm, his examples are never technical. The drawing’s inclusion in the “Machine as Seen” exhibition may have been due to the fact that it had belonged to the New York MoMA since its acquisition in 1939 (after it had been removed as “degenerate art” from Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, which had acquired the work in 1923), and points to the generous approach that Hultén took to his theme.

66. Cf. the comprehensive account in William Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), esp. 77–90. In his 1966 essay on the same topic, Camfield had used the term “machinic style.” Camfield uses the term “meta-mechanics” (1979, 106) for Picabia’s metaphorical use of technical imagery to describe psychological constellations; the same term is used in its German version, “Metamechanik,” by Hanne Bergius (in Montage und Metamechanik) for the approach to technology by the Berlin Dadaists. Cf. also Roger I. Rothman, “Between Music and the Machine: Francis Picabia and the End of Abstraction,” Tout-fait 2, no. 4 (January 2002), who argues against Camfield’s thesis of a distinctness of Picabia’s “machinist style” in that particular period, and for perceiving it in continuity with his previous work.

67. See the catalog Francis Picabia. Singulier idéal (Paris: Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2002), 425, for bibliographical references to research on the visual sources of Picabia’s machine pictures. For related poems and drawings, see “Poems and Drawings of the Daughter Born without a Mother,” in Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 58–97.

68. Francis Picabia, quoted in “French Artists Spur On American Art,” New York Tribune (October 24, 1915), pt. iv, 2; cited in Camfield, “The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia,” 313.

69. Camfield, “The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia,” 309.

70. Ibid., 316.

71. Ibid., 317; on the claim that “Picabia’s machines do work,” see also Camfield, Francis Picabia, 89–90. Camfield uses the notion of “machine aesthetics” without explicitly stating what he means by the concept (e.g., “most of his machinist paintings after 1915 incline in style toward the precision and simplicity of machine aesthetics,” in “The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia,” 319). At times, he seems to intend a general reference to “things that look like technical artefacts,” at other times “machine aesthetics” seems to be based on the formalist notion of the “beauty in machines.”

72. Max Ernst did, though, later use metallic objects for his frottages, e.g., Quand la lumière fait la roue (1925, Gerstenberg Collection, SMPK, Berlin).

73. As Hal Foster remarks in a footnote: “Ernst claimed that his interest in mechanical elements stemmed from wartime experiences more than from those Dadaists [Duchamp and Picabia].” Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 399, fn. 20. For a discussion of Picabia’s influence on Max Ernst, see Werner Spies, Max Ernst Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe, trans. J. W. Gabriel (New York: Abrams, 1991), and William Camfield, Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism (Munich: Prestel, 1993). Ernst had found, in 1919, a catalog of teaching materials; see his “Autobiographical Notes,” cited in Werner Spies, Max Ernst—Retrospektive 1979 (Munich: Prestel, 1979), 134. The geological and ecological themes of some of his collages of 1920 may have been inspired by this material. See also Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), ch. 2.

74. Hal Foster interprets the “Dada nonsense” of these works as “purposeful not only in its disruption of conventional signification, but also in its imagining of both mechanistic bodies and quasi-schizophrenic subjectivities” (Foster, Prosthetic Gods, 161). Foster proposes a close, psychoanalytically inspired reading of Max Ernst’s images in relation to his experiences as a soldier, understanding the “machine” imagery not so much as a reflection on technology proper, but as a reference to its symbolic connotations: “In this light, the Ernst collages might not only mock the fascist visions of a Marinetti or a Jünger, but also question the utopian proposals of a Tatlin or a Lissitzky: That Makes Me Piss and Self-Constructed Little Machine might then be read as parodies of such near contemporaries as Monument to the Third International of Tatlin and The New of Lissitzky” (173). It should be noted, though, that such a parodistic relationship is highly speculative, since both Tatlin’s and Lissitzky’s designs were published only after Ernst made the mentioned collages. See also Foster’s Freudian interpretations of Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis (118–149).

75. One of Klapheck’s paintings, the typewriter-like Ideal Husband (1964), was included in Hultén’s “Machine as Seen” exhibition. On the typewriter machines by Claes Oldenburg, Klapheck, William Kentridge, and Rodney Graham, see Johanne Mohs, “Schreib/Maschinen/Bilder. Narrative Schlaglichter auf ein Medium,” Kunsttexte.de, no. 1 (2013), 1–13.

76. On the optical aspects of Duchamp’s works, and the construction of the modern subject as separate from the observed object through the camera obscura, see Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, ch. 3.

77. It is worth noting that Duchamp’s oeuvre was reconstructed only in the 1960s when, in a number of retrospective exhibitions, works that he had made in the 1910 and 1920s and that had been lost were realized anew, sometimes as multiples. What was then recognized as an important impulse for the emergence of conceptual art had been rather more obscure half a century earlier. Duchamp, who died in 1968, vividly contributed to this “comeback.” It created a maze of objects and references which have made the historical “Duchamp” available to us as a phenomenon of the 1960s and its posthumous interpretations.

78. Beyme, Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden, 497.

79. See Michel Sanouillet, Marchand du sel (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1958); Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (Stuttgart: Edition Mayer, 1960). On the latter, cf. Sarat Maharaj, “Typotranslating the Green Box,” in Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon, eds., The Duchamp Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 61–91.

80. See Jean Suquet, Miroir de la Mariée (Paris: Flammarion, 1974); Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 246–277.

81. The artist, art theorist, and curator Jack Burnham recounts that during a public discussion at Yale University he asked Marcel Duchamp, “well, have you ever thought of taking some of the machines in the Large Glass and translating them into three dimensions and making real things out of them? He says: ‘Oh God, no, [perish the] thought. We don’t need any of that.’ I was thinking of Jean Tinguely, things like that, at that time, and he said, you know, it’s an allegory. And it’s an allegory that works on many different levels.” Burnham in an interview by Lutz Dammbeck (2001), accessed May 9, 2016, http://www.t-h-e-n-e-t.com/html/_film/pers/_pers_burnham_R.htm.

82. Duchamp had developed this form of mechanomorphic representation in 1912 in paintings like The King and the Queen, The Passage of the Virgin to the Bride, and The Bride, the latter showing a figure that Duchamp then also used as the model for the “Bride” in The Large Glass. Cf. also the drawing Mécanisme de la pudeur/Pudeur mécanique (1912), which is presumably the first preparatory sketch for The Large Glass. William Camfield suggests that both Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp were influenced in 1911 to 1912 by Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, “who employed pseudo-scientific procedures, mathematics and fantastic machines to mock the follies of man—often by means of a theme which devaluated sexual love.” Camfield, “The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia,” 311–312.

83. Cf. Jennifer Jane Marshall, Machine Art, 1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1–10. Cf. chapter 1 above for a description of the exhibition and its program. Cf. Gino Severini, “La Peinture d’avantgarde,” De Stijl 1 (1917): 26–28, for a futurist perspective on art’s dependence on technology and science, and on “Le machinisme d’art” as a new form of realism.

84. Spengler, Decline of the West, as quoted by Nikolai Tarabukin, From Easel to Machine (1923), cited in Gough, The Artist as Producer, 138.

85. See Versari, “Futurist Machine Art,” 162.

86. Cf. also the eulogy by the American poet Ezra Pound (1930), esp. on Antheil’s part in Ballet mécanique. After the cooperation with Léger failed due to the fact that the two artists could not agree on the synchronization of the film images and music, Antheil’s music was premiered in Paris in 1926 when it was played, as originally intended, not by human musicians, but by a pianola. Cf. also the slightly later piece by Aleksandr Mosolov, Iron Foundry (Music for Machines) (op. 19, 1926–1928), a nonillustrative, nonnarrative, however dramatic musical rendering of steel production. The stomping rhythm of the percussion and basses, repetition of phrases by strings and brass, the heroic build-up—they seek no melodic closure, but a (however kitsch-coated, orchestral) “concrete” representation of heavy industrial production.

87. Fernand Léger, “The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan, and the Artist” (1924), in Léger, Functions of Painting, ed. Edward F. Fry (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 57.

88. Ibid., 58.

89. Ibid. Léger continues: “Let us suppose … that this whole, immense world of engineers, workers, shopkeepers, and display artists became conscious of all the beauty they create and in which they live. The demand for beauty would almost be satisfied by them; the peasant would be satisfied with his beautiful colored mowing machine, and the salesman with his melody of neckties. Why is it necessary for these people to go into ecstasies on Sunday over the dubious pictures in the Louvre or elsewhere? Among a thousand pictures there are two beautiful ones? Among a hundred machine-made objects, thirty are beautiful, and they resolve the problem of Art, being beautiful and useful at the same time” (59). However, as an artist, Léger is not altogether hopeless, for there remains a place for some specialists whom he does not call “artists” but whose task it is to sublimate the mechanically and naturally given that the engineer or salesman may or may not recognize in the tools and fruit of his labor: “I think there are some men above him, very few, who are capable of elevating him through their plastic concept to a height that towers over the primary level of Beauty. Those men must be capable of viewing the work of the artisan and of nature as raw material, to be ordered, absorbed and fused in their brains, with a perfect balance between the two values: the conscious and the unconscious, the objective and the subjective” (60).

90. See Bruno Munari, “Manifesto,” translated in Miroslava Hájek, “Munari’s Machines,” in Bruno Corà et al., eds., Tinguely e Munari. Opere in azione (Milan: Mazzotta, 2004), 101; and discussed in chapter 1 above. For the connection between Munari and Tinguely, see Pontus Hultén, ed., Tinguely. Una magia più forte della morte, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi (Venice: Bompiani, 1989), 17; and Munari’s comments in Giancarlo Politi and Bruno Munari, “Le regole del gioco,” Flash Art, no. 163 (1991): 105–108, esp. 107. For an extensive online documentation of Munari’s work, cf. www.munart.org (accessed January 10, 2015); see also the drawn sketches of “useless machines” in Munari’s notebooks from the 1930s and 1940s, in Miroslava Hájek and Luca Zaffarano, Bruno Munari: My Futurist Past (Milan: Silvana, 2012), 207–217. Munari’s children’s book Le macchine di Munari (Einaudi, 1942) was not based on the macchine inutili sculptures, but presented drawings of a variety of humoristic machines.

91. Tinguely quoted in Pontus Hultén, “Der Mensch und sein Werk,” in Museum Jean Tinguely, Die Sammlung, museum collection catalog (Bern: Benteli, 1996), 45, no source provided. Hultén had already featured works by both Tinguely and Duchamp in his group exhibitions “Le Mouvement” at Galerie Denise René in Paris (1955) and “Bewogen Beweging” (Movement in art) at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1961).

92. For more on Tinguely, see K. G. Pontus Hultén, Jean Tinguely “Méta” (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975); Margit Hahnloser-Ingold, Pandämonium—Jean Tinguely (Bern: Benteli, 1988), a rather hagiographic volume, but with interesting personal memories and background material; Heidi E. Violand, “Jean Tinguely’s Kinetic Art, or A Myth of the Machine Age,” PhD diss., New York University, 1990; Museum Jean Tinguely, Die Sammlung, includes an interesting biographical report by Margit Hahnloser, “Jean Tinguely und die Schweiz,” 79–132; Museum Jean Tinguely, Jean le Jeune (Basel: Benteli, 2002), includes a biographical text by Jocelyn Daignes about Tinguely’s early love of materials and machines, his pacifism, and his Catholicism (23–65). Andres Pardey (in Jean le Jeune, 137) reports that Tinguely was lastingly impressed when he witnessed the terrible racing accident at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race on June 11, 1955, during which over 80 onlookers died.

93. See Daignes in Museum Jean Tinguely, Jean le Jeune, 37.

94. In 1960, on the occasion of an exhibition at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, the multiple Maschinenbild Haus Lange was produced in an edition of 50, after the principle of the Meta-Malevich.

95. Two of the Metamatics (Méta-Matic No. 8, of 1958, and Méta-Matic No. 17, of 1959) were shown in Hultén’s “Machine as Seen” exhibition.

96. By the same token, Tinguely distanced himself from the exact and objectivist formalism of the concrete art of contemporaries like Max Bill, Victor Vasarely, or François Morellet. Incidentally, Tinguely stopped working on the Metamatics in 1959—around the time when plotters for printing computer graphics were beginning to come into use. His randomly driven drawing machines were well in place when computer engineers and artists began to train computers and plotters to make drawings. Cf. the machines of Rebecca Horn for a different path that such performative painting machines could take; see Jessica Voigt, Rebecca Horn—von den Körperskulpturen zu den mechanisierten Objekten (Berlin: TENEA, 2001).

97. During several of the exhibitions, Tinguely signed the individual drawings and sometimes added the name of the audience operator, affirming his own role as artist and originator of the machine and its products.

98. Christina Bischofsberger, Jean Tinguely: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, Sculptures and Reliefs, 1954–1968 (Küßnacht and Zurich: Galerie Bruno Bischofsberger, 1982), cat. no. 347; cf. Hultén, “Der Mensch und sein Werk,” 58–60.

99. Tinguely, quoted in Fritz Billeter, “Interview mit Jean Tinguely,” Das Kunstwerk 20, no. 9/10 (1966), 15.

100. Ibid., 16. The fact that Tinguely was aware of contemporary artistic work is evidenced by the fact that in 1965–1966 his work had been shown together with that of Nicolas Schöffer in a touring exhibition in the United States, “Two Kinetic Sculptors.”

101. Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 174; Rotozaza No. 1 was first presented in Galerie Alexander Iolas, Paris, 1967.

102. Bischofsberger, Jean Tinguely: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, cat. no. 1154, 318–323.

103. The third version, Rotozaza No. 3, was placed in the shop windows of the Loeb department store in Bern in 1969 where it destroyed thousands of porcelain plates. Besides the aspect of consumption and destruction, this version must have been personally relevant for Tinguely, who had worked as a window decorator in Switzerland in the 1940s.

104. Bischofsberger, Jean Tinguely: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, cat. no. 428; now in the collection of the Tinguely Museum, Basel. When Hannibal II was bought by the Baseler Verkehrsverein in 1967, it was Tinguely’s first sale to a public collection; cf. Hahnloser, “Jean Tinguely und die Schweiz,” 105. An earlier version, Hannibal I, was first exhibited at Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963.

105. Two fragments are listed in the oeuvre catalog, Bischofsberger, Jean Tinguely: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1: catalog no. 139 was in Hultén’s exhibition but was not recognized by Tinguely as a sculpture, since the fragment was kept by the museum without his knowledge; and catalog no. 1124 was a gift by Tinguely to the museum. Other self-destructive constructions by Tinguely included End of the World No. 1 (1961) and No. 2 (1962); the latter was performed in the Nevada desert near Las Vegas on March 21, 1962, and was filmed by US television station NBC.

106. There is no comparable text document about other works in the catalog, and photos of the Homage installation are printed prominently on the inside cover pages, both at the front and the back of the catalog, bracketing the “Machine as Seen” exhibition as a whole and suggesting the exceptional status that Hultén wanted to give to the 1960 performance. See Klüver, “The Garden Party”; cf also Hultén, “Der Mensch und sein Werk,” 46–49. Klüver’s text had earlier been included in the magazine Zero, edited by Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, and Heinz Mack, vol. 3 (1961), n. pag. (including photographic contact prints by David Gahr); see facsimile reprint in Dirk Pörschmann and Mattijs Visser, eds., 4321 ZERO (Düsseldorf: Richter Fey, 2012), n. pag..On Homage to New York, cf. also Museum Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely Collaborations (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2009), 16–29, and the films about the piece by D. A. Pennebaker, Breaking It Up at the Museum (1960, 16 mm, black and white, sound, 8 mins.), especially of the performance in close-up, including a short interview with Tinguely; and by Robert Breer, Hommage to Jean Tinguely’s Hommage to New York [sic] (1960, 16 mm, sound, 9 mins.), mainly about the preparation of the installation in Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. In Breer’s film, Tinguely, Klüver, and a couple of other men are shown working on the installation, welding, screwing, trying out some mechanisms. The film begins with an animation of a photo of Tinguely and close-ups of the invitation card for the event, the drawing, and the title text; especially toward the end, Breer uses various animation techniques, including stop motion, speeding up, and then lots of double exposures multiplying the visual complexity of the installation—partly film on film, more film on photo. Functioning, moving parts of the installation are double-exposed with still photos of the actual performance, which otherwise is not featured, except in some still photos toward the end. Director Robert Breer would later participate as an artist in the 1968 “Machine as Seen” exhibition; cf. chapter 2 above.

107. Klüver, “The Garden Party,” 171.

108. Ibid.; Klüver also references information theorist Claude Shannon’s “Ultimate Machine” from the early 1950s, an apparatus from which, when it is activated by a switch, an artificial hand appears that moves to the switch and turns it off, then disappears again inside the box; cf. chapter 3 below.

109. The event was well prepared by the museum, with an extensive invitation that included short texts by MoMA’s sculpture curator Peter Selz, Alfred H. Barr (then advisory director of MoMA), Pontus Hultén, art critic Dore Ashton, Dada veteran Richard Huelsenbeck, and a hand-written epigram by Marcel Duchamp (see Bischofsberger, Jean Tinguely: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, 111).

110. Klüver, “The Garden Party,” 170.

111. Ibid., 171. Tinguely’s encounter with John Cage during this time is reflected by the introduction of random media content into his work, for instance, in a series of assemblages entitled Radio WNYR (1962). For these works, radio sets were opened up and dissembled, without however impeding their functionality; an automatic mechanism would slowly move across the dial and tune into and out of the different stations arbitrarily. On the significance of the accidental and the undetermined in Tinguely’s Homage to New York, see Miguel Leal, “A imaginação cega: Mecanismos de indeterminação na prática artística contemporânea,” PhD thesis, University of Porto, 2009, esp. ch. 5.3, “Maquinismos: uma arte do motor,” 458–476.

112. See Hultén, “Der Mensch und sein Werk,” 46.

113. See ibid.

114. Klüver, “The Garden Party,” 169.

115. Ibid. In terms of the pragmatics of Tinguely’s artistic process, his drawings deserve closer attention. Some are preparatory sketches, while others are construction drawings for collaborating craftsmen, maintenance drawings for museum and collection staff, or functional drawings that show the form and behavior of a particular machine. Cf. Jean Tinguely, Dessins et gravures pour les sculptures (Geneva: Musée d’art et de histoire, 1976); and the collection of drawings in the Museum Jean Tinguely, Basel.

116. An illustration of Tatlin’s Monument had been included in the Buch neuer Künstler (Book of new artists) that Lajos Kassák and Moholy-Nagy published in 1922.

117. Moholy-Nagy about the Light Prop for an Electric Stage in Die Form 5, no. 11/12 (Berlin, 1930): 297; cited from the English version of the text in Peter Weibel, ed., Beyond Art: A Third Culture (Vienna: Springer, 1996), 81; see Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (Weingarten: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1986), 328–331. It is maybe no accident either that the posthumous reception of the work changed its title to Light-Space Modulator (under this title it was also exhibited in Hultén’s exhibition), subjectifying and turning into a “subjective” machine sculpture what was conceived, by Moholy-Nagy, as an apparatus. Cf. also László Moholy-Nagy, “Musico-mechanico, mechanico-optico—Gradlinigkeit des Geistes, Umwege der Technik,” Musikblätter des Anbruch, special issue “Musik und Maschine,” 8, no. 8/9 (1926): 363–367. For a retrospective designation of Moholy-Nagy as a “media artist,” see Oliver Botar, Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2014).

118. The architectural qualities lent to the object in the film can be taken as further evidence of its relatedness to Tatlin’s Monument—which was equally a shadowlike model of the imaginary tower proper. The extent to which Moholy-Nagy was media-conscious is also demonstrated by the fact that the film begins with a sequence showing the shadow of a loose and transparent strip of celluloid film, held by two human hands.

119. László Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Zirkus, Varieté,” in Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Ferenc Molnár, eds., Die Bühne im Bauhaus, Bauhaus Bücher 4 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925), 49.

120. “Düfte & Niess Pulver gegen das Publikum,” segment 4, “dann explodiert,” segment 6. The score was published in an edited version (without the “sneezing powder” and the “explosion”) in Die Bühne im Bauhaus as a specially printed plate pasted in before p. 45, with explanations on p. 44 and a text by Moholy-Nagy: “Theater, Zirkus, Varieté,” p. 45–56, on mechanical vs. human eccentricity, p. 47–48. The original drawings are in the collection of the Institut für Theater-, Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft der Universität Köln (Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, Aufnahme-Nr. LA 3.439/33). (In the catalog Torsten Blume and Christian Hiller, eds., Human—Space—Machine: Stage Experiments at the Bauhaus [Leipzig: Spector Books, 2014], 138–139, the illustrations are reversed and placed in the wrong order; the arrows should be in the top left corner, the marionette and the “exploding” black circle at the bottom left.) Moholy-Nagy’s Mechanized Eccentric was reconstructed and performed by Jörg U. Lensing for the Theater der Klänge festival, Düsseldorf, where it premiered on November 26, 1987, at Junges Theater Düsseldorf; there is a VHS video recording of the performance at Folkwang Schule Essen in June 1988.

121. Konzerthaus Wien, Internationale Ausstellung Neuer Theatertechnik; cf. Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 56.

122. Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 56. Passuth also points out the related stage design with a spiral system turning around its own axis by Gert Caden, entitled Excentrik Operoid, also shown in Kiesler’s exhibition, which in turn might have been a response to Moholy-Nagy’s drawing of a Kinetic Constructive System in 1922.

123. See Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 13.

124. See ibid., 195. For a detailed description of Haacke’s Ice Stick, cf. chapter 6 below. Haacke had submitted three works for MoMA’s “Machine as Seen” exhibition through the competition call put out by E.A.T. Incidentally, Ice Stick (1966) was not among them, but a work entitled Ice Table (1967) was; on the submission form, Haacke ticked the box indicating that this submission was meant only for the exhibition, and not for the E.A.T. competition (cf. Experiments in Art and Technology, exh. cat.).

125. Interaction, process, and feedback are crucial aspects of the “systems aesthetics” which Jack Burnham developed in relation to works like Haacke’s. Burnham’s seminal essay “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 30–35, was published two months before Hultén’s exhibition opened.

126. Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 192.

127. Jane Goodall, “Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automation,” Theater Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 453, quoting Arthur Kroker, The Possessed Individual: Technology and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan, 1992), 13.

128. Goodall, “Transferred Agencies,” 444.

129. Gregory Chatonsky, “The Solitude of Machines,” Art Press 2, no. 29 (2013): 81–84. Such a solitude is germane to cybernetic machines. Whereas for Marx the machine imposed its rules on the individual worker, and machinery enforced the behavior of masses of workers, the cybernetic machine is a machine without workers, one that controls only itself or other machines. Günther Anders speculates about the pitiable status of machines which, due to increasing integration of systems, lose their autonomy: “In comparison with what machines are today, the machines of the previous century were lonesome and sovereign individuals, or we might say: proud ‘pioneer personalities’” (Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980], 120). The solitude of the “imaginary object” of the machine, shoring its own impossibility and loneliness against the illusion of utility and progress, is also noted by French historian Jacques Noiray, especially with regard to the machine images of surrealism and Dadaism, in Le Romancier et la machine. L’Image de la machine dans le roman français (1850–1900) (Paris: Corti, 1982), 393.

130. Chatonsky, “La Solitude des machines,” 83–84 (translation by L.-S. Torgoff, modified), with reference to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, esp. on the dynamic sublime.

131. Ibid., 84 (translation modified).

3 Algorithm Machine

The Giver of Names

In an enclosed space of the gallery, we find a pedestal, prominently placed in the middle and surrounded by a clutter of diverse and colorful plastic objects, toys and household goods, lying on the floor—an invitation to place one or more objects on top of the pedestal (figure 3.1, plate 2). A video camera is pointed here, and the video image is projected onto a screen above the pedestal. When an object is placed, we see that its image is not merely displayed in the projection, but, step by step, analyzed by a computer system that appears to qualify the object’s shape, color, and texture. Consecutively, different aspects of the video image are highlighted and graphically abstracted, as though the computer system that processes the input from the video camera were reading or registering different aspects of the object.

Figure 3.1 David Rokeby, The Giver of Names (since 1990), installation view, Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada. Photo David Rokeby. Copyright © the artist.

Then we hear a computer-generated voice speaking a sentence, sometimes quite short, using words that seem to resonate with the object, or objects, on the pedestal—apparent aspects like their shape or color, embellished with freely associated terms and poetic additions. The sentence is also displayed as text in a white font in the projected video image frame. The sentence appears simultaneously on a separate monitor screen, elsewhere in the space, together with a complex and polychrome texture of words that seem to have been drawn by the computer from a database as verbal associations connected with the terms that were derived from the image analysis.

An individual result like this appears obscure, but playing around with the installation and trying out different combinations of objects and getting used to the quirky poetics of the generated sentences slowly brings about an understanding of a rather characteristic treatment of the things that the system is trained to see and interpret. It appears to draw on a rich base of words and associative constellations, only seldomly repeating phrases, but instead seeming to learn and find new expressions all the time. Most sentences don’t make sense in a humanly rational way. They appear absurd, funny, at times mysterious, and seem to derive from a realm of language without strict conventions—a realm that we usually describe as poetry. But how does what is clearly a technical system that responds to random choices of objects made by the exhibition visitor arrive at such a complexity of responses? Is this an intelligent machine, one that can learn and apply what it has learned according to evolving and systematic rules? And as the visitor is playing around with it—are we just testing its still rather limited ability to connect objects with words, or are we training the system that will, in the future, learn to deal with objects and words in the same way that humans do—or even in a more complex way?

The Giver of Names is an ongoing project that Canadian artist David Rokeby has been working on since the early 1990s to develop a software-based system which can interpret, if not recognize, objects or shapes, and associate words with them. It is easy to learn how the system works technically, at least in principle.¹ The artist readily explains how the different components work, how the textual database was built up first from his own writings, then by adding novels like Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, whose use of individual words and phrases form the conditions of possibility for certain phrases to be constructed. The text system is further enhanced, or complicated, by linking it with online translation services, making it switch between different language realms, like English, Spanish, and French, as it constructs the associative output from the interpretation of the visual input. The vision system is based on similarly pregiven image vocabularies and visual recognition software that interpret certain shapes according to similarities with the shapes of objects which resemble a schema that it has already stored.

But this relative transparency and the simple interactive features of the work make the effect for the visitor of being confronted with an interpreting and freely associating machine the more striking. The system is clearly struggling to make sense of what it sees. The Giver of Names does not have a learning behavior in the sense that what is added, accumulated, and digested during one operative session would persist after it has been turned off; rather, it begins each session anew from its pregiven database. But what is uncanny is that, like a child, it seems to hold the potential of superseding its teacher, in due time.

At the same time, the installation is an investigation of the structures of knowledge and perception that calls into question the connection of words and things.² The title of the work, The Giver of Names, refers to a passage in the Bible in which the “giving of names” is associated with a symbolic form of appropriation, but also of companionship and subservience:

(18) Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” (19) Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. (20) The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him. (Genesis 2:18–20)

This biblical story then continues with the creation of Eve as what God intended to be a “suitable helper” for Adam.³ In the understanding suggested here, giving names is both possessive and mimetic: it constitutes ownership, and affords a form of similarity between the name giver and the object that is being named—and that thus becomes a subject of the process of name giving.

In The Giver of Names, the power of name giving is exercised by a technical system. The work thus exemplifies an artistic practice that does not engage the kinetic automatism of works like Nicolas Schöffer’s CYSP 1 or Robert Breer’s Rug; instead, it engages a semiotic automatism that is expressed through words and images and that rests on notions of artificial intelligence and the autonomous behavior and decision making in technical systems.

Chapter Introduction

An algorithm is a set of defined rules for conducting iterative mathematical operations. The principle is usually employed to perform defined tasks, calculations which can be formalized in consecutive steps of mathematical operations on defined symbols, like numbers or other coded values. In the realm of mathematics, such algorithms operate like “machines” in the sense that they are composed of several symbolic components, letters, words, and numbers, and calcuate these components according to the “mechanical” rules of arithmetics in order to complete a predefined task.⁴

Digital computer technology is based on the principle of conducting such algorithmic operations, i.e., the execution of coded algorithms and the processing of data, in order to drive processes in the integrated circuits of microchips; these in turn steer operations of technical devices that translate the resulting electronic signals into control signals for, for instance, electrical motors, liquid crystal displays, or acoustic output devices. The chains of translating calculations into such output activity can be much longer, and can contain a large number of relay points or technical levels. Many of these technical operations simultaneously involve algorithmic, electronic, physical, and mechanical aspects.⁵

The mathematical “machine” of the algorithm, with its operational rule set, forms the basis of a cultural and technical practice which, in the field of art, is commonly described as “computer art” or “digital art.” In contrast to the mechanical techniques deployed and depicted by artists from Picabia to Tinguely, from Hausmann to Moholy-Nagy, the working of algorithms and their processing of symbolic values cannot be observed directly by the human senses, but can only be experienced through their effects in the connected devices. The fundamental obscurity of this “machine” and its automatisms are a key feature of the aesthetics of computer-based art.

This chapter addresses the history and aesthetics of algorithmically based art. Some of the key notions are introduced through a discussion of works by David Rokeby, who has used algorithms and computer software as his main artistic material since the early 1980s. The develoment of cybernetic art in the 1950s and 1960s is discussed in the context of the consequential arrival of information aesthetics and systems aesthetics. The analysis of several works of computer-based art then serves to deepen our understanding of the automatic aspect of machine aesthetics.⁶

In the overall structure of this book, each of the following four chapters deals with artistic practices engaging the field of tension between technology and a specific field of reference, i.e., visuality, corporeality, and ecology. In this chapter, the referent is neither the computer as a technical system nor the digital—which I understand to be a particular form of coding symbolic content—but the algorithm as a processual formula. The algorithm has made possible, both conceptually and historically, a type of technical application that by its mathematical nature is conceived as independent of human volition. Through its technical implementation in computer-based systems the algorithm imbues these systems with a conceptual autonomy that—however utilitarian they may be—derives from the algorithm’s mathematical heritage.⁷

David Rokeby’s Algorithmic Art

As a continuation of his decade-long work on The Giver of Names, Rokeby developed the installation n-cha(n)t (2001) which we already encountered at the beginning of this book (figure 0.6).⁸ Here, a local area network connects a flock of seven computers, each of which meanders through a database of words and phrases similar to that used for The Giver of Names. Since the separate computer systems are exchanging data about their respective word streams, and given that they have a programmed tendency to fall into unison, they join into a chantlike collective speech until a visitor speaks into one of the microphones attached to the computer monitors suspended in the gallery space. A voice recognition system in the respective computer recodes the acoustic signal into text, then displays the words it has “understood” at the top of its monitor screen, and consecutively integrates these new words into its textual stream of “consciousness.” The neighboring computers also pick up on this disturbance of their collective chant, and as each is associatively connecting the new words to its own knowledge base, we hear the voices enter into a Babylonic confusion—or, as Rokeby calls it, “a party-like chaos of voices.”⁹ But the programmed interaction between the computers works like a homeostat: if there is no further input from the visitors, the associative streams will increasingly begin to overlap and synchronize again, until after a while the computers reenter into their common chant:

When left uninterrupted to communicate amongst themselves, they eventually fall into chanting, a shared stream of verbal association. This consensus unfolds very organically. The systems feel their way towards each other, finding resonance in synonyms and similar sounding words, working through different formulations of similar statements until finally achieving unison.¹⁰

n-cha(n)t is an exploration of what could be an artificial, machine-generated intelligence, and how such machines might try to simulate human perceptive and cognitive faculties. Rokeby has commented about this aspect of n-cha(n)t and its relation to The Giver of Names:

I would consider this system intelligent only in the most limited sense of the word, and it is certainly not conscious, but I do find myself projecting “loneliness” into it. The Giver of Names is awash in a sea of language it can manipulate but cannot understand. Its plight and its “loneliness” seemed to demand a social group. So I imagined a group of intelligent agents, hanging out idle in some corner of the Internet, jamming with their synthetic wits … trying out language on each other … perhaps finding their own patois … making this alien language somehow their own. So n-cha(n)t is a community of Givers of Names linked by a network.¹¹

While The Giver of Names is an interactive installation that requires visitor interaction in order to work, n-cha(n)t stages an encounter between human and machine in which the exhibition visitor invades the space of an apparently autonomous collective of machines and disrupts them in their meditative communication, because the human visitor wants to either speak to them or deliberately disturb them. Although the apparent communication of the computers can easily be identified as purely technical and programmed, without any empathy, the collective chant and its disturbance—emphasized by the video images on the computer monitors of human ears shown as being at ease, or attentive, or overwhelmed by new acoustic input¹²—suggest a form of sociality that might be happening on a different, perhaps more formal, level of exchange between the computers.

Rokeby seems aware of the work’s interlacing of mechanomorphic and anthropomorphic aspects, and of the responses of empathy and indifference that mark the experience of the work: “I am not trying to create any deep modelling of human social groups with this work. My entities are far too crude to be useful simulacra of real people. They represent nothing more than themselves … indentured slaves of this particular programmer, granted a fraction of some freedom they are utterly incapable of desiring.”¹³ At the same time, he sees n-cha(n)t as a special achievement to which he has “a very personal, passionate relationship,” and which offers him “an experience different from anything else in the world.”¹⁴ His feelings arise in part because the work’s development process was difficult, taking several years and several attempts to complete.¹⁵

Rokeby confesses that his fascination is not with machines in general, but with the computer. Other technical apparatuses are assemblages with mechanical and electronic parts which can be conceived, taken apart, and reconstructed relatively flexibly, whereas the computer is an “integrated” apparatus with a given hardware structure whose flexibility is mainly on the level of the software that is processed on it. Perhaps comparable to the human body, the computer has limited possibilities for being changed physically, while the potentials for programming it seem infinite, making it both less and more able than the human body. As a key component of computer programming, algorithms are thus Rokeby’s crucial means of construction and artistic creation.

Rokeby recounts how, at the age of seventeen, he was trying—not unlike Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic case of Joey, the mechanical boy—to “become a computer” by acting like one. In explaining his goal in conversation, Rokeby says, “I don’t exactly know what it means, but I like Robert Musil’s expression from The Man without Qualities, ‘bringing precision to the realm of the soul.’” The background to this expression throws an interesting light on Rokeby’s attempt at emulating a computer.

Musil’s novel is set in the months immediately preceding the First World War and describes the fictitious preparations for celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the accession to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian emperor in 1918, which—as the author and the readers know, but not the characters in the book—would not take place due to the war and the end of the monarchy and the empire. The main character of the novel, Ulrich, proposes the founding of a “Global Secretariat for Precision and Soul” (Erdensekretariat der Genauigkeit und Seele).¹⁶ The “realm of the soul” is a crucial point of debate between Ulrich and his counterpart, Paul Arnheim, the latter modeled by Musil after the industrialist, cultural critic, and politician Walter Rathenau. Rathenau had published a pamphlet against mechanization and hyperindustrialization, entitled On the Mechanics of the Spirit, or About the Realm of the Soul (Zur Mechanik des Geistes oder vom Reich der Seele, Berlin, 1918)—a surprising position to take by the man who was then CEO of one of the largest industrial trusts in Germany, including the electricity company AEG, but one that no doubt fascinated Musil.¹⁷ It is not surprising that Rokeby would side with Ulrich, who trusts neither the modernist optimism of his time nor Arnheim’s luxurious romanticism, whose defense of the “realm of the soul” was strangely at odds with the technical and social realities of his time. Ulrich, a man in his thirties, had studied mathematics—at the time probably as close as one could get to the spirit of the incipient computer age which would, fifty years later, enthrall the adolescent Rokeby.

Another two decades later, Rokeby’s passions have shifted to the differences, rather than the similarities, between computers and humans: “There are many who are now claiming that computers will soon be able to match human intelligence. I find this a startling claim that needs intense examination. Many of my works have been, in part, an investigation of this question and a critique of the assumptions that are being made in this regard.”¹⁸ In works like The Giver of Names and n-cha(n)t, he explores the boundary of what it is possible to construct in the computer, sorting out the things that the computer can do, in order to find out what remains beyond that boundary. His works are as much aesthetic investigations of an imaginary artificial intelligence and network communication as they are explorations of what humans imagine about the possibility of autonomous and intelligent machines. The installations are designed to stage this encounter. As Sara Diamond has put it, Rokeby “opens an imaginative door to machine consciousness. By ‘becoming’ machine for a moment, we try to imagine its encounter with us and our intelligence, grammar and logic.”¹⁹

The aesthetic dimension of Rokeby’s works derives from a particular staging of apparently autonomous decision making on the part of the technical system. The interface of screen images, text, and sound displays the results of processes which are, at the moment of our encounter with the works, controlled by the computer system and by user interaction. The activities of the technical system respond to its environment and to events that happen around it, such as the movements of people and random occurrences. We observe it taking decisions, and even though we may hesitate to project a sense of intentionality and consciousness onto what we observe, it is also difficult to look at it as only a reactive technical installation.

David Rokeby explains the basis for this experience of machinic otherness by pointing to the technically arranged openness of computers and their hypothetical subjectivation. He told the author that he himself has been surprised by the behavior of the n-cha(n)t installation: “I know exactly why it does things, because I have programmed it and given it its rules; but I cannot say what it will do.”

This split between the design, construction, and comprehension of the programmed mechanism, on the one hand, and the almost paradoxical (and thus sometimes humorous) surprise about its actual execution and automatic behavior, on the other, is a crucial aspect of machine aesthetics. In order to convey this experience, Rokeby deliberately does not, in the presentation of his works, describe or lay bare either their technical or mathematical aspects. Rather, he designs the installations to provide encounters with interactive technical systems through the collision and mutual invasion of the respective spaces of signification and meaning of humans and machines. Rokeby’s work is thus exemplary for an artistic engagement with algorithms and with the aesthetics and paradigms of cybernetics, whose relation with art practices since the 1950s we will now further explore.

Art and Cybernetics

Three Exhibitions and an Ambivalent Concept

An astonishing constellation of social, technical, and artistic events coalesced at the end of the 1960s. In the field of artistic engagement with technology, the historical moment was marked by three exhibitions which traveled along the three conceptual vectors of history, technology, and art that also structure our study: the exhibition “The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age,” curated by Pontus Hultén at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968, discussed in detail in chapter 2, presented the history of the relation between art and technology, retrospectively focusing on the modernist avant-garde; second, “Cybernetic Serendipity,” curated by Jasia Reichardt at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in the same year, took a contemporary perspective and presented works that illustrated how art was evolving, spurred by the new electronic and computer technologies; and third, “Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art,” curated by Jack Burnham at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970, sought to affirm the concept of “systems aesthetics” that Burnham had proposed in 1968, and took the technical term “software” as a metaphor for contemporary artistic concepts that relied on a reflection on systems, though not necessarily in a technical sense. Burnham’s exhibition took the electronic age as a metaphorical context of contemporary art, not—as Reichardt had done in her show—as its theme. Cybernetic principles such as feedback, interactivity, and observation, which received a technical inflection in Reichardt’s “Cybernetic Serendipity,” were explored in Burnham’s exhibition as artistic and aesthetic principles, irrespective of an actual technical realization.²⁰

In the introduction to his own exhibition’s catalog, Pontus Hultén had reflected upon the ongoing technical transformation from a mechanical to a computer-based machine paradigm and had warned against a development in which decisions were increasingly taken away from humans and delegated to technical systems. The main focus toward the end of the MoMA show lay on the work of Jean Tinguely and his humoristically “retro” mechanical sculptures. Both Reichardt and Burnham set themselves off against this notion of machine art by extending in their exhibitions a historical lineage which we will also trace in the course of this chapter. It is dominant in “Cybernetic Serendipity” but conceptually also feeds “Software,” a lineage born out of mathematics and cybernetics that leads to the development of autonomous machine systems, and to the systems aesthetics which will also become the leading principle for process-oriented postconceptual art.²¹

Twenty years before being adopted for the title of an art exhibition, the term “cybernetics” had been introduced by the US mathematician Norbert Wiener, who had been involved in developing antiaircraft systems during the Second World War. As science historian Peter Galison summarizes:

Working with the Greek word for steersman, Wiener coined the term cybernetics in the summer of 1947 to designate what he hoped would be a new science of control mechanisms in which the exchange of information would play a central role. If antisubmarine warfare was the formative problem for operations research, antiaircraft fire control was the key to cybernetics. Faced with the problem of hitting fast maneuverable bombers with ground-based artillery, Wiener brought to bear his own established interest in feedback mechanisms, communication technology, and nonlinear processes.²²

The central idea of cybernetics, i.e., that processes in both living and technical systems could be analyzed and controlled through feedback mechanisms, was soon applied not only to the mathematical probability of flight trajectories, but to biological, technical, educational, and psychological questions as well. Cybernetics became, for the span of about three decades, a catchall concept for planning social and technical processes. Modernist in spirit, it was a banner of hope for the solution of all possible problems.²³

The notion of the “machine” played an important role in these explorations, since it suggested the possibility of devising a mechanism that would unerringly perform its task—whether mechanically or mathematically. Thus, there have been two different understandings of “the machine” at play in discussions of cybernetics whose characteristics are often projected onto each other. The first notion of “machine” is seen in continuity with the classical technical apparatus, a material construction designed to perform a certain set of tasks. Thus, Norbert Wiener, in his book on Cybernetics, speaks of the “ultra-rapid computing machine” as a “mechanico-electrical system.”²⁴ A second understanding of “machine” was introduced by the British mathematician Alan Turing who published seminal papers on the mathematical aspects of information theory in the 1930s and worked, during the Second World War, on the mathematics of encryption. For Turing, the “machine” was a conceptual device that could be modeled in mathematical formulas or algorithms, on the basis of which the device that would become the “computer” was understood to be a “universal machine”: “The importance of the universal machine is clear. We do not need to have an infinity of different machines doing different jobs. A single one will suffice. The engineering problem of producing various machines for various jobs is replaced by the office work of ‘programming’ the universal machine to do these jobs.”²⁵

The “jobs” to be done by the “universal machine” are calculations, not their physical application—not the effect of one material element on another, nor the transmission of movement, nor the combination of material elements into a larger, purposeful whole. Rather, Turing’s “machine” is a concept that metaphorically borrows from the intuitive understanding of mechanisms, to describe a mathematical process that “does something,” in the cybernetic sense of providing a calculated impulse to control a process. This blurring of the distinction between a physical and a conceptual notion of the machine—rather than a clear-cut replacement of the former by the latter—becomes one of the key features of cybernetics, in that it underpins the conviction that there must be computable solutions for all problems that can be worked on by a “machine.”

The joint conceptual work of Norbert Wiener with Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow in the early 1940s was seminal for this thinking. As Galison comments: “Of particular importance, they contended that their classification rehabilitated ‘purpose’ and ‘teleology’ by bringing them under the aegis of a ‘uniform behavioristic analysis’ that was equally applicable to living organisms and machines.”²⁶ Accordingly, W. Ross Ashby described the homeostat as a “perfect machine” and suggested that it was necessary to make the machine more human, in order for humans to become able to recognize themselves in the machine. Here again, the machine was introduced as an ontological companion of the human whose integration into cybernetic systems required what Wiener called research into the “black box” of the human psyche, highlighted by Ashby as “a first step towards a scientific psychology.”²⁷

As a side effect of this rapprochement between humans and machines, the performance or response of complex technical systems could easily be interpreted as though the machine had a will of its own and a “personality.” Wiener observed:

The semi-humorous superstition of the gremlin among the aviators was probably due, as much as anything else, to the habit of dealing with a machine with a large number of built-in feedbacks which might be interpreted as friendly or hostile. For example the wings of an airplane are deliberately built in such a manner as to stabilize the plane, and this stabilization, which is of the nature of a feedback … may easily be felt as a personality to be antagonized when the plane is forced into unusual maneuvers.²⁸

This impression of “animated” machine behavior stood back to back with a second metaphorization, i.e., that of describing human behavior in terms of a technical apparatus,²⁹ and was complemented by a third such metaphorization, i.e., speculations about consciousness and the possibilities of its emergence in cybernetic systems.³⁰ Whenever something is addressed as a “machine,” it is always already conceived as a partly autonomous and subjectified assemblage, an assumption that is not unique to either the mechanical or the cybernetic age, but that is continuous across the watershed between mechanical and mathematical “machines.” As such, the machine is always already an aesthetic signifier which is characterized by this sliding between mechanical and conceptual, between functional and self-willed. Moreover, viewed as an aesthetic signifier, the machine regularly appears to be intimately tied to the concept of the uncanny. An early instance of this experience is reported by the US National Defense Research Council’s section chairman, G. R. Stibitz, who noted in 1942, after paying a visit to Norbert Wiener’s laboratory:

Most of the day is spent with Wiener, Bigelow, and Mooney. It simply must be agreed that, taking into account the character of the input data, their statistical predictor accomplishes miracles. Whether this is a useful miracle or a useless miracle, W[arren] W[eaver] is not yet convinced. The fact that predictions can at present be made only for a maximum of 2 seconds is a very serious limitation. … For a 1-second lead the behavior of their instrument is positively uncanny.³¹

In a footnote that homes in on this crucial moment of a possible success of cybernetics for “doing the job” of “knowing” in advance the flight trajectory of enemy bombers, Galison highlights this aspect of an encounter with an Other:

Stibitz invokes the term uncanny at just the moment—1 July 1942—when Wiener’s machine began predicting as if it were animated. … One is reminded here of Stanley Cavell’s reflection that Freud, in his essay on the uncanny, may be protesting too much when he claims (no less than four times) that the animate/inanimate conflation does not lie behind the uncanny. For Cavell, the uncanny reflects precisely the philosophical anxiety exacerbated by the ambiguity created when it is unclear whether a mind or merely an inanimate object is at hand. The sentiment of uncanniness resulting from such an ambiguity is therefore tied to the philosophical problem of other minds. According to Cavell, this philosophical difficulty (surrounding the existence of other minds) is part of, not subordinate to, the psychology of uncanniness.³²

And, I would add, the sentiment of uncanniness is part of the aesthetics of the machine whose automatism appears to testify to the involvement of some other agency, or mind.

Cybernetic Art and the Aesthetics of Systems

“Computer art” is frequently used as a blanket term for concepts that should be distinguished from each other, among which are cybernetic art, which is based on the principles of cybernetics; systems aesthetics, which applies concepts derived from systems theory to contemporary art; and information aesthetics, which applies criteria from information theory to the interpretation of artworks, especially to computer graphics. Importantly, these three concepts operate on quite different logical levels. While “cybernetic art” is an umbrella term for a number of artworks, “systems aesthetics” is an analytical term—strategically proposed by Jack Burnham in 1968—that denotes a paradigm ordering a certain field of artistic practice, whereas “information aesthetics” refers to a particular, mathematically grounded analytical method brought to bear on algorithmically derived artworks. If cybernetics provides models for the controllability of processes, systems theory is a theory of interdependencies which developed alongside cybernetics and outlasted it as a descriptive paradigm. Information aesthetics, born from the exuberant self-confidence of 1930s mathematics that had also spawned cybernetics, lost its relevance together with the latter.³³ Importantly, cybernetic art and systems aesthetics, while being predicated on the emergence of computer technologies in the 1950s and 1960s, are not necessarily “algorithmic.” Their works often use nonalgorithmic interactive setups, and apply notions of process, environment, and systems in a general, not in a specifically technical sense.

The earliest example of an exploration of cybernetics by an artist were the efforts by the Hungarian-born Nicolas Schöffer who had installed himself in Paris in the mid-1930, after completing his studies in Budapest. Schöffer initially worked as a painter in the tradition of the modernist avant-garde. After returning to Paris from a provincial exile in the Auvergne during the Second World War, Schöffer established the self-styled “movement” of “Spatio-Dynamism” in 1948. Its goal was “the total liberation of sculpture” by employing only openly visible constructions and flat, rhythmical elements, primary colors, and sounds that are drawn directly from the sculpture, electronically recorded, and amplified: “and finally, movement that is autonomous, organic, we could even say intelligent, thanks to cybernetics, which allows the sculpture to offer to the spectators a spectacle that is always varied and different, realizing in a single object a total synthesis of sculpture, painting, choreography, music, and cinema.”³⁴ Schöffer claimed that his own “spatiodynamic and cybernetic sculpture CYSP 1 is the first sculpture which realizes in its totality the principles of Spatio-Dynamism.”³⁵

CYSP 1 (1956) is a treelike sculpture standing 2.60 meters high. Its upper half is dominated by nineteen metal sheets of varying sizes and colors, most of them rectangular, some round, which spin around their central vertical axes at different speeds within an irregular aluminum frame construction (figure 3.2). This “treetop” is held up by four vertical metal rods which are placed on a barrel-shaped base 60 centimeters in diameter and 40 centimeters high, itself supported by several invisible motor-driven wheels. The fact that this motor unit was hidden undermines Schöffer’s claim that he used only “openly visible constructions.” Housed in the base is also a custom-made computer that controls a traction motor, a direction motor, and nineteen micromotors which spin the colored metal sheets. The computer receives signals from two microphones and two photoelectric cells, and changes the movement parameters of the metal sheets, and of the sculpure as a whole, according to these acoustic and optical impulses. Schöffer later wrote: “This is the first sculpture to have a human-like self-determined behaviour: the information received by the microphones, electronic eyes, etc., once processed, induces the sculpture to react (lights, motions, movements, sounds, etc.) according to the events evolving or occurring in its environment.”³⁶

Figure 3.2 Nicolas Schöffer, CYSP 1 (1956). Courtesy of Eléonore de Lavandeyra Schöffer © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

The categories in which Schöffer evaluated the success of his sculpture were aesthetic rather than technical; what he was proud of was not so much having constructed an autonomous machine (the term seems widely absent from his vocabulary), but having created an autonomously operating artwork and kinetic sculpture whose movements are not predetermined and that stands in a dynamic relationship with its environment.

CYSP 1 was developed in cooperation with the Paris branch of the Dutch Philips company and was first presented in Paris in spring 1956; soon afterward, it was shown as part of a ballet performance on the roof of Le Corbusier’s new Cité Radieuse building in Marseille, with dancers of the famous troupe of French choreographer Maurice Béjart.³⁷ Consequently, CYSP 1 was frequently shown as a signature piece of early cybernetic art, including at “Cybernetic Serendipity” (ICA London, 1968) and “Electra” (Paris, 1983). In the context of our focus on the 1968 and 1970 exhibitions, it is interesting to note that CYSP 1 had also been included in a solo exhibition of Schöffer’s works at the London ICA in 1960, and at the Jewish Museum in New York in a 1965 exhibition, “Two Kinetic Sculptors: Nicolas Schöffer and Jean Tinguely”—five years before Burnham’s “Software” exhibition there.³⁸

Schöffer developed the first of several “spatio-dynamic” towers in 1954, an outdoor structure that responded to the urban environment, similarly to how CYSP 1 reacted to its immediate surroundings. In cooperation with the Philips and Saint-Gobain companies, Schöffer went on to develop a House with Invisible Doors (Maison à Cloisons Invisibles), with dynamically differentiated zones of temperature, color, light, and sound, for the Salon of Public Works in Paris in 1957.³⁹ And soon after, in 1961, he realized, again in cooperation with Philips, the largest of the tower structures, the Spatiodynamic and Cybernetic Tower of Liège (Tour Spatiodynamique et Cybernétique de Liège), standing 56 meters tall.⁴⁰ This artistic work evolved in dialogue with a growing general interest in the application of cybernetic principles to urban environments which Schöffer described in his book The Cybernetic City, first published in 1969.⁴¹

In retrospect, CYSP 1 and other works by Schöffer appear to be realizations of speculations that László Moholy-Nagy had formulated three decades earlier.⁴² In 1925, Moholy-Nagy had envisioned a “simultaneous, synoptic, synacoustic (optical or phonetically mechanical) representation of thought (cinema, gramophone, loudspeaker) or a design of thoughts that interlock like cogs.”⁴³ Moholy-Nagy pointed toward a formalistic, media-based aesthetics whose first glimpses he recognized in his own work with light, in cameraless photography and filmmaking: “Investigations, experiments, theories of color and light, abstract displays of light images—as yet far too fragmentary and isolated—point towards the future, though they cannot as yet provide a precise picture of anything like the future’s scope.”⁴⁴

Despite this uncertainty, Moholy-Nagy recognized the early 1920s objectivist aesthetics of concrete art, established by Theo van Doesburg and others, and later adopted by the Abstraction-Création group, as a precursor to his own work in this area: “But one result has already emerged from these efforts: the clear recognition that apart from all individual emotion, apart from the purely subjective attitude of the spectator, objective factors determine the effectiveness of an optical work of art: factors conditioned by the material qualities of the optical medium of expression.”⁴⁵

For Nicolas Schöffer, technical precision, transparency of means, and the autonomous operation of sculpture, enabled by the technologies of cybernetics, would become a prerequisite of its “total liberation”—a self-determined behavior that Schöffer curiously had called “human-like,” somewhat defeating the promise of machinic freedom. This was first and foremost an aesthetic program, similar to Moholy-Nagy’s stated motivation for employing technical means:

The mechanical and technical requisites of art … were, until recently, condemned on the grounds that manual skill, the “personal touch,” should be regarded as the essential thing in art. Today they already hold their own in the conflict of opinions; tomorrow they will triumph; the day after tomorrow they will yield results accepted without question. Brushwork, the subjective manipulation of a tool is lost, but the clarity of formal relationships is increased to an extent almost transcending the limits of matter; an extent in which the objective context becomes transparently clear. Maximum precision, the law of the norm, replaces the misinterpreted significance of manual skill.⁴⁶

It is striking how close Schöffer and Moholy-Nagy are in their conceptual treatment of technology in art. The purpose of juxtaposing them here is not to forcibly construct a lineage, but to point to a continuity in which the cybernetic art of the 1950s drew key concepts from the earlier generation of artists. Schöffer’s spatiodynamic light works of the 1960s, such as Chronos 5 (1960), a sculpture which projects moving lights and shadows onto the surrounding walls of a space, appear to be continuations of the vision which Moholy-Nagy himself had sought to realize in his Light Prop for an Electrical Stage (1930).⁴⁷ Also around 1960, the German artists of the Zero group, especially Günther Uecker and Otto Piene, experimented with such mechanically programmed light environments. By the same token, the sculptural aspects of Schöffer’s work developed in response to Alexander Calder’s mobiles of the 1930s and 1940s, and in dialogue with Jean Tinguely, whose work was regularly exhibited together with Schöffer’s, starting with the “Salon des Realitées Nouvelles” at Galerie Denise René in 1955.

Yet for Schöffer, who had read Norbert Wiener’s books early in the 1950s, the conceptual context of this type of work was not art history, but an aesthetic appropriation of cybernetics.⁴⁸ According to his own definition, formulated in 1983,

Cybernetics is the awareness of the process that keeps phenomena in balance. It is the science of efficiency and government by the organized control of all information, including the data that concern perturbations of every kind. These perturbations are processed so as to achieve the optimum regulation of every organic, physical or aesthetic phenomenon. The result is therefore a fluid permanence in flexible balance. In this balance every appearance of a tendency toward periodicity or stagnation triggers the intervention of the perturbations needed to maintain the openness and the contingent character of any evolving process.⁴⁹

Such an explicit aesthetic engagement with the principles of cybernetic feedback and control mechanisms as Schöffer’s was rare among artists, especially before 1968. In Britain, the artists of the Independent Group, among them Richard Hamilton, Edoardo Paolozzi, John McHale, and others, reflected on cybernetics as a general concept for the growing interrelations between human, technology, and the environment, most prominently in their contribution to the exhibition “This Is Tomorrow” at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1956.⁵⁰ The year before, Hamilton had organized an exhibition in Newcastle upon Tyne which consequently also went to the ICA in London and which, under the title of “Man Machine and Motion,” presented a maze of reproductions of photographs and other images dealing with the relations of human and machine, especially through the themes of motion and mobility on land, sea, air, and outer space.⁵¹ Although these were some of the contexts that cybernetics research addressed, Hamilton treated them merely as cultural and design phenomena. Reyner Banham, an architecture theorist associated with the Independent Group, was outspokenly dismissive about cybernetics and uninterested in computers, while his thinking in the 1960s about a distributive and sustainable architecture was strongly influenced by the systems-theoretical concept of fusing architecture, environment, and technology.⁵²

The Independent Group’s conception of cybernetics was “precomputational.” Banham’s critique of modernist architecture set the idea of a “Second Machine Age” off against the “first,” which was the age of industrialization; the Second Machine Age was that of “domestic electronics and synthetic chemistry,” focused on the transformation of domestic life which Sigfried Giedion had described in his 1948 study, Mechanization Takes Command.⁵³ The artists of the Independent Group approached cybernetics in the same spirit as they absorbed other aspects of mass culture, advertising, and modern technology, i.e., as a way of opening up the arts—much in the spirit, by the way, of the early Tatlin—without following, as Schöffer did, the ideological agenda of cybernetics.⁵⁴

British artist and educator Roy Ascott employed a different approach in his teaching methods, starting in 1961, in his “Groundcourse” at Ealing College of Art.⁵⁵ Without making explicit reference to or even using computer technology, Ascott based his teaching on cybernetic and systems-theoretical principles like feedback, interaction, process, adaptation, cooperation, and interdependence, and used tools like calibrators, charts, and mind maps. His approach harked back to Alfred North Whitehead who, in Process and Reality (1929), had affirmed the role of processes (instead of substances) as constituents of the world.⁵⁶

In the wake of the emergence of second-order cybernetics in the early 1960s, another aspect of cybernetics adopted by artists was the inclusion of the observer’s agency in the cybernetic system and the resulting creation of complex systems in which input and output devices were not “mechanically” and rationally relayed, but in which apparent, causal effects were crossed with feedback mechanisms, resulting in unpredictable output from the cybernetic black box. A case in point were some of the performances of the event series 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering in 1966, which had been organized by Billy Klüver, bringing together artists from the New York avant-garde with engineers from Bell Labs.⁵⁷ The project had been launched to explore the innovative potential of art for industrial contexts of technical invention, and the artists—including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Lucinda Childs—used the possibilities of working with a team of advanced technical engineers to varying, at times excessive degrees. The most technically elaborate setup was created by the musician and composer David Tudor with engineer Fred Waldhauer for Bandoneon! (a combine). The bandoneon that Tudor played during the performance was equipped with sensors whose output would be used to control electronic sound, image, and light events from a variety of sources, some of which were loudspeakers and other sound-emitting elements, placed on remote-controlled platforms that moved around the stage during the performance. Unlike CYSP 1, the Bandoneon! system did not use negative feedback input to control and moderate the behavior of the equipment. Rather, Tudor’s system allowed for positive feedback between sound devices spinning into a sonic frenzy that could be interrupted by the artist by means of a switch readily installed on his instrument.⁵⁸ The individual events and the logic of their sequence remained obscure for audience members, who could only guess that the bandoneon player in front, assisted by a handful of engineers operating the technical equipment on stage during the performance, was somehow triggering what was going on. Tudor himself appears to have felt as if he were working on an overly powerful interface whose complexity he could not yet master, and whose beyond-control aspects became a crucial factor of the aesthetic experience of the performance.

The historic relevance of the exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” in 1968 is pinpointed by the fact that it came at a moment when cybernetics-inspired artworks still frequently exhibited the type of functional obscurity seen in Tudor’s Bandoneon! or merely made tentative and widely metaphorical references to cybernetics, as Ascott’s experiments did. Soon after 1968, the field of artistic work that actively used computers expanded rapidly—one need only think of the international New Tendencies movement of computer artists, or of Stephen Willats’s behavior projects, or of the British Computer Arts Society’s 1970 Ecogame, which was presented in Davos in 1971 and then in 1975 became part of the permanent exhibition of the London Science Museum’s “Computing Then and Now” section.⁵⁹ “Cybernetic Serendipity” attempted the first international overview of work from different artistic and technical disciplines that was inspired by cybernetics and systems theory, at the very moment Pontus Hultén’s exhibition at the New York MoMA was uneasily celebrating the end of the mechanical machine paradigm.⁶⁰

As an exhibition, “Cybernetic Serendipity” was an art show as much as a demonstration of new technologies and cybernetic principles. It contained contemporary art works next to computer suites and other electronic and digital equipment. One of the central exhibits was The Colloquy of Mobiles by psychologist and cybernetician Gordon Pask, an interactive installation that was hung from the ceiling and consisted of five separate units equipped with light and sound input and output devices (figure 3.3). Each of the five units had mobile parts and could, additionally, turn around its vertical axis. The units communicated among each other by means of light and sound signals which, depending on the current state of the separate communicating units, triggered movements or new sound or light events.⁶¹ The individual units had certain “goals” set for themselves, and in trying to achieve these goal states, the installation as a whole went through ever-changing cycles of flashing, turning, sounding, responding, and reflecting effects. Exhibition visitors were invited to participate in the complex feedback system by flashing torches at one or the other unit, triggering behavioral changes and thus tendentially influencing the operation of the entire installation.

Figure 3.3 Gordon Pask, The Colloquy of Mobiles (1968), installation view at the “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition at ICA London. Photo by Amanda Heitler.

Pask explicitly called the installation not an artwork but a “demonstration of an idea.”⁶² He had studied engineering and psychology in the 1940s and 1950s and had first explored the aesthetics of cybernetic principles in an electrical instrument invented by Pask himself, Musicolor, which dynamically connected sound and visual effects in a live performance.⁶³ Pask’s main interests were processes of organization and of learning, and he started experimenting with cybernetic “learning machines” in the 1950s. In 1961 he published Approaches to Cybernetics, in which he sought to provide an in-depth overview of its topic and areas of application.⁶⁴ Three years later, he proposed a Cybernetic Theater that would involve the audience on all levels of the unfolding action and that explicated his growing interest in participatory and interactive systems.

A direct comparison of Pask’s The Colloquy of Mobiles (1968) with Rokeby’s n-cha(n)t (2001) provides interesting insights. The installations are formally similar, with their five (Colloquy) and seven (n-cha(n)t) units suspended from the ceiling; both works present these units as relatively independent agents, equipped with a set of rules and a set of possible behaviors, as well as protocols for the communication between the units. This communication leads to a continuously volatile and changing process in the case of Colloquy, whereas the units in n-cha(n)t eventually fall into a unison chant. The units in Colloquy communicate through light and sound events, which they perceive in different manners depending on their current receptive states, and depending on their physical position in space. In n-cha(n)t, such physical, spatial positionality is irrelevant for the computer systems; the relative placement of the computers in the installation space is purely symbolic, conveying to exhibition visitors the idea of a distributed group. Communication between the units in n-cha(n)t takes place through the exchange and processing of digital data via an ethernet network. Only the microphones on the computer units open n-cha(n)t up to the surrounding space and to potentially interacting visitors. While in Colloquy the interaction (via flashlights) takes place in the idiom that the installation units also use as their means of communication, the words spoken by the visitors in n-cha(n)t first have to be translated from acoustic speech to digitally coded text before they can be inserted into the stream of words of the computer units. For the visitor, the sculptural aspects of Pask’s Colloquy and the interaction with the torches are engaging on a physical level, while the vocal and visual aspects of Rokeby’s installation (especially the video images of human ears) have a strongly empathetic impact. The interaction between the units in Colloquy is hard to follow and its logic remains alien to the visitor, even if he or she has decoded some of the mechanisms and can actively engage with the work, rather than eliciting merely accidental responses. The language-based interaction between the computers in n-cha(n)t, in contrast, suggests the possibility of the human visitor both understanding and communicating with the technical system.

Irrespective of its interactive dimension, The Colloquy of Mobiles was a surprising work and conceptually challenging even for people versed in kinetic art, because the open program of this dynamic system made it impossible to predict the concrete behavior of its units. However, its more or less self-contained nature also created an aesthetic distance which another prominent work in the “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition deliberately challenged: Edward Ihnatowicz’s Sound-Activated Mobile (SAM) was a small interactive sculpture that responded to sounds made by the exhibition visitors, with movements that appeared like sensible reactions (figure 3.4).⁶⁵ The kinetic sculpture stood about 50 centimeters high and was placed on a pedestal that hid the computer hardware controlling the mechanism. The lower part of the sculpture consisted of a “spine” of eight aluminum vertebrae-like castings. They could be moved against each other by means of a hydraulic system, resulting in complex and fluid movements of the “head” made of fiber glass and designed in the shape of four intersecting petals, each equipped with a small microphone. The placement of these microphones enabled the detection of the direction and frequency of sounds, allowing for a set of programmed, incidental responses to sounds made by exhibition visitors. As visitors spoke, hummed, or whistled, the head of the sculpture would bend toward or away from them, suggesting immediate and empathetic, idiosyncratic interpretations by the apparatus of whatever was going on in front of the sculpture.

Figure 3.4 Edward Ihnatowicz, Sound-Activated Mobile (SAM) (1968), exhibition view of “Cybernetic Serendipity,” SAM in the foreground with visitors. Courtesy of Richard Ihnatowicz.

Ihnatowicz’s SAM set up a situation in which there was both behavioral and communicative feedback between the apparatus and the human interactor. It thus stood in contrast to the autonomous interaction of elements in Pask’s Colloquy which a human participant could only intervene in without changing the rules of the installation’s internal interaction. At the same time, SAM was more “extroverted” and more explicitly interactive than, some decades later, the choir of computers in Rokeby’s n-cha(n)t which appear most contented when left to themselves and undisturbed.

These three installations represent different models of cybernetic art: the extrovert model that seeks and requires interaction between human and machine (SAM) and that results in excessive behavior of the technical device (SAM, similar to Bandoneon!), and the introvert model that is either indifferent (Colloquy) or openly deprecative toward human intervention or disturbance (n-cha(n)t) and that seeks more or less homeostatic equilibrium in the interaction of the articulated technical units.

To understand the particularity of the appropriation of cybernetic principles in art, it is useful to take a brief look at a parallel development in the 1960s: the development of systems aesthetics, which evolved not from mathematical cybernetics, but from ecological systems theory. In a text published in the US art magazine Artforum in 1968, the year of both “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” and “Cybernetic Serendipity,” American artist, critic, and curator Jack Burnham proposed the concept of “systems aesthetics” to describe what he had observed as a development in contemporary art that was gradually gaining prominence. The perspective of systems aesthetics highlights artistic practices that are oriented toward evolving processes, rather than toward complete objects and closed works, and that involve the surrounding environment as well as the visitor in the aesthetic production.⁶⁶ According to Burnham, this new aesthetic paradigm was engendered by a new sociotechnical reality and its demands, making it increasingly urgent to “[maintain] the biological livability of the Earth, [produce] more accurate models of social interaction, [understand] the growing symbiosis in man-machine relationships, [establish] priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and [define] alternate patterns of education, productivity, and leisure.”⁶⁷ Burnham’s main reference was the general systems theory that Ludwig von Bertalanffy had been developing since the 1930s, which was meant to be applicable to biological, social, and technical systems.⁶⁸ Burnham maintained that contemporary challenges required adequate responses both in social and in aesthetic practice: “We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.”⁶⁹ Systems aesthetics advocated an alliance of systems theory and contemporary art which was already under way, focusing on the “priorities of the present age”: organization, information, and interaction.

Importantly, Burnham was putting forward an art critical argument—he was not out to proselytize on behalf of using technology, though he did, in a lecture delivered at the Guggenheim Museum in 1969, argue for the need to actively engage with computers. In his seminal 1968 text, Burnham attempted to find terms to describe and interpret a certain postformalist and conceptual art practice, as represented by artists like Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, Les Levine, or Dan Flavin. Burnham was responding directly to Michael Fried’s much debated 1967 critique of minimalist art and claimed: “The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment.”⁷⁰

Burnham’s considerations underpinned the curatorial concept of the “Software” show which he organized at the Jewish Museum two years later, and which attempted to explicate the concept of systems aesthetics through an exhibition of contemporary works.⁷¹ Prominently featured in both the Artforum text and the exhibition was Hans Haacke, who had realized environmental artworks inspired by Otto Piene and others in the 1960s and who was only beginning to engage more directly with social and political issues. Writing about Haacke’s interactive environment Photo-Electric Viewer Programmed Coordinate System (1968), which responded interactively to the visitor’s presence in the exhibition space, Burnham outlines three important features of systems aesthetics: it is environmental, in that there is no distinct boundary between the artwork and its surroundings; it is interactive, following von Bertalanffy’s definition of a system as a “complex of components in interaction”;⁷² and it is autonomous, in the sense that the viewer does not control the meaning, but witnesses it.

The historical references that Burnham proposed in his seminal text describe a constellation of constructivism, conceptual art, and systems aesthetics which, on another level, reflect key coordinates of the aesthetics of the machine and its transgression which we are tracing in this study. Burnham points to Marcel Duchamp’s conceptualization of art, the postwar claim for the production of mass art by Victor Vasarely, and the recognition of the aesthetic importance of information by László Moholy-Nagy in the Telephone Pictures (1923). Finally, he suggests that systems aesthetics might be the realization of a transformation in art that had been prefigured, yet had remained unrealized, in the productivist manifesto of Tatlin and his combatants in 1920; Burnham explains: “Rather than a novel way of rearranging surfaces and spaces, it [systems aesthetics] is fundamentally concerned with the implementation of the art impulse in an advanced technological society.”⁷³

Systems aesthetics thus also represented an attitude toward technology that was significantly different from that of cybernetic art. Whereas cybernetic art developed situations in which the technical devices were more or less autonomous and explored the relationship between the installations and the users or exhibition visitors interacting with them, systems aesthetics looked at the contexts or environments in which artists, artworks, technical structures, and visitors coexisted as interdependent agents. Such a systems-ecological conception of a technological society had no place for a notion of a “machine” that would be opposed to human subjects; instead, it was an integrated conception in which the different systemic elements formed a dynamic continuum. Cybernetic art, in contrast, inherited the ambivalent notion of the machine from cybernetics, which sees the machine both as a concrete, functional principle and as a metaphor for the abstract “mechanics” of mathematics. This ambivalence reinforces the aesthetic aspect of an automatism that resides both in the independence of operations and decision making, based on the hardware and software programming of the artworks, and in the distance that these works set up in relation to an exhibition visitor. The “solitude of machines” (as Gregory Chatonsky put it) haunts works like CYSP 1, The Colloquy of Mobiles, and n-cha(n)t, whereas in contrast, the works that Burnham promoted under the label of systems aesthetics, like Haacke’s Ice Stick or his Photo-Electric Viewer Programmed Coordinate System, design an environmental copresence in which neither such a loneliness, nor even the sense of an addressable machine Other, can take shape.⁷⁴

Algorithmic Automatism

An algorithm is a formal statement that describes a procedure necessary to perform a defined task. In computer systems, algorithms define recursive procedures which are implemented in a code that makes it possible to execute the defined procedures in a given hardware and software environment.⁷⁵ Algorithms can be conceived as individual “machines,” combinations of different symbolic elements which together can be used for a specific task. Concatenated into an assemblage, or installation, these individual “machines” can be used for different forms of digital production. In their practical applications, such algorithmically based systems can, for instance, generate images, design objects, or control and shape human-machine interactions. In the arts, as well as in many other fields, they have found the most diverse uses.

An important aspect of the algorithm is that it is a basic principle of computers which in itself cannot be perceived and can barely be fathomed, and thus it features aesthetically only as an abstract, intuitive concept. Algorithms are the conceptual nanomachines that operate in a computer without attaining any sort of visibility or tangibility themselves. Their rational, yet—from a regular user’s or observer’s perspective—obscure processing on integrated circuits forms the basis of the mysteriousness of computers.⁷⁶ In the analogue world, an explanation for the type of inscrutable relations of cause and effect that they engender—for the gap between the machine operation of running algorithm-based code and the ensuing event—would have to draw on some sort of animism.

The following section does not offer a truncated history of computer art, but is rather an attempt to home in on the aesthetic aspects that are based on the application of algorithms in art. Given the machinelike conception of algorithms, a crucial aspect of machine aesthetics—namely, automatism—appears in two separate guises: as mechanical automatism and as algorithmic automatism.

Interactive

The specificities of a “digital aesthetics” have received widespread attention.⁷⁷ Authors have identified aspects such as calculability and quantification, control and chance, and the application of digital code in networked and interactive environments, as some of the crucial aesthetic dimensions. In our present context, the encounter of human and technical systems is of particular relevance. While many interactive artworks hinge on the resulting events and phenomena that digital media enable, the technical devices that engender them tend to be taken as less important than the interactions or events themselves.

The interface provides the tools and representations by which the user can communicate his or her decisions and interact with the computer system. Importantly, this interaction takes place between the human user and the interface, while the control of the system and the tasks it performs take place within the system, the computing and the output units, based on the input they receive from the interface. Artists have explored, both affirmatively and critically, the interfaces of the communication settings that they construct.⁷⁸ While, for instance, the modules in Gordon Pask’s Colloquy are functionally self-contained and the visitor can only influence or disturb them by intervening in the intrasystemic communication by flashing a flashlight, Edward Ihnatowicz’s SAM provides immediate kinetic responses to sounds made in front of the sculpture, thus constructing a dialogical situation with the exhibition visitor. Similarly responsive interactive works include Ihnatowicz’s Senster (1970), which responded to movements and sounds made by human interlocutors, Simon Penny’s movement-sensing two-wheeled robot Petit Mal (1989–2005), and Canadian artist Max Dean’s Table (1984–2001), a robotic table that repositions itself in space in reaction to the position and movement of exhibition visitors.⁷⁹ These works are designed for the interactive exchange of a human visitor with a technical object that appears animate and that seems capable of acting dialogically.⁸⁰

Interactivity in art has frequently been heralded as a form of opening up formerly closed aesthetic systems,⁸¹ as a form of art that presents the world not as representation, but as something that one can take part in. But interactive artworks have also been criticized for programming the user and his or her behavior—a criticism that has followed computer-based art “like a shadow,” as Margit Rosen puts it, since the 1960s.⁸² From game theory to the latest developments in interactive computer games and digital “gamification,” the degrees of freedom enabled in such supposedly playful environments has been under discussion.⁸³

An exceptional case of an interactive artistic practice that engages directly with computer code is the live-programming performances by British artist Alex McLean (since 2000). McLean programs and modifies electronic sounds as the performance unfolds, and the screen interface of the computer that he uses for this programming practice is projected in the performance space for the visitors and listeners to see. The interaction between computer and human—in this case not the audience, but the artist performer—constantly transforms the sonic environment in a more or less direct engagement with the computer code. It is exciting not only for the performer, but also for the audience, because together they are observing the screen interface of the processing computer as it systematically translates written code into sound, and hear the sound change as the code is modified. The excitement, especially of a nerdy crowd in a live-coding performance, emanates from the titillation at the border of machine rationality, logical understanding, and the visceral affection created by the rhythmic sounds.⁸⁴

A core principle of information theory that became the foundation for twentieth-century computation is formed by the description of tasks as mathematical and computable problems, their formalization as items that can be taken through recursive loops of “if,” “not,” “then,” etc., and the opening and closing of gates on circuits that process data. Claude Shannon, one of the founders of information theory, constructed a box called the “Ultimate Machine” (or alternatively, “Little Black Box” or “On/Off-Machine”) which expressed a rudimentary function of interaction.⁸⁵ On its outside, the little box has a switch; when this switch is turned on, the lid of the box slowly opens, an artificial hand appears and, driven by an invisible mechanism, moves toward the switch, which it pushes and turns back off, upon which the hand disappears again and the lid closes, returning the box to its idle state. It is thus a machine that is programmed to switch itself off whenever it is switched on.

A similar, only slightly more complex scenario that questioned the basic parameters of human-machine interaction, of automatism and the machinic coupling of information and control, was constructed by the Austrian media and conceptual artist Peter Weibel for his cybernetic performance Synthesis of Two Sequential Machines (1967). In this work, the artist sits at a table with a tape recorder, and upon saying the German word for “on,” he switches the tape recorder on. After a few moments, we hear the word “off” emanate from the tape recorder, whereupon the artist performer switches the recorder off again, only to repeat the cycle again after a short time (figure 3.5).⁸⁶ The interaction in this closed system is limited to the giving and following of instructions, the on and off buttons of the recorder attaining the same structural function as the uttering of a word by the performer or the recorder. It is structured by a simple algorithm that defines the actions to be performed in response to specific events—the most critical being, apparently, that the performer must say the word for “on,” a few moments after he or she has switched off the tape recorder.

Figure 3.5 Peter Weibel, Synthesis of Two Sequential Machines, Human-Machine Interaction (1967–1972), video stills. Courtesy of the artist.

A technically more complex interaction between a human user and a computer system was designed by German artist Peter Dittmer in the 1990s. Dittmer’s Die Amme (The Wet-Nurse) is an interactive installation centered around a written and real-time dialogue between the exhibition visitor and the installation’s computer (figure 3.6). The dialogue takes place at a computer terminal that is integrated into the larger structure of the installation, which also includes a large rack with electronic and electromechanical equipment. The conceptual center of the work is a glass of milk standing in a large glass case where it is placed on a hatch so that, when the hatch opens, the glass is tipped over and the milk is spilled. The mechanism of the hatch is connected to the language program that conducts the dialogue with the visitors, but whether the milk will spill and, if so, the moment when it spills are unpredictable and not connected to an obvious theme, or keyword, or duration of the conversation.⁸⁷

Figure 3.6 Peter Dittmer, Die Amme_2 (The Wet-Nurse 2) (1994–2001), installation view at Oktogon, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, 2001. Copyright © the artist.

The installation, which was realized in several versions, does not seek a Turing-test-like blurring of the borders between human and machine expression. Unlike Wolfgang von Kempelen’s “chess Turk” (1769), the installation is open at the bottom and freely displays that there is no midget hidden under the table. Rather, as Dittmer writes, “it is a work about the scandal of a thing that appropriates language.” The Wet-Nurse uses language in an erratic and unrefined way; it does not seek to make the conversation smooth, nor does it try to hide its nonhuman nature. It “uses banal phrases and exhibits a regressive, offensive banality, a bottomless way of speaking, it deranges the usual economy of the speech act, produces enlightenment through anti-enlightenment posturing, it contradicts.”⁸⁸

The exchange between the visitor and The Wet-Nurse is complicated and confrontational, and if it results in the spilling of the milk—as absurd as it is destructive—this discrete event tends to come at the wrong moment, frustrating the idea of interactivity as meaningful reciprocation. But, as philosopher Martin Burckhardt has pointed out in his interpretation of the piece, this anti-interactivity has another aspect which runs contrary to the “programming” of the visitor in interactive art: “There is an eminent radicality in Dittmer’s decision to treat the human counterpart of the Wet-Nurse not as an executive body of prefigured and limited possibilities and thus as an agent of ‘multiple choice,’ but to accept him in his full complexity (insofar as writing can mediate this complexity).”⁸⁹

At the same time, The Wet-Nurse raises an anthropological question. While the romanticist homunculi and spirits, “these unworthy pretenders, … magnifying glasses that diffracted and distorted human attributes,” only simulated human life, Martin Burckhardt writes, “this contemptible double [The Wet-Nurse] summons up the commedia humana, confirming that being human is by no means an inborn, innate quality, but one that needs to be learned (a learning process that can also go wrong).”⁹⁰

We remember such a (presumed) learning process from Rokeby’s The Giver of Names, but while that system seemed curious, eager to recognize and learn and make sense of the objects placed in front of it, The Wet-Nurse is obstinate and recalcitrant, learning—if at all—by opposition rather than by emulation. It might be this recalcitrance which makes The Wet-Nurse so typical: “The dialectical character of the Wet-Nurse can be seen in the fact that it manages to get closer to its human interlocutor than any simulacrum modelled on the human image ever could, while not for a moment ceasing to remind us of its mechanical character.”⁹¹

The formal aesthetics of Dittmer’s Wet-Nurse installation, as well as its title and function, which allude to the nurturing and consumptive nature of the intercourse between human and machine, may remind us of other artistic machines, like Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca (2000)—that apparatus of digestion and defecation⁹²—and for that matter, Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass with its brides and bachelors, articulated and disarticulated machines, presented in a maze of transparencies and frames. Together, the three works constitute a triangle of vital functions—nutrition, digestion, and sexuality—which refer both to the animal nature of humans and to a machinic understanding of the physiological processes they describe.

Cybernetic Illusion

At least in its ideological proclamations, cybernetics rejects a distinction between human, biological, and technical processes. Arguing why the term “behavior” can also be applied to technical systems, Rosenblueth and Wiener write:

We believe that men and other animals are like machines from the scientific standpoint because we believe that the only fruitful methods for the study of human and animal behavior are the methods applicable to the behavior of mechanical objects as well. Thus the main reason for selecting the terms in question was to emphasize that, as objects of scientific enquiry, humans do not differ from machines.⁹³

As in many other cases, the term “machine” is here used for a technical system that is regarded not in isolation but in relation to humans. In this sense, Rosenblueth and Wiener’s statement on the continuity between “men, animals and machines” in cybernetics could be taken to suggest not a technomorphic conception of humans and animals—the idea that humans and animals are like machines—but an anthropomorphic conception of technical systems.⁹⁴

In a remarkable passage on the epistemology of cybernetics, media historian Claus Pias has speculated about the lessons to be drawn from the epistemological antihumanism of Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and others. Pias suggests that, in an analogy to the break from the classical to the modern episteme that Foucault diagnoses for the time around 1800, cybernetics introduced a new order around 1950: “If there once was a shift from metaphysical illusion to anthropological illusion, then there must be some kind of cybernetic illusion.”⁹⁵ Driving the analogy between humanism and cybernetics further, he offers the following speculation:

If the new “experimental epistemology” is based on “information,” it is based on something that is a no less ambiguous figure than “Man” was before. … If the attempt to think a noncontradictive unity of Man produced illusions, then why should the attempt to think a non-contradictive unity of technology be without illusions? … According to Foucault it was part of the anthropological illusion to [miss the fact] that Man was constructed by technologies of power and knowledge, and that it was a phantasmagoric form of self-naturalization that shaded or [hid] these technologies. So the question might be, if there was a similar kind of theoretical shift in the history of cybernetics. A shift from experiments to instruments, from hypothetical constructions and pataphysical machines (just remember the discussions on laughing computers at Macy’s) to instrumental hardware and institutionalized computer science, from speculations to explanations, from questions about the in-betweens to certainties of answers.⁹⁶

Pias proposes looking to the second-order cybernetician Heinz von Förster for a critical perspective on cybernetic illusions. Von Förster pledged respect for material culture, and argued against the totalitarian conception that the whole world is computable; as Pias put it, von Förster made a plea “for keeping cybernetics experimental instead of instrumental, and [for raising] questions instead of providing solutions.”⁹⁷

One form that such experiments took were the artworks that engaged algorithmic and cybernetic systems. Importantly, artworks like those discussed here created a rapport between technical systems and human observers that explicates, problematizes, and at times dramatizes the relation between humans and machines. At the core of the aesthetic experience in the human encounter with such works is the challenge that the functionalism of technology, especially of digital technologies, poses for the self-conception of humans.

Echoing Pias’s call for experimentation, David Rokeby has pointed to the need to openly address the human-machine relationship:

The presence of the computer in our culture represents a fairly radical shift in balance. Having an external device capable of logical processing and precise memory poses interesting challenges and opportunities. For the most part we have failed to take useful advantage of the potentials of these devices, and have allowed the ease with which they do certain kinds of things to effectively determine the agenda of “progress.” We need to make new kinds of demands on them. They need to be critically examined from a very human perspective, not in a knee-jerk Luddite manner, but as a way of understanding ourselves and the peculiarly human desires that caused us to invent such a machine. The computer is a kind of wishful self-portrait … a compendium of abilities we have as humans aspired to but are not very gifted at. We need a much clearer understanding of this complex relationship. Without this understanding we will be unable to find an appropriate partnership with our creations.⁹⁸

Such pleas for critically engaging machines are, of course, not new. In their own ways, MoMA director Alfred Barr and the Italian futurist Bruno Munari had pointed to the same urgent need for building a partnership with machines in the 1930s, and both had advocated a strong role, even a responsibility, for artists in that investigation.⁹⁹

Autonomous

In addition to interactive artworks, a second class of artworks explores the relation of humans to technology not by setting up interactive situations, but by constructing more or less autonomous and self-contained devices and installations which a visitor can only observe, and not actively interact with. As in the example of Shannon’s Little Black Box, the reception of such works strongly hinges on the degree of transparency or intransparency of the technical mechanism. The kinetic installation Rechnender Raum—Inverted Machine (RR) (2007) by the German artist Ralf Baecker is a 3-by-3-meter point-symmetrical structure of wooden sticks, strings, and some electronic units, which in its delicate internal movements displays the calculations of a neural network (figure 3.7). Baecker explains that the units of Rechnender Raum “operate similar to a very basic artifical neural network. Like a McCulloch-Pitts-Neuron with static weights (threshold) it implements the basic Boolean functions NOT/AND/OR. RR consists of over 200 Boolean units that form a parallel operating cellular automaton.”¹⁰⁰ The kinetic sculpture shows the processing of these algorithmic processes as an endless series of physical operations. It turns the usual structure of a computer inside out, placing the calculating parts demonstratively on the outside, and the simple string display of the results, somewhat hidden, inside of the torus-shaped sculpture. While the mechanism is potentially decodable for people who know the mathematics it represents, the complex physical processing—accompanied by the delicate whirring of the electrical motors that pull the strings—remains, for the regular nonexpert exhibition visitor, as abstract and inscrutable as it is obvious.

Figure 3.7 Ralf Baecker, Rechnender Raum—Inverted Machine (2007). Photo by Ralf Baecker. Copyright © the artist.

The mystique of the black box of the computer is the theme of Italian artist Maurizio Bolognini’s installation Sealed Computers (1992) which we encountered in the prologue, in which an array of typical 1990s desktop computers are placed on the floor of the exhibition space (figure 0.1). The computers are connected to the electricity grid and are networked among each other with ethernet cables. They are without monitors, and the monitor buses on the computers are sealed with wax, making it practically impossible to connect a monitor that would enable checking what processes might be going on inside the computers. The computers are switched on, and the humming and switching of ventilators and clicking hard drives are clearly audible, giving the impression that some sort of calculation and exchange is going on in and between the terminals, but it is impossible for the visitor to know what the content of the computations might be. The visitor’s view of an array of networked black boxes is the more disquieting because their networked state suggests a sort of sociality, a banding together of individual entities. Are they conspiring against us?¹⁰¹

This herd of networked terminals reminds us of Rokeby’s flock of computers in the n-cha(n)t installation, whose activity the human visitor can follow due to the monitor displays and stream-of-consciousness sonification, and can disturb by speaking into one of the microphones. In contrast, Bolognini’s Sealed Computers makes no attempt at such explicit confrontation and reflection. There is no anthropomorphic mirror to look into, just an array of gray boxes, a well-known sight as desktop computers, but strange in their networked configuration, claiming space like a herd of unpredictable animals, and discomforting in their unmonitored processing activity.¹⁰²

In contrast, Canadian artist Max Dean’s Robotic Chair (1985–2006, realized together with Raffaello D’Andrea and Matt Donovan) reflects on the mystique of invisible kinetic mechanisms. The Robotic Chair is a robot that looks like a normal chair and whose performance in the gallery begins with a small catastrophe: at an apparently unpredictable moment, the chair disintegrates at the joints and falls apart completely, its parts noisily falling onto the floor (figure 3.8). However, soon the different parts begin moving toward each other again, joints reconnecting and the whole structure of the furniture reassembling, then pulling itself up until it again stands as the chair that was there before. The parts’ mobilization by means of small motorized wheels, and how the elements find each other and reconnect to form the joints, remain obscure, and even a critical observer is drawn to the mystique of the automatic, apparently self-willed action of the robotic parts. The inanimate parts of a piece of furniture act according to a technical logic that guides them to recompose the form of the chair which had, just a moment ago, destroyed itself, while the observer attempts to understand the mechanism and predict what will happen next. The mystique of the automaton, which had already fascinated Vaucanson’s and von Kempelen’s audiences in the eighteenth century, is heightened by the drastic moment of self-destruction, and by the automatic recomposition from a dispersion of parts that, after the collapse, lie around in a random formation that is different each time.

Figure 3.8 Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea, and Matt Donovan, The Robotic Chair (1985–2006), installation view. National Gallery of Canada Collection. Photo by Nichola Feldman-Kiss. Courtesy of the artist.

Another work by Max Dean, his installation As Yet Untitled (1992–1995), is a similar case of a technical apparatus that continuously operates without human intervention, although here the operation is purely mechanical and without an animistic allusion (figure 3.9). In this work, the arm of an industrial robot elegantly performs the task of picking up printed photographs from a stack and inserting them into a paper shredder. The photographs—found pictures that surely have a personal meaning for someone—are destroyed one by one, unless the exhibition visitor interrupts the process by placing her hands against an interface in the shape of two hands, upon which the current photograph is placed into a repository box and kept. Dean comments:

Figure 3.9 Max Dean, As Yet Untitled (1992–1995), installation view, Art Gallery of Ontario. Courtesy of the artist.

There’s an industrial, mechanical certainty about the machine. It’s been assigned a task and it does it brilliantly and if something doesn’t intercede, it will continue to do it. But there’s no emotion involved in that. The machine is unemotional, so to speak. What I wanted was the certainty of the machine. The machine isn’t investing its activity with value; you’re putting the value into what it’s doing. Part of what makes it complicated is what it’s picking up. I couldn’t think of anything more loaded than snapshots.¹⁰³

The snapshots’ emotional potential, combined with the possibility of an intervention which will prevent the destruction of yet another memory, form the aesthetic core around which Dean’s installation As Yet Untitled constructs the dichotomous structure of human and machine. The apparatus is a “machine” because it sets up the moral dilemma, and because it posits the gallery visitor as a subjective agent who can take a decision that will preserve an equally human memory.

French art and media theorist Edmond Couchot has claimed that the aesthetics of an artwork or installation hinges on the degree to which the subject is given room in the coupling of human and machine.¹⁰⁴ In terms of machine aesthetics, this claim would have to be qualified in that the experience of machine autonomy and the decoupling of human and machine can itself be an aesthetic aspect of the work.

In the face of such autonomous machines, we are reminded of Stibitz’s visit to Norbert Wiener’s laboratory in 1942 and his surprise at the uncanniness of the predictive apparatus that Wiener and his colleagues had designed. In his account of that scene which we already reviewed earlier, science historian Peter Galison suggests as the reason for this uncanny sensation the “ambiguity created when it is unclear whether a mind or merely an inanimate object is at hand.”¹⁰⁵

Such an encounter with “another mind” does not take place in the abstract but is based on the embodiment, in the machinic apparatus, of a mechanical and rule-based structure which appears to enact an alternative to the moralistic, emotional, or nostalgic ways in which humans take decisions. As N. Katherine Hayles writes, introducing the concept of embodiment in her analysis of the history of cybernetics: “What embodiment secures is not the distinction between male and female or between humans who can think and machines which cannot. Rather, embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it.”¹⁰⁶ The aesthetic form of a work of machine art is perceived as “the body” of an entity that the work seems to presuppose. Whatever the work “does” is regarded as the movement and agency of that entity, an entity whose existence is inferred from what is happening. The aesthetics of the machinic is tied to the impression of shock, or bewilderment, or surprise, that such a machine agent engenders as it seems to be “doing its thing” without an artist, an engineer, or an observer, being in control. Its embodiment objectifies and thus affirms its autonomy, which forms another aspect of machine aesthetics.

Whereas Galison introduced the notion of the uncanny in order to pinpoint an “animistic” uncertainty in the mechanistic conceptions of cybernetics, this uncertainty becomes a deliberate aesthetic effect in artworks like Robotic Chair, the Sealed Computers, and n-cha(n)t. The experience of uncanniness relates these works to an aesthetics of the sublime which, in its historical, romantic form, emerged from the estrangement from nature in the era of early industrialization. In the paintings of artists like Caspar David Friedrich, nature is endowed with overwhelming size and force at the very historical moment when dams and canals were being built to tame and control the water, and when geological exploration was laying the foundation for the removal of entire mountains for mineral exploitation. At that time, it was not the new machines that appeared sublime, but the mechanical forces of nature. In contrast, in the algorithmic artworks the sublime emerges from the uncanny impression that there is a will, of sorts, at work in computer systems that makes decisions and acts autonomously. Whether it is a conscious mind, we cannot say, but even the necessity to ask that question, and to have to admit that, from what we see and hear, we cannot determine the answer, creates the aesthetic effect that is germane to the machinic.¹⁰⁷

The apparent encounter with “another mind” is articulated by Japanese artist Seiko Mikami in Desire of Codes (2010), an installation in which the exhibition visitor is not only the observer, but also the passive object of observation of a receptive machine (figure 3.10). The installation consists of three main parts: a flock of six robotic arms suspended from the ceiling, a wall with small robotic units arranged in a grid, and a circular video projection with multiple images in a honeycomb structure.¹⁰⁸

Figure 3.10 Seiko Mikami, Desire of Codes (2010), installation view with “Six Multi Perspective Search Arms” and “Compound Eye Detector Screen.” Commissioned by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), Japan. Photo by Ryuichi Maruo. Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.

Upon entering the gallery, the visitor first encounters six robotic arms that are attached to the ceiling, their lower end at circa 2 meters’ height, each equipped with an infrared sensor, a digital camera, and a small video projector. As the exhibition visitor comes near, the arms register the visitor’s presence and move their videographic “hands” in front of the top of the upright object that they have sensed. The image that the camera records is projected as a small circular video image onto the floor in front of the visitor. The robotic arms are trained to avoid physical contact, so the visitor is confronted by a stack of quietly whirring, floating hardware that moves and quivers, apparently trying to get a good view of the intruder’s face. The projected portrait image immediately indicates that some sort of recording, if not recognition, is taking place. Its displaced position on the floor forces the visitor to look down, to see the image of himself or herself on the ground, disconnected from the body, externalized, under observation.

Second encounter: A white wall equipped with ninety robotic units arranged in fifteen columns of six units. Each unit consists of a small white metal stick on a motor-driven joint, with a white LED at the front. In some rows the units are additionally equipped with distance sensors, microphones, and small video cameras, and thus are able to sense and record any physical presence in front of the wall. If something moves near, all units in the vicinity move to point at the position where the physical presence has been detected. A visitor will thus suddenly be pointed at by dozens of small LED lights that have twitchingly been brought into position, accompanied by a wave of ticking sounds from the little stepper motors. When the visitor moves sideways, the units follow, and a second visitor in another position will attract the attention of a cloud of units near him or her. When no movement can be detected—either because the space is empty, or because all visitors are standing still—the units return to an idle, straight default position.

Third encounter: A large round video projection split into multiple hexagonal images. The images are constantly changing and seem to be flickering nervously, showing abstract surfaces, faces or parts of faces, and other body parts, accidentally recorded it seems, the results of an indifferent yet all-seeing gaze. At times, a certain visual pattern seems to dominate the screen; a moment later, the pattern erodes and falls into disorder. Interspersed are color images from what seem to be live webcams somewhere in the world, some showing darkness, others brightly lit streets or airports or human settlements. In the black-and-white close-ups, the visitors may recognize people they know, or themselves, and begin to understand that these video images are being taken this very moment, or just a short while ago, by the cameras on the small wall units. Not only was our presence in front of the wall sensed and pointed out by the small spotlights, but we were also seen. The current images are mixed with similar images of people who are not in the space now, as though the system is remembering the faces of earlier visitors, juxtaposing, perhaps recognizing and comparing them—that is, us.

Something strange happens when nobody is in the room, or at least when the system does not sense movement for a while. Perhaps we sit on the side of the space quietly, now observers ourselves. After a few minutes, the wall units have gone quiet and the usual flickering of images in the projection slows down. Suddenly, the mood of the projection changes, the image tones are slower, darker, a rumbling sound begins to fill the space, like an echo of past presences, past events, faint memories drawn up from the machine memory. We are, so it seems, watching and listening as the system dreams, as it pulls up fragments of events and visits, again combined with live images from different places in the world. Can we think of a more startling, a more moving image of the solitude of the machine than this sullen dream state? The uncanny experience ends abruptly when one of the secretly present exhibition visitors moves, or somebody enters the space, who may never know of the somnambulistic moment they have just interrupted, finding the immediately awake and agile version of the wriggling wall units and the compound-eye detector screen in full alertness.

The interactivity of Mikami’s Desire of Codes is one of the different system elements that react to more or less accidental movements of the exhibition visitor. Each of the elements can be understood through close inspection, and we can make sense of the computer-driven functions of the automated robots, cameras, and programs managing the database of images and sounds. Yet on an experiential level we are confronted with a setting in which that complex system appears to be observing us, tracking us, trying to make sense of what we do and what we look like, relating what it sees inside the exhibition space, its world, to what it observes outside, through tapping into the networks of the webcam and other machine eyes.

As a fourth element of the installation, a computer monitor placed near the exit of the gallery displays a dynamic graphic rendering of the way in which video files are stored in and drawn from the database for the video projection. The nervously wiggling graphic elements, seeming to parse, read, and extract data sets in the virtual memory of the installation, can be taken to represent the “other mind” that seems to animate the installation, and whose prosthetic media organs the visitor encounters in the camera-equipped robotic arms, the wall units, and the projection.

The aesthetics of the machine condensates at the interstices of these encounters. It is characterized by our doubt about the intelligence, or lack thereof, of the systems that we are confronted with (Cavell’s “other minds”), by our doubt about the reason for what looks like both a simple technical effect and an emotional affect, by our doubt about the possibility, or not, of a form of consciousness emerging from the searching and meandering media probes.

The autonomy of such algorithmically controlled systems is more suggestive than mechanical systems could be. But it might well be that—in the same way that photographs, for all their technical constructedness, have for almost two centuries been taken as truthful visual evidence—the idiosyncratic movements of a sculpture by Jean Tinguely, or the impossible constructions of a painted machine by Francis Picabia, similarly draw on the strange, uncanny, and autonomous logic of machines.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted material are by the author.

1. See Rokeby’s explanations on his website: David Rokeby, accessed November 30, 2015, http://www.davidrokeby.com/gon.html, and the documentation of the work on the website of the Fondation Langlois: Caitlin Jones and Lizzie Muller, “David Rokeby, The Giver of Names (1991–) Documentary Collection—Introduction,” 2008, Fondation Langlois, accessed April 13, 2016, http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2121. Before The Giver of Names, Rokeby had developed the project Liquid Language (1989), which generated poetic texts, using a Hypercard database, as a reflection on notions of memory. Some years earlier, Jean-Louis Boissier and Liliane Terrier had devised an interactive installation (Toutes les copies) for the exhibition “Les Immatériaux” (1985) in which visitors could take photocopies of objects or body parts (see Antonia Wunderlich, Der Philosoph im Museum [Bielefeld: transcript, 2006], 144, 148–149); unlike in The Giver of Names, but similar to the experiments that Sonia Sheridan had been doing with photocopiers and other electronic devices since the 1970s, the interpretation of these images was left to humans.

2. See Michel Foucault’s study of the classical and the modern episteme, The Order of Things (1966; London: Pantheon, 1970).

3. According to Genesis 2:23, “the man” gives the name “woman.”

4. Paolo Totaro and Domenico Ninno, in “The Concept of Algorithm as an Interpretative Key of Modern Rationality,” Theory, Culture and Society 31, no. 4 (2014): 29–49, have called the algorithm an “informal and intuitive notion” (31) which can be formalized mathematically as recursive functions and Turing machines.

5. On the concept of processing, see Hartmut Winkler, Prozessieren. Die dritte, vernachlässigte Medienfunktion (Munich: Fink, 2015), a comprehensive study which critically responds to Friedrich Kittler’s claim that the three main functions of media are transmission, storage, and processing, the media in that process being “machines which themselves manipulate words or numbers.” Friedrich Kittler, “Die Welt des Symbolischen—eine Welt der Maschine,” in Kittler, Draculas Vermächtnis (Leipzig: Reclam, 1989), 61.

6. For an earlier, conceptual attempt at such a definition, see Andreas Broeckmann, “Image, Process, Performance, Machine: Paradigms of Media Art Theory,” in Oliver Grau, ed., Media Art Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 193–205.

7. See Andrew Goffey, “Algorithm,” in Matthew Fuller, ed., Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 15–20, for a critical summary of the concept of the algorithm. See Elena Esposito, “Der Computer als Medium und als Maschine,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 22, no. 5 (October 1993): 338–354, for a systems-theoretical discussion of the “computer as medium and as machine”; the “machine” is here taken rather simply as a device that produces and transforms, and Esposito’s sociological interest is mainly in the question of consciousness and complexity in communication. Her thinking reflects the considerations in the early 1990s that also motivated artists like Rokeby and Peter Dittmer (whose project The Wet-Nurse is discussed at the end of this chapter) to build art installations in which such communicative encounters with “machines” could be experienced. Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), uses the term “algorithmic media” to parallel some aesthetic principles in computer art with architectural and decorative design features in mosques and Asian carpets; she speculates about the common, algorithmic roots of such features in Islamic philosophy and develops a diagram that describes the relationship between infinity, information, and image.

8. See the prologue above.

9. David Rokeby, “n-cha(n)t,” in Hannes Leopoldseder and Christine Schöpf, eds., Prix Ars Electronica 2002 Cyber Arts (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 80.

10. Ibid., 78–80.

11. Ibid., 78.

12. In a strange twist of different aesthetic registers, the view of the side of the head anonymizes the person, whereas in Alphonse Bertillon’s “signalement” for the police service of the nineteenth century, the shape of the ear was a sure marker of identification; see Alphonse Bertillon, Identification anthropométrique. Instructions signalétiques (Melun: Imprimerie administrative, 1893).

13. Rokeby, “n-cha(n)t,” 81.

14. David Rokeby, private conversation with the author, Toronto, June 23, 2007.

15. The project was first developed as a commission that remained unfinished for the opening of the ICC in Tokyo in 1997; it was completed as a commission for the Banff Centre in Canada in 2001.

16. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (New York: Knopf, 1995), 233, see also 268, 272.

17. On Rathenau see Shulamit Volkov, Walter Rathenau: Weimar’s Fallen Statesman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

18. David Rokeby, quoted in Sara Diamond, “Interpolation: The Method of David Rokeby,” in Paddy O’Brien, ed., David Rokeby, exh. cat. (Oakville, ON: Oakville Galleries, 2004), 49–78, 49.

19. Diamond, “Interpolation,” 75.

20. In addition to the respective exhibition catalogs, for Hultén’s “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” see chapter 2. For more on “Cybernetic Serendipity,” see the online archive at http://cyberneticserendipity.net/, accessed December 5, 2015; Rainer Usselmann, “The Dilemma of Media Art: Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA London,” Leonardo 36, no. 5 (2003): 389–396; and María Fernández, “Detached from History: Jasia Reichardt and ‘Cybernetic Serendipity,’” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (2008): 6–23. For more on Burnham’s “Software,” see Edward A. Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” in Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 235–250. For another exhibition that is occasionally discussed in this context, “Information,” held in the summer of 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and curated by Kynaston L. McShine, see Kynaston L. McShine, ed., Information, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970); and Johanna Lettmayer, “‘Information’ (1970)—Zur Materialität der Konzeptkunst,” MA thesis, University of Vienna, 2009.

21. The catalog for “Cybernetic Serendipity” includes images of two Metamatics (1959, 1961) by Tinguely; these are the only illustrations of works in the catalog without an explanatory text, accompanied only with a caption. See Jasia Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity, exh. cat. (London: Studio International, 1968), 39.

22. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry, no. 21 (1994): 232. For an overview of the relation between cybernetics and art, see Edward A. Shanken, “Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s,” in Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds., From Energy to Information (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 155–177, which focuses on the artistic career of Roy Ascott in particular.

23. See Claus Pias, ed., Cybernetics/Kybernetik. The Macy-Conferences 1946–1953 (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2003). The question of whether cybernetics continues to play a role today is discussed by Erich Hörl and others in Hörl, ed., Die technologische Bedingung. Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011).

24. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (1948; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 4, 6. For an overview of a variety of “cybernetic machines,” see Tihamér Nemes, Cybernetic Machines (1962; published posthumously, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1970); as well as some excerpts on independent automata and animal models from Nemes’s book, in Peter Weibel, ed., Beyond Art: A Third Culture (Vienna: Springer, 1996), 308–314.

25. Alan Turing, Mechanical Intelligence, in Collected Works, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1992), 7.

26. Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 245; for Richard Taylor’s critique of the application of the notion of “purpose” to technical systems, see 249–250.

27. Quoted in Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 252.

28. Norbert Wiener, “Operationalism—Old and New” (1945), cited in Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 246.

29. See Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 263.

30. See P. J. P. Millican and A. Clark, eds., Machines and Thought: The Legacy of Alan Turing (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), and Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), who famously insisted that “consciousness is not ‘algorithmic’” (411). As Shusha Niederberger has shown through her analysis of programming languages and their increasing mediality, such metaphorizations become less tenable, the closer one looks at the precise technical processes; see Shusha Niederberger, “Zur Performativität und Medialität von Code. Reflexionen zu Code aus der künstlerischen Perspektive,” 2013, accessed November 30, 2015, http://www.netzliteratur.net/niederberger/medialitaet_von_code.pdf.

31. Cited in Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 243.

32. Ibid., fn. 37; referring to Stanley Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” in Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 153–178.

33. We can also observe this differentiation in the literature: Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: Braziller, 1968), 17, refers to the founder of systems theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, but not to the cyberneticians. And Christoph Asendorf, “Die Künste im technischen Zeitalter und das utopische Potenzial der Kybernetik,” in Erich Hörl and Michael Hagner, eds., Die Transformation des Humanen. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 107–124, who discusses cybernetics and art, deals with the Independent Group and Schöffer, and briefly mentions E.A.T., but makes no mention of Burnham’s “systems aesthetics”—like Claus Pias in “‘Hollerith “Feathered Crystal”’: Art, Science, and Computing in the Era of Cybernetics,” Grey Room 29 (2007), 110–134, a text about information aesthetics. See also the discussion of information aesthetics in chapter 4 below.

34. Nicolas Schöffer, archival document, 1956, accessed July 8, 2014, http://www.olats.org/schoffer/archives/cyspf.htm (my translation from the French).

35. Ibid. For a video of CYSP 1, see the film Lumino-Dynamics, 1960, accessed July 8, 2014, http://www.britishpathe.com/video/lumino-dynamics (my translation).

36. Nicolas Schöffer, “Sonic and Visual Structures: Theory and Experiment,” Leonardo 18, no. 2 (1985): 59–68.

37. See Guy Habasque, Nicolas Schöffer (Neuchatel: Editions du Griffon, 1963), also available at the official documentation website for Nicolas Schöffer (edited by Émeline Brulé and Louis Éveillard for Leonardo/Olats), http://www.olats.org/schoffer/archives/cyspdesc.htm (accessed December 5, 2015). Schöffer’s main support at Philips came from the director of the Paris branch, Marcel Joly.

38. Nicolas Schöffer Archives, archival document, accessed July 8, 2014, http://www.olats.org/schoffer/archives/cysppubl.htm; in this not fully reliable chronology, the presentation at “Cybernetic Serendipity” is missing.

39. See the summary description at http://www.olats.org/schoffer/archives/maci.htm (accessed December 5, 2015).

40. See Asendorf, “Die Künste im technischen Zeitalter,” 114–117, on Schöffer’s “cybernetic” projects and on some of the unrealized projects for gigantic spatiodynamic cities and towers. The projects received an ambivalent reception because they seemed to include aspects of control and surveillance, and thus seemed to represent the negative sides of a comprehensively technified society.

41. See Nicolas Schöffer, La Ville Cybernétique (Paris: Edition Tchou, 1969; rpt., Paris: Edition Denoël, 1972). Around the same time and for several years, Schöffer also taught a course on Art et Programmation at the architecture department of the Paris art school, the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

42. Despite the similarities between Moholy-Nagy and Schöffer analyzed here, Schöffer’s widow, Eléonore de Lavandeyra Schöffer (in conversation with the author, November 28, 2015), maintains that Schöffer did not learn of his fellow Hungarian’s work before the late 1940s. The influence on Schöffer, before and after the war, of artists like Alexander Calder or the artists of the group Abstraction-Création, who were still active in Paris when Schöffer arrived there in 1936 and whose goals resemble the concepts Schöffer formulated in the late 1940s, would require further research. Moholy-Nagy had left Germany in 1934 and emigrated to the United States in 1937, but remained visible in Europe not least through his Bauhaus publications, and the special issue, dedicated to Moholy-Nagy, of the Czech journal Telehor which appeared in the year Schöffer had moved to Paris; see Telehor—International Journal for Visual Culture, no. 1–2, special issue on László Moholy-Nagy (Brno, 1936), reprint ed. by Klemens Gruber and Oliver Botár (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2013).

43. László Moholy-Nagy, in Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Ferenc Molnár, eds., Die Bühne im Bauhaus (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925), 52; cited in Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (Weingarten: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1986), 317.

44. László Moholy-Nagy, “From Pigment to Light” (1936), rpt. in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print and Writings from 1916 to the Present (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 340; according to Passuth (Moholy-Nagy, 342), the fragments collected in this text for the 1936 special issue of telehor were written between 1923 and 1926.

45. Quoted in Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 342.

46. Ibid., 342–343.

47. See chapter 2 above. Speculating about “the formal achievements of the future,” Moholy-Nagy seems to be looking way ahead into the age of LED screens, 3D movies, and holograms, when he writes (probably in the mid-1920s): “light displays of any desired quality and magnitude will suddenly blaze up, and multicolored floodlights with transparent sheaths of fire will project a constant flow of immaterial, evanescent images into space by the simple manipulation of switches. And in the film of the future we shall have constant change in the speed and intensity of light; space in motion constantly varied through the medium of light refracted from efflorescent reflectors; flashes of light and black-outs; chiaroscuro, distance and proximity of light; ultra-violet rays, infra-red penetration of darkness rendered visible—a wealth of undreamt-of optical experiences that will be profoundly stirring to our emotions.” Quoted in Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 343–344.

48. See Guy Habasque, “From Space to Time,” in Marcel Joray, ed., Nicolas Schöffer (Neuchatel: Editions du Griffon, 1963), 10–17.

49. Schöffer, “Sonic and Visual Structures,” 68, fn. 13.

50. See Catherine Mason, A Computer in the Art Room (Hindringham: JJG, 2008), 16–32.

51. See Richard Hamilton, ed., Man Machine and Motion, exh. cat. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Hatton Gallery, 1955).

52. I am grateful to Florian Sprenger for sharing his insights into Banham’s work.

53. Sigfried Giedion had visited London for a lecture in 1948, presumably presenting ideas from his newly published Mechanization Takes Command, in which he also recommends artistic engagement with machines. In response, Richard Hamilton created in 1949 the drawings of the Reaper series of partly deconstructed agricultural machines (see Mason, A Computer in the Art Room, 23). These drawings are quite singular in Hamilton’s oeuvre, even though in other works he dealt with cars and apparatuses; as structures, they rather resemble the symbolic and surrealist machines depicted by Francis Picabia and Max Ernst.

54. See Asendorf, “Die Künste im technischen Zeitalter,” 110–113.

55. See Shanken, “Cybernetics and Art,” and Mason, A Computer in the Art Room, 23.

56. See Mason, A Computer in the Art Room, 63. Ascott’s teaching tools differed from the Learning Machine that Fluxus artist George Maciunas devised. Even during his studies in the 1950s, Maciunas used to map complex knowledge into self-designed charts, diagrams, maps, and spreadsheets; see Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’ Learning Machines: From Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus (Vienna: Springer, 2011). The Learning Machine of 1969 mapped areas of knowledge and was meant as a plan for an educational curriculum. It is apparently the only work by Maciunas of that type that was called a “machine,” while others were called a “chart” or “plan.” However, this chart seems to represent only a linear flow of time and relations, without feedback or recursivity in a cybernetic sense.

57. See Clarisse Bardiot, 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering (Montreal: Fondation Langlois, 2006), accessed August 14, 2014, http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/9evenings; Catherine Morris, 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theater, and Engineering, 1966 (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006). Sylvie Lacerte, in the essay “9 Evenings and Experiments in Art and Technology: A Gap to Fill in Art History’s Recent Chronicles,” in Dieter Daniels and Barbara U. Schmidt, eds., Artists as Inventors, Inventors as Artists (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 158–175, presents a useful summary which, however, is marred by an overly strong insistence that the event has been unduly ignored by art historians, without an explanation of why it should be of interest to people not primarily inclined toward technological art.

58. See Martina Leeker, “Just do it! Mimesis in technischem und künstlerischem Systems Engineering,” in Friedrich Balke, Bernhard Siegert, and Joseph Vogl, eds., Archiv für Mediengeschichte 12 (Munich: Fink, 2012), 195.

59. See Mason, A Computer in the Art Room, 119–128.

60. For the contemporary perception of the exceptional historical significance of “Cybernetic Serendipity,” see, e.g., Günther Pfeiffer, Kunst und Kommunikation (Cologne: DuMont, 1972), 158–159, who calls the catalog “the richest source for the history of this new art genre.” Curiously, in the encounter of artistic robots by Nam June Paik (Robot K-456, 1964), Jean Tinguely (Méta-Matic, 1961), and Nicolas Schöffer (CYSP 1, 1956) at “Cybernetic Serendipity,” the oldest of the three robots moved most elegantly and independently, while the other two younger specimens appeared to be nostalgic parodies of robotic automata.

61. See Margit Rosen, “‘The control of control.’ Gordon Pasks kybernetische Ästhetik,” in Ranulph Glanville and Albert Müller, eds., Pask Present, exh. cat. (Vienna: Atelier Färbergasse, 2008), 130–191; and Andrew Pickering, Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 355–361. For a description of the work’s technical functions, see Thomas Dreher, History of Computer Art. IASLonline NetArt: Theory, ch. II.3.2.3, accessed December 5, 2014, http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/GCA_Indexe.html. Pickering also makes some general remarks about the lack of recognition for “machine art” by art history and contemporary art discourses (Pickering, Cybernetic Brain, 361–362), based on Simon Penny, “Bridging Two Cultures: Towards an Interdisciplinary History of the Artist-Inventor and the Machine-Artwork,” in Daniels and Schmidt, Artists as Inventors, 142–158.

62. Reichardt, Cybernetic Serendipity, 35.

63. Dreher, History of Computer Art, ch. II.3.1.1.

64. Gordon Pask, Approaches to Cybernetics (London: Hutchinson, 1961). The preface to the book was written by Warren S. McCulloch, and in the acknowledgments Pask refers to conversations with, among others, W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, and Heinz von Förster.

65. See Reichardt, Cybernetic Serendipity, 38; Mason, A Computer in the Art Room, 82; Dreher, History of Computer Art, ch. II.3.2.2. For an analysis of Ihnatowicz’s aesthetics of interactivity, see Mason, A Computer in the Art Room, 93–94, and Joanna Walewska, “Relationship of Art and Technology: Edward Ihnatowicz’s Philosophical Investigation on the Problem of Perception,” in Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, eds., Relive: Media Art Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 309–324. Even though the acronym “SAM” is now generally identified with Ihnatowicz’s sculpture, the catalog of “Cybernetic Serendipity” presented an earlier “SAM” more prominently, at the beginning of the volume: This was Anthony Stafford Beer’s Stochastic Analogue Machine, an apparatus built in the mid-1950s in the context of Stafford Beer’s operational research; see Reichardt, Cybernetic Serendipity, 11–12, and the description in Stafford Beer, “The Mechanical Simulation of Stochastic Flow,” in Max Davies, R. T. Eddison, and Thornton Page, eds., Proceedings of the First International Conference on Operational Research (London: English Universities Press, 1957), 166–175.

66. As suggested by Edward Shanken, “Reprogramming Systems Aesthetics: A Strategic Historiography,” in Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference 2009, UC Irvine, n. pag., the term “systems aesthetics” is here used synonymously with Burnham’s original term “systems esthetics.” On the relationship between systems theory and art, see Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), and Francis Halsall, Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

67. Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 31.

68. See Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology,” Science 111 (1950): 23–29; Bertalanffy’s Robots, Men and Minds: Psychology in the Modern World (1967) and General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (1968) were published in New York by Braziller, which also published books by György Kepes and, a few years later, Burnham’s essay collection Great Western Salt Works (1974).

69. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 31.

70. Ibid.; cf. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967): 12–23.

71. See Edward A. Shanken, Art and Electronic Media (London: Phaidon, 2009). In an interview with Lutz Dammbeck in the early 2000s, Burnham suggested that he saw the “Software” exhibition as a partial failure due to the lack of financial means; see website “Das Netz, ein Film von Lutz Dammbeck,” accessed July 19, 2014, http://www.t-h-e-n-e-t.com/html/_film/pers/_pers_burnham.htm. In the same set of online materials, documenting Dammbeck’s research for his film about the American “Unabomber,” Das Netz (b.film, 2003), there is also an interview in which Hans Haake reminiscenced at length about the 1960s and the reasons for his temporary adoption of the concept of “systems” to describe his works; the transcript is available at http://www.t-h-e-n-e-t.com/html/_film/pers/_pers_haake.htm (accessed August 19, 2014).

72. Bertalanffy, cited in Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 32.

73. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 35.

74. We will again pick up this thread of an eco-logical dissipation of the concept of the machine in chapter 6 when we discuss the relationship of ecology and machine.

75. See Goffey, “Algorithm.”

76. The abstractness of code has been explored in the context of software art, where some of the aspects of a machine aesthetic (symbolic, formalist, kinetic, automatic) could also be applied and analytically developed. It would be interesting to discuss a software-based phenomenon like “glitch” and “error” (see Tim Barker, “Aesthetics of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant,” in Mark Nunes, ed., Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures [London: Continuum, 2011], 42–58) in relation to the apects of kinetics and dysfunctionality that we find, for instance, in the sculptural work of Munari and Tinguely. For a discussion of the aesthetics of software art, see Andreas Broeckmann, “Software Art Aesthetics,” Mono, no. 1 (FBAUP Porto, 2007), 158–167.

77. See for instance Christiane Paul, ed., A Companion to Digital Art (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2016); Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (London: Berg, 2006); Claudia Giannetti, Ästhetik des Digitalen: Ein intermediärer Beitrag zu Wissenschaft, Medien- und Kunstsystem (Vienna: Springer, 2004); Martin Warnke, “Kunst aus der Maschine. Informationsästhetik, Virtualität und Interaktivität, Digital Communities.” In Warnke, Der Zeitpfeil im Digitalen. Synthese, Mimesis, Emergenz, 56–69 (Stuttgart: Alcatel SEL Stiftung, 2004).

78. See Katja Kwastek, Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), for a comprehensive study of the aesthetics of interactive art.

79. For descriptions and an insightful interview with Max Dean, see Robert Enwright, “Interview with Max Dean,” Border Crossings, no. 101 (Winnipeg, 2007): 24–37. Enwright’s conclusion, “What makes his [Dean’s] robots so compelling and disturbing is that when we look at them, we see only ourselves” (27), contradicts our proposition that the aesthetic power of these works resides in the encounter with a “machinic Other.” For Ihnatowicz, see Mason, A Computer in the Art Room, 79–99, and Penny, “Bridging Two Cultures,” 151–152.

80. Two special cases of “autonomy” in interactive works are Norman White’s Helpless Robot (1987–1996) and Them Fuckin’ Robots (1986) by Laura Kikauka and Norman White. Helpless Robot has no automatically moving parts but addresses the exhibition visitor verbally, somewhat neurotically demanding to be turned around and complaining when this is not done at the right speed; it also responds with verbal expressions to the presence, actions, and inactions of the visitor. Them Fuckin’ Robots consists of two anthropomorphic robots, one with technical features mimiking the male, the other the female human sexual organs, which have to be arranged into position by their artist-creators for their mimicking of intercourse.

81. See Eco on the role of participation in “programmed art”: Umberto Eco, “Arte programmata” (1962), rpt. in Margit Rosen, ed., A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 98–101.

82. See for instance A. Michael Noll and Branimir Makanec’s proposals for controlling interactive behavior and the emotions of the participants “according to the artist’s specifications,” in Rosen, A Little-Known Story, 36.

83. See Mathias Fuchs et al., eds., Rethinking Gamification (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2014).

84. On the materiality of code, see Georg Trogemann, ed., Code und Material. Exkursionen ins Undingliche (Vienna: Springer, 2010); Niederberger, “Zur Performativität und Medialität von Code”; and Christopher Alex McLean, “Artist-Programmers and Programming Languages for the Arts,” PhD dissertation, University of London, Goldsmiths College, 2011. For a critique of the performative aspects of code in interactive artworks, see Jim Campbell, “Delusions of Dialogue: Control and Choice in Interactive Art,” Leonardo 33, no. 2 (April 2000): 133–136. See also musician and composer Peter Zinoview’s Partita for Unattended Computer (1967) in which an array of (at the time, human-size) computers was put on a stage and, upon having been switched on, was left to perform its real-time computer music program without further intervention by a human technician; and German artist Nicolas Baginsky’s Sirens (since 1992), a band of three robots that hold and strum electric guitars. Sirens is controlled by a feedback system based on a neural network trained to guide the process of sound making from chaotic and random structures toward a sonic and rhythmical equilibrium, which means that in most cases, during a particular “set,” the playing of the three separately operating robots will go from dissonance, through a phase of rhythmical tension, to a state of a monotonous droning sound.

85. See Axel Roch, Claude E. Shannon. Spielzeug, Leben und die geheime Geschichte seiner Theorie der Information (Berlin: Gegenstalt Verlag, 2009), 28–29, who dates the device to the “early 1950s” and remarks that Shannon adapted it from other engineers and mathematicians who, like him, worked for Bell Laboratories at the time and constructed and publicly presented machines that followed the same principle.

86. See Peter Weibel, Das offene Werk, 1964–1979 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 329, and Siegfried Zielinski and Peter Weibel, eds., Der Stand der Bilder. Die Medienpioniere Zbigniew Rybczynski und Gabor Body (Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2011), 128–130. Cf. Christoph Korn, Non-Machine Series, 2009 (including A Simple Machine That Switches Itself Off after 11 Days and That Does Not Produce Anything in the Meantime).

87. See Peter Dittmer, Schalten und Walten (Die Amme / The Wet-Nurse), accessed September 9, 2014, http://home.snafu.de/boxnd/index.html.

88. Ibid.

89. Quoted from the extended German version of Martin Burckhardt, “Von milchverweigernden Ammen, subversiven Kaninchen und anderen Naturwidrigkeiten” (2002), accessed September 9, 2014, http://home.snafu.de/boxnd/index.html (emphasis added).

90. Martin Burckhardt, “Of Wet-Nurses Who Withhold Milk, Subversive Rabbits and Other Unnatural Things—Peter Dittmer’s Die Amme (Wet-Nurse),” in Achim Könnecke and Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, eds., Aussendienst—Kunstprojekte in öffentlichen Räumen Hamburgs, Mai 2000–Mai 2002 (Freiburg: modo Verlag, 2002), 153.

91. Ibid.

92. See chapter 5 below.

93. Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, “Purposeful and Non-purposeful Behavior,” Philosophy of Science 17, no. 4 (October 1950): 326, cited in Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 250–251.

94. A similar thought regarding the derivation of machine concepts from conceptions of organisms had been formulated around the same time by Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism” (1952), in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992); see chapter 1 above.

95. Claus Pias, “Analog, Digital, and the Cybernetic Illusion,” Kybernetes 34, no. 3/4 (2005), 548.

96. Ibid., 548–549.

97. Ibid., 550.

98. David Rokeby, “The Computer as a Prosthetic Organ of Philosophy,” Dichtung Digital, no. 3 (2003), accessed December 5, 2015, http://www.dichtung-digital.de/2003/issue/3/Rokeby.htm.

99. See chapter 1 above.

100. Ralf Baecker, “Experimente,” in Trogemann, Code und Material, 48–53; and http://www.rlfbckr.org/work/rechnender_raum (accessed September 5, 2014).

101. See Maurizio Bolognini, ed., Infinito personale—Personal Infinity (Brescia: Nuovi Strumenti, 2007). In other works, Bolognini has provided interfaces for interacting with the computer systems or for viewing the supposed result of the computers’ data processing in the form of simple graphic line structures. (These structures strangely resemble the curved lines projected by David Tudor’s laser projection piece for E.A.T.’s Pepsi Pavillion at Expo Osaka, 1970.) Bolognini positions his work in the antiauthorial tradition of concrete art, which now also involves the desubjectivation of the interacting visitor: “the new technologies oblige you to go beyond the utterance, dragging you onto the level of [the] functioning of things. This can change the nature and the meaning of artistic expression” (“Programmed Machines: Infinity out of Control. A conversation with Maurizio Bolognini,” Infinito personale, 19–34, this quotation on page 28). Sandra Solimano, “Metaphors and Moves,” in Bolognini, Infinito personale, 17–18, has pointed out that Bolognini fails to fulfill his wish to escape metaphors. She wonders about the appropriateness of the projection of evolving graphics, which, she suggests, undermines Bolognini’s intention. While concurring with Solimano’s assessment, I disagree with her generic conclusion that Bolognini’s work might after all contain a “metaphor of the human condition” (18). It is necessary to distinguish between Bolognini’s works and his discourse about them, but I would agree with Bolognini that what his works confront us with is not the “human condition,” but a condition of the “machine” (as a projected technological other).

102. On the theme of the rejection of images and iconoclasm, see Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

103. Dean, quoted in Enwright, “Interview with Max Dean,” 34. Caroline Seck Langill has highlighted the “living effect,” a term borrowed from Norman White, as the key factor of such a machine aesthetics (Seck Langill, “The Living Effect: Autonomous Behavior in Early Electronic Media Art,” in Cubitt and Thomas, Relive, 257–273). Referring to my own text of 2007 (“Image, Process, Performance, Machine”), she analyzes robotic works by Max Dean, Norman White, Nam June Paik, and W. Grey Walter, and emphasizes three characteristics of how this “living effect” is created in artworks: “first, an adherence to behavior rather than resemblance; second, the effect is one of a whole body in space, with proprioceptive abilities and attributes; third, … there is the potential for flaws, for accidents, and for technical instabilities” (270). I would take issue with her interesting argument, in that Seck Langill implicitly treats the “living effect” as a production-aesthetic category that the respective works are imbued with; against that, I would argue that the “aesthetics of the machinic” hinges on the experience of the viewer—a shift of focus which would, I believe, make it necessary to develop a more explicit notion of the recognition of “life,” or “aliveness,” and bring the aspect of empathy—that Seck Langill also mentions in passing—into sharper relief: “The living effect acknowledges that if one is attempting to induce a living effect in a synthetic organism there is a necessity for imperfections, for the inducement of empathy and compassion, and for the negating of resemblance. Curiously, this definition is not that different from how we truly know each other” (270).

104. See Edmond Couchot, “Medien und Neue ‘Medien’: Von der Kommunikation zur Kommutation,” in Yvonne Spielmann and Gundolf Winter, eds., Bild—Medium—Kunst (Munich: Fink, 1999), 82.

105. Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 243, fn. 37; see also the discussion of the uncanny earlier in this chapter.

106. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xiv.

107. Galison reminds us of the need to look at the uncanny from a strictly historical perspective: “I would add this: each generation has its own conception of what constitutes a mind. Wiener’s notion circulates around feedback, control, and the capacity to predict. Since characterizations of mind change, a philosophical-historical account of the uncanny would necessarily pass through many epochs.” Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 243 fn. 37. See David Nye, The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

108. For a description of the work, see http://www.idd.tamabi.ac.jp/~mikami/artworks/ and http://special.ycam.jp/doc/ (both accessed May 5, 2016), and Seiko Mikami, “Desire of Codes,” in Hannes Leopoldseder, Christine Schöpf, and Gerfried Stocker, eds., The Big Picture: New Concepts for a New World (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 57–62. The sequence I describe is based on an exhibition of the work at the Lentos Museum in Linz in 2012. At the premiere exhibition at YCAM in Yamaguchi, the first component the visitor would encounter was the “wall.”

4 Image Machine

Machines that See

In the previous chapter we encountered several “machines that see,” or rather, art installations that use and process visual input data. Seiko Mikami’s Desire of Codes includes multiple roboticized video cameras that observe exhibition visitors and feed these images into a database from which they are replayed in a large, kaleidoscopic composite image projection. A more analytical gaze is turned on the objects that visitors can place in front of the camera in David Rokeby’s The Giver of Names installation. Unlike Mikami’s contraption, it ignores the presence of the human visitors and focuses on the recognition of objects by their shapes and colors.

The construction of such autonomous viewing systems has occupied Rokeby since the 1980s, when his first major project was an interactive system called Very Nervous System (VNS).¹ It is based on the visual tracing of movements in a space by means of a video camera, and the analysis of these tracings (movement location, direction, speed, etc.) by computer software which Rokeby developed himself and which he made available for other artists to use in interactive artworks and dance productions. In Rokeby’s first exhibition version, the data from the movement analysis are used to trigger sounds, so that moving around in the space of the installation becomes like playing a complex and invisible musical instrument.²

A series of works that Rokeby developed from VNS further explore the aesthetics of computerized vision systems. The installation Watch (1995) presents two juxtaposed variants of a live video image taken, for instance, of a street corner: one of the projected images shows only objects and people that are standing still, while everything that moves is invisible or appears as a faint blur; the other image shows only objects and people that are currently moving, whereas everything that is static appears as a grayish fog. In a next step, the installation Seen, realized for the Venice Biennale in 2002, includes a graphically more complex rendition of the algorithmically generated images. Besides the two projections of static and dynamic objects, there are two additional images that interpret the movement of people, animals, and objects on St. Mark’s Square as continuous lines of flow, and as staggered, Marey-like repetitions of the same figure in consecutive positions (figure 4.1, plate 3).³

Figure 4.1 David Rokeby, Seen (2002), installation view, Venice Biennale of Architecture. Photo by David Rokeby. Copyright © the artist.

The potential of a computer-based vision system and its applications beyond plain observation of a public area was further explored by Rokeby in the installation Sorting Demon (2003). A computer-controlled video camera scans its surroundings and seeks to identify moving objects as people, whose photograph it then takes and analyzes according to color hues, both of dominant clothing and skin colors. The respectively colored areas of the photo are isolated, separated, and sorted into dedicated areas of a display screen. What emerge are collaged color patterns of human skin—mainly of faces—and, elsewhere, of clothing. The system discriminates between different colors, though not against individual people; it is morally indifferent to skin colors and their intensities, yet for the human observer the display screen shows an eerie pattern of differentiation which could easily be used as a basis for discriminatory social policies.

While the technical systems in these works look at patterns and movements and disregard individual people, another series of works by Rokeby explore the effects of singling out individuals from an undifferentiated crowd in an open public space, or from the visitors in the exhibition space. The installation Taken (2002) uses a video camera that is pointed at the space in front of a large double video projection (figure 4.2). The two projections show different renditions of the video images taken of exhibition visitors: one presents a looped and condensed view of all the visitors since the system was switched on, showing the current visitors more prominently and earlier ones as increasingly fading shadows. Like the images in the Watch series, the projection in Taken again shows a statistical image that accumulates visual data over a longer period of time. The second projection in Taken shows the image taken by the video camera as it zooms in to individual heads of people, which the system now displays in a large-size video image for a few seconds. These surveillance-style portraits of individual visitors are overlaid or “titled” with randomly chosen adjectives (like “unsuspecting,” “complicit,” “hungry”), ascribing these qualities to the persons represented.⁴

Figure 4.2 David Rokeby, Taken (2002), installation view, National Art Museum of China, Beijing. Photo by David Rokeby. Copyright © the artist.

Chapter Summary

The present chapter explores the aesthetics of machines with regard to such systems of technical vision. It starts off with a presentation of the concept of “operational images,” which describes a type of image that is not made for human perception but forms part of technical operations. From here we venture into a more general discussion of the technicality and mediality of images. We look at mechanical, electronic, and digital systems that have been used to produce images in the context of art since the 1950s, and pay special attention to a number of art projects that seek to test human perception and the mediality of human vision. In an attempt to apply the dimensions of machine aesthetics outlined previously—its associative, symbolic, formalist, kinetic, automatic, interactive, and autonomous aspects—we explore how visuality is negotiated, and how the machine—as a relation to technology—is constituted, by such artistic vision machines.

For a closer analysis of technical vision systems, it is important to distinguish between the three levels of optics, vision, and images. By “optics” we understand the physical system through which light is captured and prepared for technical or physiological processing. In an electronic system, optically derived input will be translated into electronic impulses which can in turn be coded as analog or digital signals. “Vision” is the process of interpreting the optically derived impressions or data. In such an understanding of vision, the term refers to both the physiologically based process in living beings and the technically based process in electronic and digital apparatuses which process visual information. An “image” is a particular form in which such optically derived visual information appears.

The attempt to find an authoritative definition of the image is a daunting task. Both the art historical and the philosophical literature on the topic are prolific and have recently been expanded even further, given the attention that the images of popular culture have received in cultural and visual studies since the 1980s and the recognition of scientific and technical imagery by image studies since the 1990s. This expansion is reflected in W. J. T. Mitchell’s insistence on distinguishing analytically between images and pictures, the latter referring to the material objects, the picturing surface, as against the more conceptual idea of images, which can take graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, or linguistic forms.⁵ The German art historian Hans Belting has proposed the concept of an “image anthropology” that encompasses interdisciplinary research into the social usages and meanings of images in a global and anthropological perspective.⁶ For Belting, images have to be understood in relation to the media in which they are constructed and brought to appearance, and with regard to the bodies which perceive and make sense of them. A broadening of the field of art history toward a general discipline of historical image studies (historische Bildwissenschaft) has also been advocated by the art historian Horst Bredekamp and others in their research into “technical images,” which include visual representations from scientific, medical, and engineering contexts, looking at the apparatuses, media, and interfaces through which such images are made, presented, and used. Such a broad approach requires an extended definition of images that takes their technical production into account, as well as the instrumental, scientific, and diagnostic procedures in which they are deployed and analyzed.⁷ As the American philosopher Mark Hansen has put it, “The image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable.”⁸

Such an extended definition of images would not include all forms of optically derived data sets, like for instance the optical sensors in Nicolas Schöffer’s CYSP 1, Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles, or David Rokeby’s VNS, which provide the input for interactive behavior of technical systems, since here the input data are processed without reference to a coherent visual unit. In order to describe the “processes by which information is made perceivable,” it seems useful to draw on the definition of images that the art theoretician Gottfried Boehm has proposed mainly for the traditional objects of art history, but which can be adapted also to an expanded understanding of the field of images.

Boehm has introduced the notion of “iconic difference” (ikonische Differenz) that points to both the semantic and the visual difference of the image from its surroundings:

We speak of an image only when the visual contrast organizes the field of its appearance in such a manner that it can manifest itself as a manageable extent sui generis, i.e., when the visual contrast connects with the size and the borders. It requires the artful division of the gaze which—simul et singulariter—refers the configuration to the field, and accommodating both the individual and the simultaneity of the image.⁹

This interlacing of visuality and materiality is studied through the material conditions of images, how images are made, what images are made of, and how the changing technical conditions of making and using images have changed the very notion of what an “image” is. In his discussion of the relation in principle between image and medium, Boehm has suggested, as a minimal definition of image, “the simultaneous perceivability of the representation and the represented, of the medial premise and the iconic shaping.”¹⁰

Such an analysis that conceives an image as delimited and mediated can also be applied to technically produced images. The aesthetics of such images hinges on a variety of aspects, one of which is the apparent automatism which brings about and transforms the images. Each media-technical dispositive offers a variety of points where such automatisms can occur.¹¹

With such a definition in mind, the exploration of the aesthetics of “machine images” seems a paradoxical endeavor, given that it seems to make little sense to ascribe to a technical apparatus the ability to perceive and understand an image as such. Rather, we have to assume that such an apparatus will use the optically derived data without reference to either the delimitation of the field or the mediality of the image. Both are aesthetic aspects which may pertain to the identification and decoding of signals, but not to a holistic visual impression.

Instead, I would propose approaching “images made by and for machines” as objects of human perception and interpretation. The notion of the “image,” like that of the “machine,” is most usefully understood as a companion concept to the human. In the same way as the machine is a designation employed by a subject in order to address an aspect of the apparatus that constructs both subject and machine, in the same way an image is predicated on a human subject for whom the “image” is a particular form in which the world reveals itself.¹²

I’d argue for the “image” as an anthropological category whose understanding has to take into account machine vision and algorithmic operations on optically derived data as “competition” in the visual field. Such a focus on the image as an anthropological category is not only seconded by Hansen’s emphasis on the perceivability of images, but also by French theorist Paul Virilio’s analysis of the “vision machine” with special regard to the effect that “visionics,” the technical systems of automated vision, are having on human perception: “After synthetic images, products of info-graphic software, after the digital image processing of computer-aided design, we are on the verge of synthetic vision, the automation of perception. What will be the effects, the theoretical and practical consequences for our own ‘vision of the world,’ of Paul Klee’s intuition’s becoming reality?”¹³

Just as the machine is constituted as a technological Other, the “sightless vision” of visionics constructs objects as an actively gazing Other of human perception. “Unless you are Lewis Carroll, it is hard to imagine the viewpoint of a doorknob or a button on a cardigan. Unless you are Paul Klee [who had noted, ‘Now objects perceive me’], it is not easy to imagine artificial contemplation, the wide-awake dream of a population of objects all busy staring at you.”¹⁴ It becomes possible to imagine such an artificial contemplation when, two decades after Virilio made this remark, one experiences Seiko Mikami’s installation Desire of Codes which confronts us with a staring population of robotic cameras feeding a system that processes the images they take of us—and that falls into its dream state when it seems to be alone.

Operational Images

Around 2003, the German filmmaker Harun Farocki coined the term “operational images” for “images that are not simply meant to reproduce something, but instead are part of an operation.”¹⁵ For several years, Farocki had been doing research about automated vision systems for a trilogy of two-channel video installations, titled Eye/Machine. The third part of the series, Eye/Machine III (Auge/Maschine III) (2003), and the related film version War at a Distance (Erkennen und Verfolgen) (2003), deal specifically with different systems used in industrial and military contexts, in which images are not used for humans to survey and control certain operational procedures, but the technical system itself analyzes the images (figures 4.3, 4.4). The historical and contemporary examples that Farocki shows include, for instance, directing a construction robot in a car factory to hit the head of a screw, or a computer vision system that enables a cruise missile to hit its target.¹⁶

Figure 4.3 Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine I (Auge/Maschine I) (2000), video still. Copyright © Harun Farocki GbR.

Figure 4.4 Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine III (Auge/Maschine III) (2003), video still. Copyright © Harun Farocki GbR.

In an essay that Farocki wrote after completing the film, he cites a passage from the French philosopher Roland Barthes’s Mythologies where Barthes speaks not about images but about words that are part of an operation, for instance when a woodcutter names the tree that will be cut down.¹⁷ Farocki was skeptical about the actual technical relevance of such vision systems and affirms that he found no evidence in his research that such systems had actually been used in either of the US Gulf Wars in 1991 and 2003, and that he came across only one technical system that actually processes visual data for identifying a target, despite billions of dollars’ worth of research and development spending over decades.¹⁸ Farocki’s focus is therefore more on the ideological function of the pictures of such weapon systems shown to humans, which create the myth of “precision-guided weapons” and instill fear, serving to give the weapons industry the appearance of a failsafe and economical system—whose development requires further funding and political support. Paul Virilio had claimed that the images of vision-guided missiles that were shown during the First Gulf War were targeted at the television viewers who saw them, a claim that in Farocki’s interpretation means that the visual regime of operational images is primarily conceived as advertising for the weapons industry.¹⁹ Farocki insists that in the material that he presents in Eye/Machine III, it is therefore important to distinguish between “the aesthetics of commodities” on one side and “machine aesthetics” on the other.²⁰ The latter is characterized, first and foremost, by the disavowal of what is not of importance. In order for it to work, the vision system has to reduce the complexity of the current image and compare certain stored patterns of a territory or an object to such a reductive version of the image. Farocki writes that it is part of this “machine aesthetics” that this disavowal of detail and complexity “creates a strong counter-reaction” in human observers.²¹

Paul Virilio may have been the first to engage with the epistemological, strategic, and aesthetic aspects of such technical vision systems. In a text first published in 1988, The Vision Machine, he discusses the mental impact of current and potential future developments in the sightless vision of “visionics.”²² Virilio is particularly concerned with the epistemological status of mental images in comparison with virtual images, those “synthetic images created by the machine for the machine,” which are enigmatic and exclude the human observer. In this context, Virilio uses the term “operational,” though not in the exact sense that Farocki will later define. Virilio points to the transgression of synthetically produced images into the field of the factual, and to the way in which the virtual begins to have real effects: “To my mind, this is one of the most crucial aspects of the development of the new technologies of digital imagery and of the synthetic vision offered by electron optics: the relative fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational, if you prefer) and the virtual; the ascendancy of the ‘reality effect’ over a reality principle already largely contested elsewhere, particularly in physics.”²³

In Virilio’s analysis, this becoming factual of the virtual is exacerbated by the temporal aspect of these new technologies. Like human perception, the vision machine operates in time, but it does so at a speed that decouples the machine reality from human reality: “These synthetic-perception machines will be capable of replacing us in certain domains, in certain ultra high-speed operations for which our own visual capacities are inadequate, not because of our ocular system’s limited depth of focus, as was the case with the telescope and the microscope, but because of the limited depth of time of our physiological ‘take’.”²⁴ Forecasting future events, which had been one of the major challenges of early cybernetics, becomes a crucial task of the new vision systems, as well as increasing attempts at deception and the overriding of reality by virtuality, not least in the military and propaganda scenarios of the Cold War, where nuclear deterrence was based on the visibility and invisibility of one’s own nuclear military potential. This also concerns decoy technologies, which Virilio describes in detail because they exemplify the operative replacement of real phenomena by deceptive images which, for instance, divert a missile from its real target onto a virtual decoy target.²⁵ An important reason such deceptions are possible is the mediality of perception which hinges on the specific perceptive parameters of a particular system, and the necessity of what Farocki called the disavowal, i.e., the reduction of what enters the field of vision to aspects that can be recognized and processed for operative decision making.

Virilio emphasized the fact that technical visuality is fundamentally different from the way humans see:

Don’t forget, though, that “image” is just an empty word here since the machine’s interpretation has nothing to do with normal vision (to put it mildly!). For the computer, the optically active electron image is merely a series of coded impulses whose configuration we cannot begin to imagine since, in this “automation of perception,” image feedback is no longer assured. That being, of course, the whole idea.²⁶

From a human perspective, this is a blind gaze, a gaze that does not take in the complexity of a visual field and its aesthetic multidimensionality but only looks for precoded cues. “Blindness is thus very much at the heart of the coming ‘vision machine’. The production of sightless vision is itself merely the reproduction of an intense blindness that will become the latest and last form of industrialization: the industrialization of the non-gaze.”²⁷ However, this blind, technical gaze and its statistical way of analyzing and interpreting images is not simply different from a human way of seeing; Virilio saw the danger of it increasingly becoming the basis for human visual perception and understanding: “The usual criticism of statistical thought, as generating rational illusions, thus necessarily comes down to what we might here call the visual thought of the computer, digital optics now being scarcely more than a statistical optics capable of generating a series of visual illusions, ‘rational illusions’, which affect our understanding as well as reasoning.”²⁸

Virilio’s thinking is speculative in the best sense: it departs from facts in order to extrapolate and imagine what the cultural and mental effects of certain technical developments might be. This development goes back to the coupling of photo and film cameras to aerial vehicles and weapons, a history which Virilio addressed in War and Cinema,²⁹ and which was also taken up by Farocki in his films. Both their accounts reference a more technical treatment of the development of computer vision only indirectly, focusing instead on representations and understandings of such machine vision systems.

Initially, these systems were developed in a military context to support the interpretation of aerial photographs taken of enemy territoy.³⁰ Post-Second World War research into cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence was used to devise systems for pattern recognition, and, from the mid-1950s onward, for image processing. Pattern recognition is based on the conceptualization of, for instance, spoken language, texts, or images as information, and their translation into stacks of data that can be analyzed to detect specific patterns that point to the existence of certain objects or structures. Both the encoding of images and the analysis of the resulting coded data are thus crucial tasks of computer vision systems. As a complement to pattern recognition, the field of image processing was developed to enhance or prepare images for their interpretation by humans or computers.³¹

In the United States, institutional development, for instance with the founding of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in 1961, was paralleled by conceptual research in which, by 1965, the mathematician Lawrence G. Roberts made important proposals for formalizing optical information from perspectival views of three-dimensional objects for computer analysis, which would also play an important role for 3D computer graphics.³²

Research in other areas, like radar, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance, explored possibilities of perceiving nonvisual qualities of the object under observation and thus accounted for yet another dimension of the blindness of the “vision machine”: here the model sense was not vision but touch, a remote touch that does not have the limitations of visual perspective, though it has of course its own medial particularities.³³ The decisive criterion for the success of such perceptual systems was, and probably is, whether the derived information can be made operational. Media historian Lev Manovich summarizes the conflation of comprehension and agency that determines such a strategic and technological conception of computer vision systems: “In the best tradition of … pragmatism …, cognition is equated with action. The computer can be said to ‘understand’ a scene if it can act on it—move objects, assemble details, destroy targets.”³⁴

Several authors have more recently attempted to describe the operationality of images less in such pragmatic and technological terms, with their focus on “images by and for machines,” than in terms of the efficacy and agency of images in social and scientific contexts. Art historian Horst Bredekamp has introduced the concept of the “picture act” (Bildakt) to highlight the way pictures provoke or engender actions. The picture act is related to the notion of the effect of an image (Bildwirkung), but it puts the picture itself in the position of the agent that affords an effect or response.³⁵

Bredekamp’s conception of “picture acts” is based on the work of the German philosopher Sybille Krämer, who has been developing a theory of the operativity of writing, in writing as well as in computer programs. Krämer distinguishes between “phenomena of operational pictoriality [operative Bildlichkeit]” and “operationally efficacious images [operativ wirksame Bildern].” Such operationally efficacious images include the type of computer images in, for instance, remote control and automated guidance systems, which Farocki and others call “operational images.” They are technically integrated into a given technical apparatus. In contrast, the images of operational pictoriality are, for instance, diagrams, graphs, and maps. They generally combine pictorial aspects with those of writing and can be put to use without themselves being operational.³⁶

Bredekamp’s picture acts are performed by images in the sense of operational pictoriality, i.e., by the potential of pictures to be used and acted upon. Instead of such a sidelining of operational images, the media historian Thomas Keenan has argued for a politicization of image operations, whether they are done by machines or by humans.³⁷ Keenan introduces Allan Sekula’s account of aerial photographs in the First World War, taken and interpreted by a unit led by modernist photographer Edward Steichen, as “instrumental images,” and the ensuing attempts by aerial reconnaissance units to automate their reading and interpretation.³⁸ Keenan discusses several examples of operational images and refers to their definition by Farocki as images that function without being seen by human eyes: “They need no interpretation in order to work; or, rather, they include something like interpretation as part of the image-making process. They are about as purely instrumental as images can get, and to that they add a feedback loop—what happens in the image guides, produces, creates effects in the world that is imaged.”³⁹

Keenan thus points to the fact that such operational images are not passively read, but are coded and thus active elements of an assemblage of image production, interpretation, and agency; that they are in fact part of the operational apparatus:

Reading becomes mechanical coding. The ideal goal of such an interpretative machine would be to incorporate the “reading” of the image into the very technology that generates it in the first place, to produce images that arrive before the eye bearing their own translation into the terms required for intervention … and then to link that directly to the means of intervention. … The ideal mode of reading them would be not to have to read them at all.⁴⁰

While this description may echo the pragmatism of the developers of computer vision systems quoted by Manovich, Keenan adds that such systems are not neutral, but that their formation and the use of images in them—“the interpretive grid created by Steichen’s unit, or a contemporary analytic algorithm”—are always framed by social and political contexts, which makes their meaning, in Sekula’s expression, a matter of “political maneuvering.”⁴¹ Even the purely technological interpretation of visually acquired data still implies such an act of “maneuvering,” that it is still politically informed. Keenan does not understand operational images in a strictly technical sense, but applies the term to different types of efficacious images and to different contexts in which they can be put to work. Besides describing technological and nonhuman systems, the concept of operational images thus becomes available to political contexts where, for instance, human rights abuses are to be uncovered by practices of “counter-forensics.”⁴²

The German art historian and image theoretician Tom Holert has similarly suggested a more inclusive definition of operational images which, he says, have a function of determining and programming behavior: operational images are “images which have become components of a functional, technical environment and which determine a more or less automatic activity or behavior.”⁴³ Like Keenan, Holert considers images and their potency (Wirkmächtigkeit) in a context of public communication and political struggle. With regard to image censorship and propaganda, for instance, it becomes clear “that the issue is not images but asymmetrical visibilities, and that the availability of visual data always also implies the possibility of its absence.”⁴⁴

However, Holert also argues for an expanded conception of images or pictorialities (Bildlichkeiten) that takes into account the consequences of their algorithmic state as operational images and that may be more suitably expressed mathematically than visually.⁴⁵ A current sense of visuality implies the particular aesthetics of this algorithmic dimension, and considers such images “as complex interfaces of human-machine interaction, … in order to stop expecting them to tell the truth about reality.”⁴⁶

In a similar vein, Thomas Keenan has proposed to extend the notion of the image to this kind of optical processing.⁴⁷ With regard to the automatic, optically controlled docking procedure at the International Space Station, the information that is being processed by the system could then also be called an image, which in this case is a set of optically derived digital data that are processed according to certain algorithms and patterns, a technical matching of spatial positions and movements according to optical clues.

A strong notion of operational images will no doubt have to integrate the algorithmic functionality of the digital systems that process them and in which operational images are not merely reference data but are themselves part of the coding and decoding procedures. However, such a technical understanding of operational images does not mean that the category of the image is actually useful for describing the technical functionality of such vision systems. Rather, I would argue that the notion of the “image” is best employed in analogy to that of the “machine,” which, in the conception developed here, is understood as a metaphor through which the unaddressable apparatuses of subjectification are made addressable. Accordingly, a description of optically derived, digitally and electronically coded and processed data sets as “images” indicates that these data sets are considered, and their efficacies contemplated, by human subjects. The fact that they are also, and differently, seen and acted upon by machines is an aspect of the estrangement and uncanniness that underpins the aesthetics of the machinic.

Machines that Make Images

In most instances when, in the visual arts of the twentieth century, machines were given the task of making images—by means of mechanical, electronic, or digital devices—there was less doubt about the human observer as the proper recipient of such works. Only in the rarest instances were such images operational. A frequent point of discussion, however, was the aesthetic status of the technical devices and the media through which works were created or displayed. In a number of cases, the machines making the images were seen as at least as important as their visual products, and such apparatus-based artworks were criticized for being ambiguous about their potential artistic creativity.

Among the most explicit mechanical image machines are the Metamatics drawing sculptures by Jean Tinguely. From the mid-1950s until the 1970s, Tinguely built a total of 17 sculptures, or apparatuses, with which drawings can be produced. Metamatic No. 8 (1958), for example, is a “tabletop model” of 50 centimeters height and 110 centimeters width (figure 2.5). It is a technical contraption on a tripod, with several flat sheet metal elements (circles, a rounded triangle, a spiral) that are painted black and attached to a support construction. An electrical motor is built into the pedestal on which the sculpture is placed, which is connected to the sculpture by a transmission belt. It drives a conveyor system that moves the different elements. In the right half of the sculpture is a vertically placed black metal sheet of 30 by 20 centimeters to whose front a piece of A4 paper can be attached. A metal arm in front of this sheet can be equipped with a color pen. The arm is attached to one of the moving elements, and as the motor is switched on by means of a button in front of the sculpture, the entire construction begins to move and shake, the pen erratically hitting the sheet of paper within a radius of about 15 centimeters. By applying pens with different colors in successive sessions, the sculpture can be made to produce polychromatic drawings.

In the series of drawing machines, Tinguely varied the construction in size and form; some sculptures use human physical power, like the bicycle-driven Metamatic No. 6 (1959),⁴⁸ but the general principle of a kinetic metal construction to which a pen and a piece of paper can be attached remains the same. The sculptures are never anthropomorphic.⁴⁹ The construction that holds and guides the pen determines the possible structuration of the drawing; the physical latitude of the construction and its actualization determine the graphic form. The act of drawing is an event that happens in time, and the duration of the event—timed by the duration of operating the mechanism—determines the density of the drawn color lines and strokes. Each drawing is unique.

What does it mean to “make an image”? We are faced with a complex assemblage that encompasses the artist-engineer who constructed the machine; the machine with its particular physical structure that determines its operation and that includes both functional elements and “nonfunctional” elements which form part of its overall sculptural appearance and performance; the user or operator who sets the process of drawing in motion; and the resulting drawing. Tinguely provides a deconstruction of the act of image making—even though he reserved a special place for himself. He was aware of the currency of the artist’s name on the art market, so the drawings were treated as artworks, signed and dated.⁵⁰ In the context of the 1959 art fair, Tinguely presented Metamatic No. 17, and at the same time he filed a patent for the principle of the drawing machine. He positions himself as artist, but also as inventor and engineer who leaves the operation of the machine artwork to exhibition visitors.

In contrast, the use of photography and film by artists in the twentieth century most often meant the deployment of industrially produced devices, save for the instances of experimental creation where the construction of special equipment or the transformation of given devices became part of the artistic practice. This was also the case with artists who worked with electronic equipment from the 1950s onward. While this initially meant the use of oscilloscopes and radar screens, mainly from military contexts, the artistic development in the 1960s and 1970s was closely tied to the use of television and video technologies.⁵¹

Nam June Paik had first used television sets in his exhibition “Exposition of Music—Electronic Television” (1963), manipulating the standard functionality of the electronic devices. Paik explored the aesthetic latitude of the TV set, both as a sculptural object and as an instrument for generating images. The minimalist Zen for TV, for instance, which shows a single white line of pixels on the screen of a television set that is placed on its side, was the result of a technical manipulation of the vertical deflection plates in the cathode ray tube of a television set, which is really not an electronic but a physical, namely magnetic function of the CRT monitor. In 1968–1969, together with the electrical engineer Shuya Abe, Paik constructed the Paik-Abe-Video-Synthesizer, one of the earliest examples of an electronic device that could not only manipulate recorded video images but also create synthetic images.

In the late 1960s, many artists started to explore the aesthetic potentials of electronic signal processing in video, first with analog, later with digital and hybrid analog/digital systems. Among them were Steina and Woody Vasulka, whose work in the 1970s is exemplary of the spirit of experimentation and technical invention which dominated those years.⁵² Between 1975 and 1978, Steina Vasulka developed a series of works under the title Machine Vision which experimentally combined optics with electronics. The physical devices assembled video cameras with flat and spherical, still and motorized mirrors and lenses that would move and turn in front of the camera lens, continuously changing the camera view and elucidating principles like the pan or zoom. The series included the installation Allvision (1975) of two cameras pointing at the two sides of a convex mirror sphere, each providing fisheye images of one half of the exhibition space—the two cameras together thus taking images of the entire space (figure 4.5). The live-image feeds from all installations were displayed on a three-by-three monitor wall. The video images of the Machine Vision installations were also used in a series of tapes made by Steina in the same period. One of them, Orbital Obsession (1977), shows a series of performative experiments with the different installations and the real-time modulating, keying, and switching of the image inputs by means of electronic video equipment.⁵³ These effects—rather limited and clunky in comparison with the image manipulations that would soon become possible through digital processing—are typical of the aesthetics of electronic video as used by artists working in the 1970s and 1980s, which harked back to the formalist and kinetic work of artists like Moholy-Nagy or the experimental photographers at the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s.

Figure 4.5 Steina Vasulka, Allvision (1975), installation from the series Machine Vision. Photo by Kevin Noble. Courtesy of the artist.

More recently, the French artist Julien Maire has used mechanical and electronic techniques to build installations that combine sculptural and media-technical aspects and thus present a unique blurring of associative, kinetic, and automatic aspects of machine aesthetics. His installation Exploding Camera (2007) forms an interesting case when considering the aesthetics of electronic media (figures 4.6, 4.7; plates 4, 5). It also raises the question of the artistic status of the technically created image, which we will later address in a more theoretical perspective.

Figure 4.6 Julien Maire, Exploding Camera (2007), installation view, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Copyright © the artist.

Figure 4.7 Julien Maire, Exploding Camera (2007), sequence of screenshots. Copyright © the artist.

There is a jumble of electronic gear with some LED lights on a table, and a TV set with a CRT tube next to it. The TV monitor shows blurry still images. Sometimes there are slight movements in those images, but these could also be mere shifts in the color spectrum, technical effects rather than representations of visually recorded physical movements. Different images are presented, one after the other. The images change by being shifted downward; one image is moved out of view at the bottom as a new image appears at the top of the screen. Occasionally, several such images are moved past the screen, then the movement stops and one image is held on the screen for a while. It lights up, tinted in changing colors; objects appear in single or double form. Sometimes a flash of light burns a point-shaped hole in the surface of the screen image and slowly disappears again, an electronic afterimage receding.

On the tabletop, we see a mess of thin cables connecting multiple LED lights which are fixed on small metal stands, around 50 centimeters above the tabletop. The LEDs are of different sizes and colors, go on and off at irregular intervals, and point downward at what looks like the dissected body of a video camera. The camera is wired up, but its case is opened and the components scattered around. Somewhere in the middle there is a CD-size disk, occasionally spinning. Small, frameless slides are fixed to the rim of the transparent disk. Underneath the disk, a button-size device can be recognized as the video sensor of the camera. When we realize that the images on the TV screen change synchronously with the physical movement of the disk, and that the color and light effects on the screen images take place synchronously with the different LEDs lighting up, we understand that the video sensor must still be functioning, transmitting the optical information that it receives as electronic signals to the cathode ray tube of the TV set. Without optical lenses, the optical input to the video sensor is blurry; only rough shapes can be recognized, what they show can only be guessed. The images on the screen are still images which are animated by the changing configurations of light effects from the LEDs.⁵⁴

There are sounds playing which are synchronized with the movement of the images, a mix of almost musical electronic mood sounds and occasional sounds of motors, shots, and explosions. These evocative sounds seem to bind the abstract images and color and light effects together into a filmic narrative: we see helicopters, we see an aerial view of large oil tanks, we see the sun rise in the desert, and together with the sounds, a movie begins to unfold in our head, about political tension, about military activities in the Middle East, about looming death.

A movie has been choreographed for us from some technical debris, a miniature media spectacle created with a sculptural installation of a “dying” yet still functioning media apparatus that is able to produce in real time an experimental film. The video images are produced live by direct illumination of the camera’s active light sensor, filtered by found slide images.

With the title of the installation, Exploding Camera, Julien Maire refers to a historical event that is iconic for the contemporary role of public media. In the year 2001, two days before September 11, Commander Massoud, then the most powerful opponent to the Taliban regime in the Afghan civil war, was murdered. Two al-Qaida suicide bombers posing as journalists killed the northern Afghan warlord with an explosive device that had been hidden in a video camera which they brought to what was supposed to be a television interview. The historical connection between Massoud’s assassination and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11 is documented, though the event of 9/9 has been widely forgotten—certainly because of the magnitude of the events that overshadowed it a few days later, and maybe also because this figurehead of an independent Afghanistan did not fit into the narrative that led to the following military campaign in the central Asian country by the US-led alliance.

Julien Maire’s Exploding Camera is a media sculpture that takes this historical example to reflect on violence and image construction in the electronic mass media.⁵⁵ The image production takes place in the physical gallery space, while the transmission and display of the electronic image happen in the virtual electronic space of the technical infrastructure, including the cathode ray tube of the TV monitor. The installation deploys film slides, LED lights, a digitally controlled electronic video sensor, and an electronic video monitor to portray the fatal dialectics of construction and destruction in the politics of media representation. It confronts us with the speculative perceptions of a machine eye that lingers in a state of near death. The images that unfold on the screen are an electronic interpretation of light signals caught by the video sensor, unprotected by the focusing, distancing, objectifying lens. The apparatus, which is there both as the main site and medium of image production and as a spectacle, allows us to look critically at the construction and the technical constructedness of mediated experiences. Exploding Camera deconstructs the electronic media image and turns the exhibition space into an experimental stage reminiscent of a battlefield.

The historical importance of artworks like Zen for TV, Allvision, or Exploding Camera lies, first, in the exploration of an iconicity that is based on the given technical structure and specifications of the electronic video system: an exploration that was pushed forward both by the invention of new technical tools that broadened the range of visual expression and by the appropriation and transformation of existing technology. Between Maire, the Vasulkas, and the early Paik, we see that the electronic image can be tweaked and created on three levels, the levels of input, signal processing, and output. Every electronic image is constructed from these technical components.

Second, these transitional electronic video images were important because they made the technological construction of television images visible—epitomized perhaps by the early TV-Décollages of Wolf Vostell (since 1958) and the excessive multimonitor video installations of Nam June Paik. They formed the basis for a critique of the image which, in Chris Marker’s seminal film Sans Soleil (1983), is represented by the video images made by Hayao Yamaneko that are transformed by a video synthesizer in order to create a distance from the real objects and that can thus be more truthful, because they appear as what they really are, namely images, and not the transportable and concrete form of a reality that is always already unreachable.⁵⁶

Besides mechanical, photographic, and electronic techniques, algorithmically based digital systems offer yet another form of artistic image making in which part of the creative process is delegated to a technical system. In the early phase of the 1960s, the resulting images were mostly still graphics, due to limited calculation power and limited options for displays and other output devices.⁵⁷

In a discussion of “the images of new media,” Gottfried Boehm in 1999 formulated the assumption that digital images are “explications of calculation processes” which, in principle, “can take on any shape” and “resemble the programs on which they are based.”⁵⁸ He claimed that “the new media are literally ‘media’, i.e. the conditions of possible images,” and that it was questionable “whether and how the new media are able to achieve genuine iconic manifestations.”⁵⁹

Against such a restrictive approach, I want to argue in this chapter that in fact iconicity is always based on technical conditions, conditions of possible images, and that it is a historically arbitrary decision to “naturalize” images resulting from some technical conditions—like the material conditions of painting—while bracketing others. By contrast, Boehm’s phenomenological definition of the image is independent of specific techniques. To be able to describe an image and to understand its aesthetics, it is necessary to be able to analyze both its phenomenological and its technical aspects. According to Boehm, “in the sense of iconic valences, [the images of new media] are no images at all, but simulations.”⁶⁰ Yet this can also be said of painting, for instance, whose materialities of oil paint and linen canvas or wood “simulate” an icon rather than being one. We will here briefly review some of the technical conditions of twentieth-century image making in order to show how Boehm’s question of what an image is, and what it can be, has motivated not only painters and image makers like Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Lucio Fontana, or Barnett Newman, but also artists exploring iconicity by means of electronic and digital techniques.

The French artist François Morellet opted for a “programmed” art production for the same reason that motivated many avant-garde artists, namely to reduce the mystique surrounding artistic creativity. Morellet had been trained as an artist and had worked nonfiguratively since the late 1940s. With strongly conceptual, graphic works like 3 double trames 0º, 30º, 60º (Three double grids 0º, 30º, 60º) (1960–1961), in which line grids are overlaid on the same panel at different angles, Morellet developed the principles of conceptual art into a form that, from the 1960s onward, could also be realized by computers. The triviality of the “machines” of graphic rules with which he produced his work was thus a deliberate choice in the tradition of concrete artists like Theo van Doesburg, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Josef Albers, and Anni Albers.⁶¹ For Morellet, the development of geometric order by means of the successive execution of a predetermined program was not an homage to a technological aesthetics, but a way of renewing the avant-garde concept of a nonexpressive, abstract art. The prospect of an automated production of images by machines implied the conscious subversion of one of the heroic moments of modern subjecthood: the creation of visual art, of an image.⁶²

Another example of the introduction of algorithmic principles into visual art, before and independent of the discrete logic of digital technology, is the formal method for generating abstract images that was developed around 1959 by the Hungarian-born artist Vera Molnar. Molnar had lived in Paris since 1947, working in the tradition of concrete art, painting and drawing images of geometric shapes in different sizes and colors. These pictures often came in series that varied the composition of specific shapes, their angles, or colors, with the aim of finding aesthetically interesting configurations. Retrospectively, she writes in 1991:

In order to realize my research series in a truly systematic manner, I deployed a technique which I called machine imaginaire [imaginary machine]. I imagined that I had a computer. I designed a program and, step by step, I realized simple, limited series which, however, were complete in themselves, leaving out not a single combination of forms. As soon as I could, I replaced the make-believe computer, the imagined machine, by a real computer.

This method helped Molnar “to distance myself from the inherited cultural baggage, to free myself from the influences of civilization that shape us and from the cultural ‘ready-mades’, and to find combinations of forms that had never been seen before.”⁶³

As regards the operation of the machine imaginaire, Molnar would first define the classes of objects to be used in a particular work: squares, rectangles, and shapes with variable angles and sizes, lines and their thickness, etc. Then she defined the rules, the program, according to which the configuration of the objects would be established and iterated. This program was then executed in meticulous drawings, Molnar making precise notes about the steps that she had already completed, in order to avoid omissions or repetitions. She did not always use the same drawing techniques for the execution of the program, but in general she only used black and white, after experiments with colors had proved overly complicated. The colors were added later, again based on a systematic procedure using color charts. In order to avoid specific unwanted cases—like, for instance, diagonals in consecutive rows touching each other, forming continuous lines—Molnar introduced additional rules that would exclude, in this case, certain angles (e.g., 45 and 135 degrees).

Molnar’s procedure was not designed to produce specific and unique graphics; it is a method for visualizing all possible iterations of a predefined program. From these instantiations, and based on her own, subjective sense of aesthetics, she then made a selection which would be realized in a more elaborate visual form, such as drawings or paintings. “First I thought that there would be one correct version, but then I understood that I am more interested in situations than in individual cases, in the same sense as I don’t believe in a single artwork.”⁶⁴ The criteria of the selection are subjective and intuitive: “In general, I have understood that I like things that are either close to total order, or close to total chaos. I still don’t so much like anything between those two states.”⁶⁵

When the pioneers of computer graphics, like the engineers-cum-artists Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, or Michael Noll, were able to use mainframe computers for the creation of the first graphic images in the early 1960s, with the challenges of writing a program in an appropriate programming language that could be executed by a computer and whose result could be printed or drawn by a plotter, the complexity both of the technical apparatus and of the potential visual output expanded rapidly.⁶⁶

In the broader context of our discussion of the machine in art, a document by the German mathematician and early computer artist Frieder Nake is of particular interest, because it shows the prevalence of the conception of the “machine” as a specific, subjective category. Nake’s “Production of Drawings, Sound Sequences, and Texts with Electronic Computing Systems,” published by the Deutsches Rechenzentrum (German Computing Center) in Darmstadt in 1966, provides “remarks on the programming of computer graphics” with the aim of instructing art schools in the potentials of the new technological means.⁶⁷ Illustrated with his own early computer-graphic experiments, Nake’s text spells out in simple terms the different components that are used in the production of such graphics: a program set up to run on the computing system, the computing system which executes the program, and the transfer of the information output from this execution via punched tape to a drawing machine which executes the drawing. The running of this main program requires, writes Nake, a number of subprograms which will, for instance, provide pseudo-random numbers, or direct the punching of the punched tape. This assemblage can be complemented by programs “that determine certain aesthetic measures during the computation process, and accordingly influence the progress of the drawing. This production must be considered in the context of the artistic theory that M. Bense and his collaborators have developed following G. D. Birkhoff.”⁶⁸

This last remark points to the concept of information aesthetics, which grew out of attempts to find a rational, mathematical basis for aesthetic judgments, or, as some of its proponents hoped, an objective description of aesthetic quality. Around 1930, the American mathematician George D. Birkhoff had published texts on the statistical “aesthetic measure” which he derived from a structural analysis and quantification of complexity and order in artworks. This principle was adopted in the late 1950s by Max Bense in Germany and by Abraham Moles in France, both of whom, independently of each other, started using the term “information aesthetics.” Bense continued Birkhoff’s reception-aesthetic hunt for an objectification of aesthetic judgment—nurturing in some early German computer artists the illusion that an application of the quantitative criteria of information and redundancy would lead to artistically interesting results—while Moles proposed a production-aesthetic theory that was instructive for artists working with information systems and that, unlike the Bense school, took into account the unpredictability and openness of material and form.⁶⁹

In Nake’s description, the technical components of computer, computer program, algorithm, and drawing apparatus are not addressed as “machines.” Instead, Nake diligently speaks of a “digital electronic computation system (or installation)” (Rechenanlage), a “program” and its “subprograms” (Unterprogramme), and of the Graphomat Zuse Z 64 as a “fully automatic drawing apparatus” (Zeichengerät). The word “machine” is only used in two instances: once with reference to the drawing apparatus (as “the punch-tape-controlled drawing machine”), and once, more conspicuously, with regard to the computer:

The first and most important task is the setting up of the program. It should enable the production of a whole class of drawings (“aesthetic objects,” according to Bense). It should be able to go through all the variations of a specific schema. This should be seen in analogy to the approach of the artist who pursues a theme in all directions by means of his “intuition.” By intuition we can understand the selection of possibilities from a certain repertory. This intuition is simulated in the computing machine by the automatic selection of pseudo-random numbers.⁷⁰

The slippage—for once calling the “Rechenanlage” a “Rechenmaschine”—occurs precisely when Nake makes a direct comparison between the practice of the human artist and the simulation of this practice by means of the computer. This moment of encounter—the computer eye to eye with the intuiting artist—is what brings forth the technical “as machine.” And correspondingly, in the example mentioned before, the Graphomat Z64 is a drawing “apparatus” so long as it is connected to the other devices in the system, but for a moment it becomes a “machine” when we see it draw and compete with a human hand. By analogy, Molnar’s machine imaginaire is a “machine” because it externalizes and rationalizes a procedure in the course of which the human brain is turned into the computer which processes an algorithm and thus controls the drawing apparatus of the hand with a pencil on paper.

The two concepts of aesthetic practice represented by Molnar and Nake differ in an important way. Nake’s speculative proposal—inspired by the wish for a high score on Birkhoff’s scale of information aesthetics—to implement an additional program “that determines certain aesthetic measures during the computation process, and accordingly influences the progress of the drawing”—such a programmed correction would have been unacceptable for Molnar, who, both in the period of the machine imaginaire and after she started using digital computer systems from 1968 onward, slavishly stuck with the execution of the predetermined program. Molnar insists that she never cheated, for instance by interrupting the plotter during the drawing process when it had reached a stage where the drawing seemed ready. She always let the plotter take its course and complete the program. If she was not content with the result, she might modify the computer program and have it run again, but she would never manipulate the process during execution, as suggested by Nake’s aesthetic correction. Instead, she would at times be surprised by the results of programming mistakes, like the graphic effects of a wrongly placed comma in the written code.⁷¹

This is the moment of the machine, the experience of a technical action that may rationally be understood as fully programmed, yet that is felt to have an uncontrollable logic of its own. It differs from the concrete paintings of Theo van Doesburg whose shapes were developed on a rectangular grid but remained under the control of the artist’s sense of balance and compositions, and it is more singular than the serial images by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack who, starting in his years at the Bauhaus, algorithmically drew all the possible variations of certain graphic configurations—much in the methodical manner that Vera Molnar would perfect with the machine imaginaire. Instead of the mystique of apparent machinic volition, Hirschfeld-Mack’s graphs invite comparison and selectivity, but they do not offer the unique moment of creation that the drawing computer would perform in the execution of a specific software program.

In the course of the 1990s, computer software gained increasing critical attention both for its social relevance in structuring communication infrastructures and forms of computer-based agency and for its aesthetic possibilities.⁷² With the growing availability of affordable computers and the emergence of the World Wide Web, artists experimented with the configuration of networks and explored the potential for expanding the limits of how software can be employed in creative processes. Artistic browser software projects, like I/O/D’s Webstalker (1998), Netochka Nezvanova’s Nebula.M81 (1999), and JODI’s Wrong Browser (2000), and data analysis and visualization projects by artists like the Radical Software Group’s Carnivore (since 2001) or Minitasking (2002) by Schoenerwissen, indicate the typical relation between a critical articulation of information infrastructures and the visualization of machine operations.⁷³ The dynamic network environments in which projects like these operate make them akin to an aesthetics of systems rather than one of machines. In the same way as the autopoietic dimension of generative software projects points beyond the principle of the machine and uses this term, if at all, only in the metaphorical, metonymic sense in which authors like Maturana, Guattari, and others have employed it, such network-based projects presuppose an ecological understanding of technology which, as I will discuss more fully in chapter 6, transgresses the twentieth-century concept of the machine.

This concept still informs works that address the question of the iconicity of algorithmic processes, like French computer artist Antoine Schmitt’s Vexation 1 (2000, figure 4.8). This is a computer-based work in which, in the confines of a white-lined rectangle on the black surface of a display screen, a small white circle moves from one side of the rectangle to the other in a fixed sequence—bottom to top, then left, right, and back to the bottom—sounding a different tone whenever one of the sides of the rectangle is hit. While this rule, and thus the sequence of the four tones, is fixed, the path on which the little “ball” travels from one side to the next is calculated in real time and can take on a variety of speeds and trajectories, suggesting phases of protraction and hesitation as well as moments of excitement and speed. The erratic movement of the white ball and the arrhythmic repetition of the sound sequence are indicative of a randomness which is clearly programmed and based on tables of random numbers, yet somehow appears as subjective and intentional in its performative realization. Rationally, the viewer may think this system’s visual output is a kinetic grandchild of Morellet’s tilted grids. Yet, as one observes the white ball in Schmitt’s Vexation 1 hesitating, quivering, and then exploding into cheerful bouncing in the next moment, its strange dynamic makes it difficult not to project traits of subjectivity onto the quite obviously programmed artifact.⁷⁴

Figure 4.8 Antoine Schmitt, Vexation 1 (2000), software program, sequence of screenshots. Copyright © the artist.

In contrast to such a formalist aesthetic approach, the Dutch-Belgian artist duo JODI have developed a more deconstructive approach to software-based images, in the Dadaist tradition of kineticism. Since the early 1990s, JODI have explored the different layers of encoding and decoding, of representation and of communication, of the interaction between algorithmic and iconic protocols that determine the screen-based interfaces of computer games, Internet services, and various client software.⁷⁵ Their work Untitled Game (1996–2001) is based on four levels of the popular computer game Quake. The game engine software has been manipulated and the visual representations of the different levels have been stripped of all details so that they are now barely recognizable, composed only of schematic op-art-style black-and-white surfaces, or in one case of a totally indistinct whiteness (figure 4.9). However, the virtual spatial structure and the different traps and enemies that inhabit the game are still there, and the abstracted game levels can still be played. JODI thus offer a commentary on the idea of smooth interactivity which is normally associated with such virtual environments. The radical pictorial abstraction gestures not only toward the conventions of pictorial realism, but also toward modernism’s false assumption about the inherent loftiness of emptiness as pure form.

Figure 4.9 JODI, untitled game (1999), software, 12 game modifications of Quake, screen image. Copyright © the artists.

Rather than ask whether such visual spaces constitute “genuine iconic manifestations” (Boehm), the question for a contemporary notion of images must be how the algorithmic and interactive conditions of such visual spaces are changing concepts of visuality, and of iconicity. In the late 1990s, the US artist John F. Simon created Every Icon (1997), a work that shows a 32-by-32-pixel grid in which each cell can be either black or white. The work pledges to display all possible configurations of the pixels, i.e., “every icon” that can be represented in such a limited, 32-by-32-pixel matrix (figure 4.10). The speed of the calculation is dependent on the clock speed of the computer on which the program runs, but even on a fast computer, going through all possible configurations would take several million years. On one level, Every Icon is a parody of the algorithmic processing done by Vera Molnar and shows how the computer, faced with such a simple and overwhelming task, can itself become a machine imaginaire. And on another level, while the piece is certainly not an “image,” it addresses the mediality of images firmly in the tradition of artists asking this very question throughout modernism.

Figure 4.10 John F. Simon, Every Icon (1997). Image courtesy of numeral.com.

Physiological and Technical Embodiments of Images

Even long before the invention of cinematography at the end of the nineteenth century, artists have been aware of the medialities and the technical conditions of images they can create. The different levels of technicality that we analyzed in the previous section are stacked onto one another: digital techniques require electronic circuits to be processed, and electronic techniques have to be coupled to physical, at times mechanical interfaces in order to be perceivable. A project of “digital art,” like Schmitt’s Vexation 1 or Simon’s Every Icon, requires the electronic circuit boards on the computer that runs its software, and the material supports, the physical electrodes or liquid crystals, in the displays that show its visual representations.

Another level of mediality required in visual art is the physiological apparatus of human visual perception. Although physiologically grounded visual phenomena like the afterimage have been known since antiquity, it was not till the nineteenth century that they were systematically researched and described. In his seminal study Techniques of the Observer (1990), American art historian Jonathan Crary discussed the parallel developments of this research and of the media techniques that made it possible to study the respective phenomena, and that turned some of these phenomena into entertaining spectacles.⁷⁶ Crucially, the researchers of the nineteenth century discovered the physiologically determined latency and thus the temporality of seeing, and hence the autonomy of the act of seeing from the seen object. The eye and the human perceptual (optical and neurological) apparatus were discovered to be part of a continuum that, by means of media techniques like stereoscopy or stroboscopy and under specifically controlled spatial and lighting conditions, could be made to perceive images as moving or three-dimensional.

Like all images, these perceptions are effects of the respective media apparatus, which necessarily depends on the physiology of visual perception as one of its conditioning frameworks, an insight that has also been reflected in the work of painters since the nineteenth century—the paintings of Paul Cézanne are the classic illustration of this trope.⁷⁷ The “representation of perception” and of the mediality of human perception was epitomized by Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs of the 1920s and 1930s. Duchamp produced six double-sided disks 20 centimeters in diameter, titled for instance Montgolfière, Gold Fish, or Chinese Lampion, which were to be rotated at a speed of 40–60 rpm by a gramophone-like motorized apparatus. When spun like that, it appeared to the human eye as though parts of the designs were making additional or contrary movements, or as though certain elements were three-dimensional.⁷⁸

The Rotoreliefs form part of Duchamp’s critique of a retinal art which reproduces visual experiences. Instead, he sought to enable a new type of experience that directly speaks to the mind. Yet at the same time the spinning disks can be understood as “hyper-retinal,” in that they allow us to observe at least part of the processes through which the human visual apparatus creates the impression of movement and spatial depth from specific graphic and dynamic configurations.⁷⁹ What appears as an image in the spinning Rotoreliefs is a phenomenon which uniquely and exclusively appears to the human eye, or rather to the human mind mediated by the eye and the neurological processes of visual perception. This phenomenon is latent in the design printed on the disk, and will be realized only under the conditions of the motor spinning the disk at a particular speed, and in the presence of the perceiving eye.⁸⁰

Research into the functioning of human vision led, around 1830, to the discovery of the stroboscopic effect: based on the latency of the afterimage, images that appear to the human eye in discrete form will be perceived as a continuous, moving sequence, if the differences between the individual images are small enough. The phenakistiscope and the zoetrope were the first devices that made use of this effect to simulate movement through the consecutive exposure of discrete still images.

Unlike Duchamp’s spinning disks, whose visual potential lies in specific graphic configurations that can be activated by exposing a continuous movement to the human eye, the zoetrope is based on discrete and discontinuous images which are fused by the latency of human visual perception. For this effect to work, one factor plays a crucial role: the speed at which the images change, or the number of image states per second that are necessary to create the illusion of continuous movement. This gives a first understanding of the notion of “resolution,” i.e., to what degree a movement has to be resolved into individual steps in order to appear continuous when presented in the zoetrope. Sixteen to eighteen images per second are sufficient to create the illusion of movement. The technical apparatus and the image sequence have to be matched and “synchronized” in order to simulate a movement that appears “natural” to the human eye.

In the nineteenth century, zoetropes and similar cinematographic apparatuses were mainly produced as toys and for entertainment. The chronophotographs of Eadweard Muybridge lent themselves to the reproduction of movement in such apparatuses, though these chronophotographs had been produced for the very purpose of studying the movement of humans and animals in discrete steps, rather than “blurring” them again into continuous movements.

The introduction of image telegraphy and of television made it necessary to consider the aspect of resolution not only with regard to the segmentation of movement in time (temporal resolution, image frequency) but also with regard to the density of visual information on the image surface (pictorial resolution). In order to transmit an image by means of electrical or electronic signals, the image has to be split up into a matrix of image points (pixels) that are individually encoded into discrete signals, transmitted, and then decoded for display on a monitor with an equivalent pixel matrix. The higher the number of pixels and the greater the detail of the representation, the higher also the requirement of information that has to be coded and transmitted.

Here again the human perceptual faculties play an important role, since the level of accuracy of the image representation depends on the accuracy of human vision and the degree to which adjoining elements of the image are perceived as separate or seem to merge. Thus, in a fine matrix, different shades of gray can be constructed from different mixtures of white and black pixels, and on a classical RGB color TV monitor, colors and shades are constructed from more or less bright pixels of red, green, and blue.⁸¹

The American artist Jim Campbell has explored the aesthetics of the pixel-based image and the phenomena of image resolution, of blurring and clarity of the image, in his Low Resolution video installations. In the work Church on Fifth Avenue (2001), a matrix of 32 by 24 red LEDs is used as a monitor to display a slow-motion video of a generic street scene of people walking by on a wide pavement and cars driving on a street in the background (figure 4.11, plate 6). A sheet of diffusing Plexiglas is placed in front of the display at an angle, so that on the left side the Plexiglas is very close to the LEDs and barely diffuses their light, whereas at the right edge the Plexi sheet is around 10 centimeters in front of the LEDs, which here appear as highly blurred. While the LEDs at the left edge can be clearly distinguished as individual points of light, to the right there are only more or less bright areas of red light. The video image of the street scene is best discernible in the middle area where the diffused refraction on the Plexi sheet merges the light from the individual LEDs into continuous shapes and figures. Toward the left side, the LED pixels, at more than 2 centimeters distance from each other, do not form a continuous image but appear as points of light that brighten up and dim down, without this sequence of visual impulses becoming legible as iconic information. And toward the right side, there is a continuous yet indistinct, myopic blur.⁸² Due to the movement in the video image of pedestrians and cars from left to right and from right to left, the viewer can follow individual figures passing gradually from one state of iconicity to another, moving from the low-resolution abstraction through a finely diffused legibility into the nebulous blur on the right of the screen, or in the opposite direction.

Figure 4.11 Jim Campbell, Church on Fifth Avenue (2001), installation view. Copyright © the artist.

The question of image resolution is a crucial factor in the context of the digital coding and transmission of image data files, where, due to the technical limitations of transmission bandwidth, a balance has to be found between image accuracy, as perceived by the human eye, and data volume. Image compression standards for still and video images seek to optimize this balance on the basis of “perceptual coding” that, as in the JPEG standard, explicitly takes the characteristics of human visual perception into account to mathematically model the optimal level of loss of detail for specific display environments.⁸³

The visual aesthetics of JPEG compression and the questions of photographic indexicality and veracity have been highlighted in the jpegs photo series by the German photographer Thomas Ruff, for which the artist took JPEG-coded photographs from the Internet, enlarged them to a monumental size, and printed them as sharp and fine-grained photographs, so that the tiled structure of the JPEG images becomes blatantly visible.⁸⁴

What unites these examples of artworks, from Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, through Campbell’s low-resolution video installations, to Ruff’s jpeg photos, is the fact that they not only articulate aspects of technical and human physiological dispositions—which is something that the visual media technologies on which they are founded already do—but they all reapproach and reinvent the medium which they deploy and make its particular aesthetics available for further scrutiny. They are media for human perception. Insofar as these works explore the articulation of human vision and technical media, they also highlight the entanglement of human perception in the technical construction of images, and vice versa.

The cascade of physiological, physical, electronic, and digital conditions of image making described here points to the fact that there is no basic form of iconicity, and that images always depend on highly specific and complex material conditions. The media that convey images never exist in a pure and definitive form. The artworks discussed here illustrate the diversity of critical and creative approaches to those material conditions, and point to the aesthetic “surplus” which any image medium carries. Our particular interest lies in those aspects of the technical conditions of image making where the respective apparatus takes on, or seems to take on, a level of autonomy, appearing not as a mere ancillary if idiosyncratic medium, but as a machinelike agent that determines by itself the production and formation of the images that we see. Thus, the Rotoreliefs by Marcel Duchamp—and the works by Campbell and Ruff do this by analogy—display for the critical viewer both the somewhat magical phenomenon of shapes and movements appearing in the spinning disks which cannot be seen on the still disks, and the equally strange awareness that one’s visual perception is a process directly coupled to the technical medium in front of the eyes, and able to bring about phenomena, optical or rather visual illusions, that only exist under the media-technical conditions of this particular human-machine dispositive.

The media-technical and physiological conditions of image making and perceptions are affordances that imply the possibilities of understanding and acting upon an image.⁸⁵ The inscription of the ways of seeing into an image dispositive—whether it is geared to a human or a machine as recipient—requires a knowledge, or an intuition, about the deployment and decoding of the perceptual offers that an image makes. A particular aspect of the aesthetics of an artwork can be to counteract the expectations inscribed in an image or an interface, and to offer a counterintuitive if not counterfactual impression that requires a readaptation of the intuitions that usually guide the response to such affordances.

Such a challenge to the expectations of the behavior of images is proposed by Julien Maire’s installation Memory Cone (2009), which also levels the boundary between image production and image perception by building the need for interaction by the exhibition visitor into the setup (figures 4.12, 4.13; plates 7, 8).

Figure 4.12 Julien Maire, Memory Cone (2009), installation view, MUHKA, Antwerp. Copyright © the artist.

Figure 4.13 Julien Maire, Memory Cone (2009), projection detail. Copyright © the artist.

On entering the exhibition space, the visitor encounters a table with a black tablecloth. There is a video camera on a small tripod pointed at the black cloth, and, on a separate table and connected to the camera, a video projector with unusual extensions that projects onto a white screen. White strips of paper can be placed by the visitor on the black cloth; as they are moved into the field of view of the video camera, the projector displays equivalent parts of what look like generic family images. Thus, rectangular or square fragments of an image can be explored by moving around the white paper, or by placing additional paper strips which will enlarge the zone of visibility of the image. Gaps between the light papers, and shadows thrown by one piece of paper on another, show up as empty black, as a void. This void can be restored, and the image removed entirely, by removing all paper strips with a swipe of the hand.

The production of the projected image remains enigmatic, for although the entire apparatus appears in front of our eyes, it is difficult to understand where the image is actually generated. The video camera is only pointed at the tabletop, recording the differences between black and white areas. Part of the extended video projector is a straight-tray slide projector with slides that are consecutively projected. A special set of optical lenses reduces the image from this slide projector and directs it at a mirror device that is part of the digital light-processing (DLP) technology used in contemporary video projectors. This digital micromirror device (DMD) carries hundreds of thousands of small mirrors on its ca. 2-by-3.5-centimeter surface. Each of these small mirrors can be tilted electronically to produce multiple shades of gray, depending on the speed at which it is tilted back and forth. In a video projector using the DLP technology, the DMD together with a special color wheel technology can produce color video images of high-definition quality, using a white light source.

Julien Maire repurposes this technology in the Memory Cone installation: his DLP video projector regularly converts the live image taken by the video camera on the tabletop into the projection of an, in this case, dark gray surface image. When a white strip is moved into the field of view of the camera, the respective micro mirrors on the DMD are tilted at a frequency that normally produces the equivalent of brightness. The color wheel of the projector is bypassed, so the image of the tabletop, and of the hands arranging the white paper strips, is without technical color manipulation. The light source, however, is not a regular LED, but the slide projector whose lens projects the slide image onto the DMD. The light that gets projected onto the screen is the light from the slide projector bulb, filtered by the slide, so that all the colors, the bright and the dark areas of the slide, determine the composition of the image triggered by the white strips. This effect can also be observed when a hand reaches into the field of view of the camera: the visitor’s hand then becomes the light trigger and defines, with its shape and areas of brightness and dark, the shape of the parts of the slide image reflected onto the screen. While the slide image is reversed by the DMD mirrors, the shaping video image is, under normal circumstances, a straight, analogical presentation of the camera image—although, of course, the digital settings in either the camera or the projector could easily be changed to get a reversed version of the camera image.

There is a chain of material, visual, and electronic events, each of which can be addressed as an image or as an image source, and each of which is taken, processed, and passed on to other parts of the technical assemblage. The two main image sources are coupled optically (the slide projector) and electronically (the video camera) to produce one projected image that is an optical reflection of the slide image, with the light configuration being shaped by the electronic transmission of the camera image onto the DMD.

Maire’s title for the installation explicitly relates to French philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of the “memory cone.” It counterposes the expanse of all our memories, dispersed across the recesses of our mind—represented by the broad circular base of the “cone”—with what we remember at a specific moment, literally pinpointed by the tip of the cone. This relationship has been discussed by film and media historian Edwin Carels, who has also pointed to the technical aspects of duration and memory, terms which are crucial for both Maire and Bergson.⁸⁶ Yet Maire does more than offer a translation of Bergson’s metaphor into an optical process. The technical contraption he has built constructs a setting and a form of relation between images and actions that is unique and allows for an aesthetic experience that cannot be had otherwise. In that sense, Maire’s Memory Cone surpasses Bergson’s conception and offers its own model experience for the way we interact with our own memories, as well as with technically mediated images. This model is made possible by the specific technical construction, and it inherits the conceptual hybridity of the technical, visual, and interactive elements of the installation. In the same way that Bergson took cinematography as a metaphor for the mechanism of human thought, Maire takes the philosophical concept of the memory cone as a metaphor for the mechanisms of image construction.

Memory Cone deals with images that are not static or durable but transient image events, and thus raises the question of what and where the image actually occurs. The installation makes it possible to distinguish the image in its different aspects as hybridized and accumulated states: what we see on the wall is an analog reflection of the light that is projected by the slide projector onto the DMD mirror device; the micromirrors are positioned according to the images taken continuously by the video camera of the tabletop, and electronically processed according to the DLP protocols. The physical interaction of the visitor with the white strips is electronically mediated by the video camera and translated into the superfast physical movements of the micro mirrors on the DMD chip. What becomes visible of the photographic (positive) image projected by the slide projector is technically conditioned by the electronically controlled configuration of the DMD mirrors, and visually conditioned by the placement of the white strips by the visitor.

There is neither analog continuity nor static durability in electronically transmitted images like those of Memory Cone: while the moving image in a traditional film is constructed from a projection sequence of 24 images per second, and the PAL television standard generates 25 images per second on the cathode ray tube, the micro mirrors in the Memory Cone installation wiggle thousands of times per second, originally to create different shades of gray, whereas here they reflect a slide image at a rate at which the human eye perceives as a continuous image what is really a high-frequency flicker. So even though the slide projector produces a continuous analog image, the DMD mirrors “digitize” this analog projection into discrete on/off light events which are, however, too fast to be distinguishable by the latent human visual perception.

The specific aesthetics of the image—both its particular visual appearance and the technical and pragmatic apparatus through which it is generated and formed—hinges on a dispositive that can be described in analogy to the apparatus theory of cinema. In the early 1970s, film theoreticians like Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-Louis Comolli applied Louis Althusser’s critique of “ideological state apparatuses” to film and cinema, describing the related notions of reality and subjectivity as ideological constructs. At the time, apparatus theory exposed the image-producing apparatus of cinema to a form of formal and political critique that was soon also applied to the critical analysis of photography. This critique turned against representational realism and the supposed transparency of the technology, and against the illusion of a medium that would transmit information without loss or deformation, and revived the intent of the critical avant-garde of the 1920s, of Vertov, Brecht, and others, to reveal the mechanisms of aesthetic representation by inscribing the construction of the technical and social dispositive into the artwork.⁸⁷

Even though Julien Maire’s installations formally follow such a deconstructivist aesthetics, they maintain a certain level of what we might call obscure transparency: despite the technical mechanisms lying bare and open, the aesthetic experience of his works is characterized by a sense of wonder rather than by rational comprehension. Even though we may understand the functioning of the slide-reflecting DMD, the apparition of the image content in the projection, which corresponds to the position and shape of the paper strips on the table, remains miraculous.⁸⁸

Maire’s aesthetic program is, accordingly, not one of enlightenment but of expression and invention. He says that he does not strive for the straightforward production of images, but wants “to rethink all the machinery that is producing the image.”⁸⁹ For him, the technical system of the image production is an artistic medium that he deploys, appropriates, and modifies in order to be able “to show what I want; … the system has to fit with the image that I want to produce.”⁹⁰ The art historical context within which this work is taking place is that of the technically produced image. Through his work, Maire is “looking for a new type of expression that shows what is missing in the classic recorded image,”⁹¹ seeking to extend the expressive range of such technically mediated images, “like a painter.” In this effort, one of his strategic interests is to counter the tendency toward ever greater speed of transmission and ever higher resolution. In contrast, he wants to explore slowness and the aesthetic potentials of low-resolution images.

Maire’s work dissolves the oppositions between static and moving image, between image, medium, and body or production, interaction, and reception, and makes it impossible to consider what an image is without reflecting on the technical and perceptual dispositives that construct it.

The Aesthetics of the Vision Machine

The image machine operates on multiple levels—conceptual, material, technical, corporeal—and requires these different levels to be put to work. The American artist Sol LeWitt famously spoke of the machinic aspect of conceptual art: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless.”⁹² With respect to his Wall Drawings (1969–1973), for which LeWitt only wrote the instructions to be interpreted and executed by others, he explained:

The artist conceives and plans the wall drawing. It is realized by draftsmen (the artist can act as his own draftsman). The plan is interpreted by the draftsman. There are decisions which the draftsman makes, within the plan, as part of the plan. Each individual being unique, given the same instructions, would carry them out differently. … The draftsman may make errors in following the plan without compromising the plan. All wall drawings contain errors. They are part of the work.⁹³

The machinic quality of the Wall Drawings is thus not dependent on a specific technology, but on the method of execution.

The notion of the image machine proposed here affords two forms of subjectivation—a subjectivation of the human recipient of the images, and a subjectivation of the apparatus that produces the images. By way of concluding this chapter, I want to briefly gloss a number of works that provide models for these different forms of subjectivation rooted in the materials, in the techniques, and in the bodies involved.

Herwig Weiser’s installation Lucid Phantom Messenger (2010) is a sculptural screen and transparent container filled with chemical liquids and electrodes that cause the chemicals to crystallize into exuberant and colorful plantlike shapes (figure 4.14, plate 9). The chemicals and the electrochemical processes are similar to those used in liquid crystal display (LCD) screens. But while those processes are highly controlled and timed to allow for precise visual representations, here these substances are made to coagulate and interact freely and in a lifelike, polymorphous process. The materials which are, as Matthew Fuller writes, “familiar by name to the consumer of hi-tech goods, but which are always somehow inert, territorialized into certain kinds of highly fixed behaviours, start to exhibit another kind of dynamic, catalysis, stabilizations, floods and blobs, percolation, the drool of gels, tendrils grown of crystals and polymers globulating under the influence of electrical charges and ultrasonic shivers.”⁹⁴

Figure 4.14 Herwig Weiser, Lucid Phantom Messenger (2010). Copyright © the artist.

Weiser’s is an image machine turned inward, without any hint at anthropomorphism. We observe a more or less pure, physical (chemical) process that seems to elicit a virtuality deeply engrained in the material, a process that is allowed the freedom of afunctionality, the machine operating and generating its images through the workings of the material.

Where such image techniques are not left to themselves but put to use with the purpose of representation, the recipient of the image is deliberately implicated. Since Petrarch’s account of his ascent to Mont Ventoux in the fourteenth century, the concept of landscape has been closely tied to the emergence of the modern subject that reflects on itself as it perceives the world, and as it perceives itself in opposition to nature. Landscape painting thus often implies the longing for an ideal or utopian return—most poignantly expressed in the romantic period and its celebration both of the sublime and of the individual.⁹⁵ It is therefore consequential that artists like Wolfgang Staehle, Ingo Günther, and David Rokeby have used the landscape motif to reflect on the mechanisms of subjectivation in machine vision systems.

In a series of projection works, the New York-based German artist Wolfgang Staehle has presented live-video images of land- and cityscapes. The first, in 1999, was an image of the Empire State Building in Manhattan. This choice was a response to Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire, whose eight-hour take was limited by the available stock material, and was instantly historical, whereas Staehle’s images of the building were video stills taken and updated every eight seconds and transferred electronically to the exhibition venue. Some of the following works in the series presented images from cities like New York, Berlin, Rome, while others, like Eastpoint (2004), showed landscapes and explicitly referred to historical landscape painting, especially to the Hudson River School of the nineteenth century, by the carefully chosen framing of the particular view that the projected images showed (figure 4.15). Staehle’s projection presented the same landscape in a radically different time frame, given that the image was not one of an arrested historical moment but a present view, as transient as time itself. The question about the landscape view as an event space was strangely twisted when, during an exhibition at Postmasters Gallery in September 2001, the camera pointed at the skyline of Lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn riverside, with ships and docks in the foreground and the Manhattan Bridge at the center of the horizontal image composition, also caught the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The indifferent gaze of the camera was not agitated by the event, as it was not agitated by the Hudson River flowing past. The abstraction and disembodiment of the machine gaze affected not only the scene it observed but also that of the exhibition viewer. As in the classical view of Eastpoint, the simultaneity of eventscape and view imply a decoupling in time as well as in space.⁹⁶

Figure 4.15 Wolfgang Staehle, Eastpoint (2004), screen image. Courtesy of the artist, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

Both the indifference of the gaze and the spatiotemporal decoupling are exacerbated when the perspective is shifted from anthropomorphic horizontality into the increasingly normalized verticality of images taken by satellites, airplanes, or drones. The formerly mimetic abstraction of a territory into a cartographic map is transformed in these images into the visualization of a terrain which becomes an interface for operational planning, a virtual territory that can be directly acted upon. The history of this vertical view begins in the 1850s when the French photographer Nadar took the first photographs of a battlefield from a hot air balloon, followed by pigeons and airplanes equipped with photo cameras at the beginning of the twentieth century. The military use of the images requires the introduction of aerial reconnaissance units and training in reading and interpreting such photographs, followed by the development of camouflage techniques for hiding infrastructure and weaponry from the equally medialized gaze of the enemy. An arms race of hiding on the ground and detecting from the air ensues.⁹⁷

Yet the history of the vertical, forensic gaze has not only a military but also an ecological strand to it. Measuring stretches of land, geological and biological exploration, the search for minerals and fossil resources, the control of agricultural activities, and the archaeology of human life all make use of images taken from above.⁹⁸ The expansion of the machinic gaze soon transgresses the limits of optical photography and the spectrum of human visibility to include radiographic, seismographic, and thermographic sensors, turning the surface under observation into a sounding, moving, and radiating terrain, porous, transparent, and immaterial.

One of the first artworks that explicitly addressed the iconography and aesthetics of satellite images was the installation K4 (C3I [Command Control Communication and Intelligence]) (1987) which the German-American artist Ingo Günther showed at documenta 8 in Kassel.⁹⁹ The walls and floor of the installation space are covered with a light gray marble (figure 4.16). A video projector is placed in the dark brown metal-covered ceiling and projects downward onto a massive, table-size block of marble placed at the center of the space. The video projection is the only source of light. It shows a montage of satellite images and camera pans across aerial photographs and maps, giving the impression of a sequence of strategically relevant images and diagrams that are being reviewed, analyzed, and worked upon in a military command room. There is a certain theatricality in the demonstration of the different types of images, and the occasional human arms and hands that can be seen moving across the cartographic material as it is being filmed. Yet what seems crucial here is the nonintentional and mechanical production of the images, which is not determined by the individual perspective of a human photographer but by the indifferent gaze of the vision machine. This indifference pinpoints the politics of these images and forms the basis of their potential operationality, here represented by the filmed inscription of electronic images with lines and vectors, and the gesturing hands.

Figure 4.16 Ingo Günther, K4 (C3I [Command Control Communication and Intelligence]) (1987), installation view, Skulpturenmuseum Marl. Courtesy of the artist.

In contrast to the static camera position in Staehle’s real-time projections, and to the flyover aesthetics in Ingo Günther’s K4, a third example of such a machinic landscape is the gallery installation of David Rokeby’s Machine for Taking Time. It shows a video projection in which we see a specific landscape—in one instance it is the park of Oakville Galleries (2001–2004), in another the cityscape of Montréal (Boulevard Saint-Laurent, 2007), seen from the rooftop of one of its buildings (figure 4.17). The camera pans and zooms in slow, regular movements, from left to right, zooms in, moves further, zooms out, pans to the left, etc. In addition to this movement in space, the objects that we see also change their appearance, the video transitioning, as it seems, through different light situations and seasonal phases, with bright sunlight, cloudy skies, rain, and snow.

Figure 4.17 David Rokeby, Machine for Taking Time (Boul. Saint-Laurent) (2007). Photomontage by David Rokeby. Copyright © the artist.

In the course of an entire year, a digital video camera placed in a fixed position was programmed to run a particular course of directional and optical movements every day, during which course a fixed number of 1,079 still images were taken daily.¹⁰⁰ Thus an image was taken from each of the 1,079 camera positions on 365 consecutive days, with the respective light and weather conditions determining the appearance of the scene on any one of those days. For the video installation, images from this database of 365 times 1,079 images are algorithmically stitched together in real time, the resulting images in the projection moving through the “stack” not only as the camera eye moved in space, but also into the “depth” of the different temporal layers, creating the impression of a synchronicity of the seasons in the continuous space of a particular landscape setting. While this changing of the seasons is easily comprehensible for a human viewer, the repetitive precision of the movement and the ease of sliding forward and backward in time are eerie and inhuman. Rokeby’s “film” is composed of algorithmically animated still images that are calculated in real time, so the speed of movement that we see in the video is determined by the processing speed of the computer system rendering the transitions between the different data sets.

More than in the images taken from a fixed viewpoint, we are made aware that what we see is determined by the camera eye. We project our gaze into the camera eye whose rigid movements are apparently determined by a robot. As in the other examples discussed here, the camera and the recording system are not visible—only the resulting images are presented, while we have to infer the technique that led to their construction. We can imagine Rokeby’s Machine for Taking Time as an operational image system that monitors an urban or natural environment and then orders and controls specific (robotic or human) actions. The video in the projection would then be a monitoring image that is only relevant for a human observer, who is, in the face of Rokeby’s installation, given the clear sense that he or she might be only a secondary audience of the represented field of operations.

At the heart of these machine landscape dispositives is the display of a gaze that is not human but embodied by a technical device. This is an experience that was already diagnosed by Dziga Vertov, and was reiterated by Gilles Deleuze when he said of the cinematic machine of subjectivation, “The sole cinematographic consciousness is not us, the spectator, nor the hero; it is the camera, the camera [which is only] sometimes human.”¹⁰¹

A reinsertion of the human body into such a machinic assemblage of disembodiment was realized in 1984 by the Canadian artist David Tomas in the installation performance Behind the Eye Lies the Hand of William Henry Fox Talbot (figure 4.18, plate 10). It predates, by a few years, Jonathan Crary’s analysis that the construction of the modern observer-subject by apparatuses like the phenakistiscope is threefold: “The very physical position required of the observer by the phenakistiscope bespeaks a confounding of three modes: an individual body that is at once a spectator, a subject of empirical research and observation, and an element of machine production.”¹⁰²

Figure 4.18 David Tomas, Behind the Eye Lies the Hand of William Henry Fox Talbot (1984), installation view, S. L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto. Photo by Alex Neumann. Copyright © the artist.

In the complex yet minimalist spatial arrangement of mirrors, photo and video cameras, monitors, and furniture objects for Behind the Eye, Tomas sought to construct a version of the photographic process that would make it possible to experience the metaphorical layering of visual representation.¹⁰³ Importantly, his body was part of the installation, sitting at a drawing board, looking through a vintage 1840s camera lucida and “performing” Fox Talbot’s “pencil of nature” by making drawings that exemplified the symbolic transitions between the different media involved. The drawing human body of the artist becomes a part of the machinic dispositif, where it is not a privileged site of image creation or perception but a technical element contributing to an overall image-producing structure.

Tomas performs what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have described as the contested paradigm of “mechanical objectivity”; what is here an ethical and epistemological question—as it is in the examples that Daston and Galison discuss for “objective” scientific representation in the nineteenth century—becomes a question of technical functionality in operational images: these latter machinic images are sufficiently objective if the computer can act on them, when the manufacturing robot hits the screw head, and when the self-guided missile hits its designated target.¹⁰⁴

By placing the seeing human eye at the center of the installation yet degrading it to an optical device, Tomas pinpointed, in 1984, the question of the sightless gaze that Virilio would raise in his text on the Vision Machine a few years later: “Digital optics is indeed a rational metaphor for intoxication, statistical intoxication, that is: a blurring of perception that affects the real as much as the figurative, as though our society were sinking into the darkness of a voluntary blindness, its will to digital power finally contaminating the horizon of sight as well as knowledge.”¹⁰⁵ This sightless gaze is characterized by the disavowal (Farocki) of complexity and by the perfection of a statistical analysis of visual data that requires no looking and interpreting subject, but a system which, like Alphonse Bertillon’s identification signalétique of the 1880s, is characterized by the mechanized reading of coded fragments that requires neither bodies nor subjects for taking decisions and acting upon them.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted material are by the author.

1. The main realization of the Very Nervous System was done in 1986–1990, but Rokeby had prepared it in previous works, including Reflexions (1984) and Body Language (1984–1986).

2. See Katja Kwastek, Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 234–241.

3. On his website, Rokeby compares this image to “a Muybridge motion study,” but given that the figures appear in different positions in the same image frame, rather than in separate frames, a comparison with Marey’s images seems more appropriate; cf. http://www.davidrokeby.com/seen.html (accessed June 24, 2014). Cf. also the work Gathering (2004), principally an expanded version of Seen.

4. In Taken, 100 or even 200 previously taken images of individual visitors are occasionally displayed in a screen-filling grid, but the normal mode for this left side of the double projection is the large-scale representation and “labeling” of individuals present at that moment. Rokeby had also explored the aspect of individualizing surveillance systems in works like Guardian Angel (2001), Watched and Measured (2000), and Border Patrol (the latter together with the New York artist Paul Garrin, 1995). The computer-generated designations of exhibition visitors is reminiscent of a function of Ihnatowicz’s 1973 interactive sculpture Bandit, a one-armed-bandit-style interface which gave verbal feedback on the interacting visitor’s reaction (see Catherine Mason, A Computer in the Art Room [Hindringham, UK: JJG, 2008], 94).

5. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

6. Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft, 4th ed. (Munich: Fink, 2011).

7. Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

8. Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 10. There is a broad range of approaches in image theory that are often shaped by different theoretical and philosophical traditions, in which, not least, the different etymologies of the image-related vocabulary in different languages play an important role. For instance, whereas Gottfried Boehm conceptualizes the image as a phenomenon that achieves an autonomous status in the act of reception, both Belting and Mitchell study images in their social context; cf. the comparative discussion on Boehm, Mitchell, and Kittler in Gabriele Werner, “Nicht jede Wende zum Bildlichen meint das Gleiche. Zu Boehm, Mitchell—und Kittler,” in Bernhard J. Dotzler, ed., Bild / Kritik (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2010), 13–43.

9. Gottfried Boehm, “Zwischen Auge und Hand. Bilder als Instrumente der Erkenntnis,” in Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen. Die Macht des Zeigens (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007), 69.

10. Gottfried Boehm, “Vom Medium zum Bild,” in Yvonne Spielmann and Gundolf Winter, eds., Bild—Medium—Kunst (Munich: Fink, 1999), 173.

11. Boehm’s emphasis on images from art contexts leads him to claim that certain media (like stained glass or the principles of perspective) imply certain aesthetics, and that the apparatuses that serve to mechanically support the construction of central perspective (like the velum, the camera obscura, or the photo camera) imply an inferior aesthetics of reproduction (see Boehm, “Vom Medium zum Bild,” 173–174). Such inferiority can, Boehm argues, be overcome to the degree that the images transgress the mediality of the conditions that frame them (see ibid., 170).

12. For an alternative, structuralist analysis of such “machine vision” articulated in film and installation works by Dziga Vertov, Michael Snow, and Harun Farocki, see David Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

13. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 62; first published as La machine de vision (Paris: Galilée, 1988).

14. Ibid.; the sentence from Paul Klee’s diary is quoted on p. 59. The topos of the image being alive and looking back was already pinpointed by Aby Warburg when he wrote the epigram “You are alive and you do me no harm.” See Horst Bredekamp, “‘Du lebst und thust mir nichts.’ Anmerkungen zur Aktualität Aby Warburgs,” in Horst Bredekamp et al., eds., Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990 (Weinheim: VCH, 1991), 1–7. Cf. also Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 98, on Clement Greenberg’s idea of the painting “gazing back at you”; and Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1992). Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” in Gottfried Boehm et al., eds., Was ist ein Bild (Munich: Fink, 1994), 33, reminds us that the ancient Greeks described the image as “zoon,” as “living.”

15. Harun Farocki, “War Always Finds a Way,” in Chantal Pontbriand, ed., HF/RG (Paris: Jeu de Paume/Blackjack Editions, 2009), 107 (first published as “Der Krieg findet immer einen Ausweg,” in Cinema 50. Essay [Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2005], 21–33). The English translation of Farocki’s text uses the term “operative images,” even though a more accurate translation of the German “operative Bilder” would have been “operational,” a term that more explicitly refers to the relation to an operation, rather than to something that is more generally working or in use. Like Thomas Keenan and others, I use the term “operational images” for the German expression “operative Bilder.”

16. For a general discussion of Eye/Machine, cf. Niels van Tomme, “The Image as Machine,” in Niels van Tomme, ed., Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen (Baltimore: University of Maryland, 2014), 25–35, who summarizes: “Blurring the boundaries between human and machine vision, Harun Farocki, according to Foster, ‘intimates that a new ‘robo eye’ is in place, one that, unlike the ‘kino-eye’ celebrated by Dziga Vertov, does not extend the human prosthetically so much as it replaces the human robotically” (29, quoting Hal Foster, “Vision Quest: The Cinema of Harun Farocki,” Artforum, November 2004, 157–161); and Trevor Paglen, “Operational Images,” E-Flux Journal, 2014, accessed November 30, 2015, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/operational-images/.

17. Farocki, “War Always Finds a Way,” 107.

18. Ibid., 106. The system is called Hardware in the Loop (HIL).

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 110.

21. Ibid.

22. Virilio, The Vision Machine, 59. For a critical discussion of Virilio’s text see John Johnston, “Machinic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 1 (1999): 27–48, who attempts to apply the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the “machinic” to phenomena of vision, making reference especially to postwar avant-garde and experimental film and to the emerging visual field of the Internet.

23. Virilio, The Vision Machine, 60. Neither Farocki nor Virilio make direct reference to the field of “operations research,” whereas Manuel De Landa, in his account of this area of strategic research into the analysis, preparation, and prediction of military operations, in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991), esp. 194–203, speaks about “machine vision,” but not about “operational images.” On the context of military strategies, see also Jimena Canales, “Operational Art,” in van Tomme, Visibility Machines, 37–54. Canales reminds us of Jacques Lacan’s question of what images machines would make of the world, independently of humans (see Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, vol. 2, 1954–1955 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 46–47), and insists that “operational images have to be seen” (39).

24. Virilio, The Vision Machine, 61.

25. Ibid., 71–72.

26. Ibid., 73.

27. Ibid., 72–73.

28. Ibid., 75.

29. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989).

30. See Allan Sekula, “Steichen at War,” in Sekula, Photography against the Grain (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 33–52. For an overview of computer vision systems on which the following summary is also based, see Lev Manovich, “Modern Surveillance Machines: Perspective, Radar, 3-D Graphics, and Computer Vision,” in Thomas Y. Levin, ed., CTRL SPACE: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 382–395, esp. the section “Computer Vision: Automation of Sight,” 390–393. An earlier version of this paper by Manovich (in which the section on computer vision is more or less identical) was published as “The Automation of Sight: From Photography to Computer Vision,” in Timothy Druckrey, ed., Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (New York: Aperture, 1996), 229–239. Cf. also E. R. Davies, Computer and Machine Vision: Theory, Algorithms, Practicalities (New York: Academic Press, 2012).

31. See Manovich, “Modern Surveillance Machines,” 391.

32. The foundational research papers were: Lawrence G. Roberts: “Machine Perception of Three-Dimensional Solids,” 1963, and “Homogeneous Matrix Representation and Manipulation of N-Dimensional Constructs,” 1965; see Manovich, “Modern Surveillance Machines,” 390.

33. See ibid., 393–394.

34. Ibid., 392–393.

35. See Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010). Cf. Inge Hinterwaldner, “Zur Operativität eLABORierter Wissenschaftsbilder,” in Felix Mittelberger et al., eds., Maschinensehen. Feldforschung in den Räumen bildgebender Technologien (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2013), 51–61, who conceives of operationality as a form of mediation in scientific discourses and, following Bruno Latour, as the field of things that can be done with images. Nina Samuel, in “Images as Tools: On Visual Epistemic Practices in the Biological Sciences,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (2013): 225–236, understands “operational images” as “tools” that can be used either by human or by technical agents. A similar conception underscored the exhibition “Operational Images,” Centre de la Photographie Genève, March 2011.

36. See Sybille Krämer, “Operative Bildlichkeit. Von der ‘Grammatologie’ zu einer ‘Diagrammatologie’? Reflexionen über erkennendes Sehen,” in Martina Hessler and Dieter Mersch, eds., Logik des Bildlichen. Zur Kritik der ikonischen Vernunft (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 94–123. While Krämer explicitly excludes operational (or operationally efficacious) images from the field of operational pictoriality, the set of six characteristics she proposes for the latter might form a useful point of departure, or diagram, for analyzing the functionality and aesthetics of operational images. These six aspects are: planeness and simultaneity (Flächigkeit und Simultanität), directionality (Gerichtetheit), graphism (Graphismus), syntacticity (Syntaktizität), referentiality (Referenzialität), and operationality (Operativität). The latter implies, for Krämer, that phenomena of operational pictoriality are not only manageable and explorable, but that they are also generative and that they constitute their objects—something that is particularly the case in objects of knowledge and of theory in which there is an interlocking of visualization, operationalization, and generation.

37. See Thomas Keenan, “Counter-Forensics and Photography,” Grey Room, no. 55 (2014): 58–77.

38. Like Krämer, “Operative Bildlichkeit,” Keenan uses the expression “operationally effective images”; see Keenan, “Counter-Forensics,” 61.

39. Ibid., 64.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., 67.

42. Ibid., 68.

43. Tom Holert, “Bilder im Zeitalter des Drohnenkriegs. Tom Holert im Interview mit Felix Koltermann,” W & F. Wissenschaft und Frieden, no. 3 (2014): 30.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., 31.

46. Ibid.

47. Thus a comment by Keenan, made during the conference “Image Operations,” ICI Berlin, April 2014.

48. This Cyclograveur seems poised between Marey’s La Méthode graphique (1878) and its reinterpretation by the Dutch composer and artist Dick Raaijmakers in De Grafische Methode: Fiets (1979); see Arjen Mulder and Joke Brouwer, eds., Dick Raaijmakers—Monograph (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007).

49. And thus stand in distinct contrast to the drawing automaton of the Brothers Jaquet-Droz of 1774.

50. The titling is not always systematic, but typical for the pre-1970 phase is, for instance, “Painting by Méta-matic No. 20 in collaboration with Klara Hultén.” During a session with Metamatic No. 8 in 1974, the paper was stamped, dated, and signed with the operator’s name on the reverse side, and signed by Tinguely on the front side.

51. See Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). For an artistic translation of working with electronic radar monitors during the war into “electronic” pixel paintings, see the work of German painter Karl Otto Götz, described by himself in “Gemaltes Bild—kinetisches Bild,” in blätter + bilder, Zeitschrift für Dichtung, Musik und Malerei, no. 5 (November-December 1959), 45–47, and “Elektronische Malerei und ihre Programmierung,” in Das Kunstwerk 14, no. 12 (June 1961), 14–23. The print magazine Radical Software, whose eleven issues were published from 1970 to 1974, was particularly important for the US scene; it is documented on www.radicalsoftware.org (accessed April 3, 2014).

52. See Linda L. Cathcart, ed., Steina Vasulka—Machine Vision. Woody Vasulka—Descriptions, exh. cat. (Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1978); Robert R. Riley and Marita Sturken, Steina and Woody Vasulka: Machine Media, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996). Woody Vasulka curated two major exhibitions which documented this experimental video scene, “Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt” (Linz, 1992, with catalog), and “MindFrames” (Karlsruhe, 2006–2007), the latter forming the basis for the publication Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973–1990, ed. Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

53. See Yvonne Spielmann, “Video and Computer: The Aesthetics of Steina and Woody Vasulka,” Fondation Langlois, Montreal, 2004, accessed December 1, 2015, http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=461; the full-length video is available at http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=486 (accessed April 3, 2014).

54. For similar effects of color-light animation, cf. the Color Light Play (1922–1924) performances by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack at the Bauhaus.

55. Cf. Marie-José Mondzain, “Can Images Kill?,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 1 (Autumn 2009): 20–51.

56. Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (1983), min 39:00–41:00. As an homage to the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and his film Stalker, Yamaneko calls the world of his synthetic images “the zone.”

57. For historical overviews of early computer art, see Heike Piehler, Die Anfänge der Computerkunst (Frankfurt am Main: dot Verlag, 2002); Christoph Klütsch, Computergrafik. Ästhetische Experimente zwischen zwei Kulturen—die Anfänge der Computerkunst in den 1960er Jahren (Vienna: Springer, 2007); and Drant D. Taylor, When the Machine Made Art. The Troubled History of Computer Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

58. Boehm, “Vom Medium zum Bild,” 175.

59. Ibid., 175–176. Boehm hints that the work of Gary Hill “leaves no doubt” that this potential is principally given (176).

60. Ibid., 176.

61. Van Doesburg, in his manifesto “Art Concret” (1930), claimed that the concrete work of art should refer not to nature or emotions but only to itself: “The construction of the picture, as well as its elements, should be simple and controllable visually. Technique should be mechanical, that is to say exact, anti-impressionistic” (cited in Margit Rosen, ed., A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973 [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011], 44). A similar formal and conceptual aesthetic in the 1960s influenced artists like Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, and Gary Kuehn. In the field of sculpture, this practice points backward to Brancusi, Naum Gabo, and Le Corbusier—thus the references suggested by Lewis Mumford in Art and Technics (1952)—and forward to kinetic sculptures and environments by David Rokeby, like Cloud (2007) or Long Wave (2009).

62. See Rosen, A Little-Known Story, 33 and 92. Cf. also Morellet’s comments in Electra, exh. cat. (Paris, 1983), 328.

63. Vera Molnar, “Meine Arbeit mit dem Computer,” in Horst Rave and Dagmar Weste, eds., Vera Molnar. Neun Quadrate (Bonn: gkg Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung, 1991), 8–9 (my translation from the German). On the “machine imaginaire,” see Vincent Baby, in Véra Molnar—une retrospective, 1942–2012 (Paris: Chauveau, 2012), 11–13. Molnar recounts that she had heard of computers in the 1950s, but what she could read at the time gave her the impression that it was impossible to get access to such a machine for her artworks—books like Edmund C. Berkeley’s Giant Brains, or Machines That Think (1949), or Louis Couffignal’s Les Machines à penser (1952), or the many articles in popular magazines like Time which, in January 1950, ran a title story on the Mark III computer and the “computer men” (Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry, no. 21 [1994]: 312). However, she came to see that a computer could help realize her desire to work strictly systematically. Molnar says that she cannot remember a specific moment when she had the idea for the machine imaginaire. Her earlier work had been equally systematic in its procedures, so we can assume that the “invention” of the machine imaginaire was for Molnar a moment of formalizing an existing method and coining a term for it, rather than the creation of a completely new procedure. (Vera Molnar, in conversation with the author, Paris, October 22, 2007.) The same principle was for instance used by Herman de Vries in the 1960s (see Rosen, A Little-Known Story, 33, and the handwritten document on p. 247) and has, if we follow theoretician Sybille Krämer, a much older history: “Long before the computer as a universal medium and programmable machine, we developed the computer ‘in us’, understood here as a machinelike handling, relieved of interpretation, of signs on paper.” Sybille Krämer, “Schriftbildlichkeit, oder: Über eine (fast) vergessene Dimension der Schrift,” in Horst Bredekamp and Sybille Krämer, eds., Bild—Schrift—Zahl (Munich: Fink, 2003), 171.

64. Vera Molnar, in conversation with the author, Paris, October 22, 2007.

65. Ibid.

66. See the comprehensive documentation of the New Tendencies in Rosen, A Little-Known Story, and the political contextualization in Armin Medosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Vera Molnar, despite her formal interest in computation, is conspicuously absent from the ranks of the New Tendencies. Shortly after joining the New Tendencies-related French GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), she left the group again, uninterested in the focus on scientific and technological research.

67. See Frieder Nake, “Herstellung von zeichnerischen Darstellungen, Tonfolgen und Texten mit elektronischen Rechenanlagen,” Program Information, PI-21, Deutsches Rechenzentrum, Darmstadt, April 1966.

68. Nake, “Herstellung von zeichnerischen Darstellungen,” 5.

69. Cf. Barbara Büscher, H.-C. von Herrmann, and C. Hoffmann, eds., Ästhetik als Programm. Max Bense—Daten und Streuungen, special issue of Kaleidoskopien 5 (2004); and Günther Pfeiffer, Kunst und Kommunikation (Cologne: DuMont, 1972), 173–187. Cf. also Max Bense’s summary account in “Aesthetics and Programming” (1968), rpt. in Rosen, A Little-Known Story, 296–299, and Frieder Nake’s critical report, “There Should Be No Computer Art” (1971), reprinted in ibid., 466–468. The media historian Martin Warnke speaks of the “heroic failure” of Bense’s and Birkhoff’s attempt at a mathematically formalized aesthetics; see Martin Warnke, “Ästhetik des Digitalen,” in Hedy Graber and Dominik Landwehr, eds., Kultur digital—Begrife, Hintergründe, Beispiele (Basel: Christoph Merian, 2011).

70. Nake, “Herstellung von zeichnerischen Darstellungen,” 3.

71. Molnar, “Meine Arbeit mit dem Computer,” 8–9; Molnar claims that there is no rupture in her oeuvre, either by the introduction of the machine imaginaire around 1959 or by the use of the computer from 1968 onward. However, the works gained in complexity, and the computer seems to have helped her push the boundaries of disorder and chaos. See also Rosen, A Little-Known Story, 34–35, on the discussion among New Tendencies artists about the differences between human and computer execution of a drawing; an important point of debate (and of division between artists and engineers in the group) was the impression that the visual outcome was put into question and that the program gained priority over the resulting designs; A. Michael Noll claimed that “artistic originality in the sense of improbability can be simulated perfectly” (ibid., 35).

72. See Matthew Fuller, Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), and Matthew Fuller, ed., Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

73. See the characterization of artistic work with software and algorithms in Aymeric Mansoux, “Digital Feedback as Another State of Matter: Automated Creation Processes as a New Clay,” in Martin Howse, ed., XXXXX Reader (London: OpenMute, 2006), 402–405. Cf. also the reflections on code and materiality in Georg Trogemann, “Code und Material,” in Trogemann, ed., Code und Material. Exkursionen ins Undingliche (Vienna: Springer, 2010), 15–26.

74. For an early critique of chance or contingency in computer graphics, see Pfeiffer, Kunst und Kommunikation, 194–203.

75. See Tilman Baumgärtel, Plug In, and Büro Friedrich, eds., Install.Exe/JODI (Basel: Christoph Merian, 2002). The “postdigital” concepts of “Glitch Aesthetics” and “New Aesthetic” derive from these early experiments of “net.artists”; art historically, they refer back not only to the experiments in electronic art from the 1960s and 1970s, but also to the constructivist exploration of faktura in the 1920s. The argument put forward by Tim Barker in his essay “Aesthetics of the Error” points in a similar direction, yet it is marred by a lack of precise definitions of the key terms of “machine” and “error.” What Barker calls “errors” are in fact functions and potentials of the computer (explored by artists such as JODI, Yann Le Guennec, or Cory Arcangel), not accidents or uncontrolled aberrations—which is why Barker’s references to such “predecessors” as Hans Arp, Bruno Munari, Robert Rauschenberg, or John Cage are also imprecise. Pias insists that “every program that runs is legitimate. … Hacking subverts the notions of correct or incorrect usage; it deconstructs, in a certain way, the ‘misuse’ itself by showing that a concept of technical function that is tied to a human intentionality of purposes does not make sense with regard to computers.” Claus Pias, Computer Spiel Welten (Zurich: diaphanes, 2010), 84.

76. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). For a commentary on Crary’s theses, see Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media (London: Polity, 2010), 145–154. For a detailed study of the history of experimental research on visual perception, see Romana Karla Schuler, Seeing Motion: A History of Visual Perception in Art and Science (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). For studies of the different media apparatuses developed during the nineteenth century, see Bodo von Dewitz and Werner Nekes, eds., Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst. Sehmaschinen und Bilderwelten. Die Sammlung Werner Nekes (Munich: Steidl, 2002); Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). For an overview of a number of “vision machines” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among others those of Friedrich Kiesler and Alfons Schilling, see Peter Weibel, “Contours of a History of the Theory and Art of Perception in Austria,” in Peter Weibel, ed., Beyond Art: A Third Culture (Vienna: Springer, 1996), 16–32.

77. See Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 126–127.

78. See Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 95–103, for a rendering of the erotic associations some of the disks bring up.

79. As such, Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs were echoed by Mikami’s Molecular Informatics (1996), an installation that equally enabled the self-reflective observation of the process of visual perception (in that case, especially the aspect of the movement of the human eye); cf. the discussion in chapter 5 below.

80. Cf. Karl Gerstner’s series Tangentiales Exzentrum (ca. 1956), described in Karl Gerstner, “Bilder machen heute?,” Spirale 8 (1960), 2, 4, 6, 10; cited in Rosen, A Little-Known Story, 32.

81. For a summary of the technical development, see Kittler, Optical Media, 270–292, and Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

82. See Richard Shiff, “Selbst-Interferenz,” in Michael Lüthy and Christoph Menke, eds., Subjekt und Medium in der Kunst der Moderne (Zurich: diaphanes, 2006), 33–35, on the mediality of Jim Campell’s low-resolution LED panels. In other works, Campbell has explored the role of movement in the legibility of low-resolution images (Running and Falling, 2004) and three-dimensional pixel spaces (Scattered Light, 2010). Cf. also Julien Maire’s deconstructive Low Resolution Cinema (2005), and Aram Bartholl’s 0,16 (2009).

83. See Alan C. Bovik, The Essential Guide to Image Processing (Amsterdam, 2009); Mohammed Ghanbari, Standard Codecs, Image Processing to Advanced Video Coding (London, 2003). On digital video codecs, see Adrian Mackenzie, “Codecs,” in Fuller, Software Studies, 48–55.

84. See Thomas Ruff, jpegs (Cologne: DuMont, 2009).

85. For the concept of affordance, see the work of the US psychologist James Jerome Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), and the introduction of the concept to design theory by Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

86. See Edwin Carels, “The Productivity of the Prototype: On Julien Maire’s Cinema of Contraptions,” in Robert Vanderbeeken, Christel Stalpaert, David Depestel, and Boris Debackere, eds., Bastard or Playmate? Adapting Theater, Mutating Media and Contemporary Performing Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 187–188; and Julien Maire, “Memory Cone. Interview,” in Andreas Broeckmann, Stefan Riekeles, and Thomas Munz, eds., TRUST (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2010), 122–133.

87. See Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Baudry, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 302–312.

88. See Carels, “The Productivity of the Prototype,” 191.

89. Julien Maire, interview, AV Festival, Newcastle, UK (March 2012), min 3:40, accessed December 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LR9JTk1yFo.

90. Julien Maire, interview, AV Festival, min 12:40.

91. Maire, “Memory Cone. Interview,” 131.

92. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 79–83.

93. Sol LeWitt, Seventeen Squares with Sixteen Lines and One Arc. (Project for Wall Drawings) (Portland, OR: Portland Center for the Visual Arts, 1973).

94. Matthew Fuller, “Sublime of the Liminal: In Transitive Times,” in Translife, exh. cat., NAMOC China (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).

95. See Matthias Eberle, Individuum und Landschaft. Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung der Landschaftsmalerei (Gießen: Anabas, 1986).

96. For related, algorithmically indifferent animated landscape images taken from a stable viewpoint, cf. Driessens & Verstappen’s series of Landscape films (2001–2010).

97. See Virilio, The Vision Machine, for a reflection on the development of electronic decoy techniques for visual operations in electronic spaces, which followed such territorial methods that responded to photographic surveillance. On cartography, see Cartes et figures de la terre, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1980). On aerial reconnaissance, see Christoph Asendorf, Super-Constellation—Flugzeug und Raumrevolution: die Wirkung der Luftfahrt auf Kunst und Kultur der Moderne (Vienna: Springer, 1996). Artists like László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes were involved in US aerial reconnaissance and camouflage efforts during the Second World War; see László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947). The belated analysis of aerial photographs of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz forms an important motif in Harun Farocki’s film Images of the World (1988); cf. Farocki, “War Always Finds a Way,” 110–111, and Volker Pantenburg, Film als Theorie: Bildforschung bei Harun Farocki und Jean-Luc Godard (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006).

98. Cf. British geographer L. Dudley Stamp’s 1925 Aerial Survey of Burmese forests, or the aerial research of the German geographer and ecologist Carl Troll in the 1930s (“Luftbildplan und ökologische Bodenforschung,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, no. 7/8 [Berlin, 1939], 241–298).

99. See the collection of the Skulpturenmuseum Marl, Germany, http://ingogunther.com/238167/489418/work/k4-%28c3i%29, and http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/k4/ (accessed November 30, 2015).

100. In the case of Boul. Saint-Laurent, 2007, the number was 1,024 photos per day. For a comparable setup of a landscape image recorded over time, here resulting in a single still image, cf. Susan Collins’s Seascape (2009). Cf. also Gabriel Lester’s three-channel video installation Choreography (2001–2007), whose erratically twisting and turning images were recorded by a video camera placed on a robot and are now “dancing” to Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps.

101. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 20.

102. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 112.

103. See Lesley Johnstone, “Unhinged from Time,” in David Tomas: Chemical Skins, exh. cat. (Oakville, ON: Oakville Galleries, 1994), 8–25. The installation was part of a series that began in 1980, and its first rendition was realized as Photography: A Word (1983), a later version as Chemical Skins (1994). The contraption resembles, perhaps not accidentally, the representations of Albrecht Dürer’s perspectival drawing arrangements. Documentation of Tomas’s work can be found at http://davidtomas.org (accessed December 6, 2015).

104. Cf. also Daston and Galison’s example (in Objectivity [Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007]) of Arthur Worthington, who used his own eye as an apparatus: in 1875, Worthington drew the different states of droplets falling into a liquid from the afterimages that a flashlight had projected onto his retina, before he was able, in 1894, to use a photo camera for the same task (finding and admitting that in 1875 he had wrongly corrected his own observations and made the droplets look more regular and symmetrical than they actually were).

105. Virilio, The Vision Machine, 76. On the media history of blindness, see Cornelius Borck, “Blindness, Seeing, and Envisioning Prosthesis: The Optophone between Science, Technology, and Art,” in Dieter Daniels and Barbara U. Schmidt, Artists as Inventors, Inventors as Artists (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 108–129; and Peter Bexte, Blinde Seher. Wahrnehmung von Wahrnehmung in der Kunst des 17. Jahrhunderts. Mit einem Anhang zur Entdeckung des Blinden Flecks im Jahre 1668 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1999).

5 Body Machine

Toward a Technological Conception of the Human Body

There’s a human body, hovering in a large space. It is positioned upright, fixed with strings that are attached to metal hooks in the body’s flesh at one end, and to a meter-wide metal ring above at the other. The male human body is naked. It is suspended in the air. We can see the twenty white strings and the hooks which pull the skin and flesh upward where they pierce the skin of the upper body. It doesn’t look as though the body is floating, but the upright poise also doesn’t give the impression of an immobilized, passively hanging or tortured body. The head is held upright. With its two hands, the body holds a yellow control box which steers a gantry crane to which the metal ring is fixed at one point. The arms and hands can be moved freely, whereas the control box is fixed to the metal ring in front of the body at a height that makes it easy for the hands to hold it, and to hold onto it. The gantry crane covers the entire interior space of perhaps 10 meters width and 25 meters length, which now also accommodates a crowd of maybe 60 or 80 people who are watching what is going on, some of them equipped with photo or video cameras. In the course of the performance, the body is moved along a straight trajectory by the crane. At one point, the body is swinging back and forth like a pendulum, set in motion by a deliberate maneuver of the crane steered by the body (figure 5.1).¹

Figure 5.1 Stelarc, Remote Controlled Suspension (1987), video still, MOCA Brisbane, Australia, 9 August 1987. Courtesy of the artist.

An awkward image. The body is hanging, it is detached from the floor and thus deprived of its natural possibilities of moving around on its legs. It is hanging in a mechanical dispositive of hooks, strings, metal ring, and gantry crane that makes the body’s overall movements dependent on a specific technical construction. The technical dispositive defines the parameters of movement of the body, or rather, the body is a part of a dispositive that has certain properties of size, form, weight, mechanical feedback, agency. The body is relatively free to hold up its head, and to move its arms and hands with which it holds the control box that steers the electricity-powered crane and thus the entire machine-body dispositive. By pressing the various buttons of the control box, the body controls the movements of the crane which in turn determine the movements of the body with the rest of the dispositive. When the body is set into a swinging motion, the control mechanism is used in such a way that the mechanical movement of the crane interacts with the gravity and inertia of the body and causes the latter to swing.

This action was performed by the Australian artist Stelarc in a disused industrial space in Brisbane in 1987. The performance dramatizes the relation of the human body and technology in a particularly poignant way and thus forms an appropriate image to open a treatment of the relation of body and machine in twentieth-century art. The reflection on the meaning of machines has hinged on their relation to the human body at least since the eighteenth century when La Mettrie, following Descartes’s more metaphorical comparison of the human body to a machine, offered his influential description of man as a machine.² The physiological research of the nineteenth century reinforced this tendency by offering a growing understanding of the “functionality” of the human body, seconded by discourses on natural evolution and on ecology which suggested the inscription of the human body into genealogical and functional structures, and shrank the room for thinking human beings as independent entities, let alone as independent, willing subjects. Schematically speaking, the twentieth century has been haunted by the paradox that the human body was, on the one hand, understood phenomenologically as the more or less enigmatic site of all experience, of constructing and perceiving reality, and of consciousness, and on the other hand was conceived materialistically as a complicated yet potentially decodable mechanism available for deconstruction and insertion into technical, social, and other systems.

Chapter Summary

The present chapter describes this body-machine relation and its articulations in twentieth-century art. It takes off from the work of Stelarc, which has radically addressed the technicities of the human body, and contextualizes it with two historical excursions: first by looking at the conceptions of the mechanical body by artists like Oskar Schlemmer and El Lissitzky and comparing them to the materialist theories of the human body, virulent especially during the first decades of the century and articulated in Taylorist production regimes, in the scientific management of the laboring body and in biomechanics; and second by investigating conceptions of the human body in the wake of cybernetics, where Stelarc’s notion of the “hollow body” resonates with proposals for encapsulated and cyborg bodies by theorists like Oswald Wiener, and the disembodied sensing organisms proposed in works by Seiko Mikami. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the deconstruction of the human body by the artists Arthur Elsenaar and Wim Delvoye, who speculate about scenarios in which the human body is not adapted, but subjected to or replaced by, technical systems.

In this narrative, Stelarc’s work holds a pivotal position. His projects and performances deal with the extension and improvement of the human body as a hollow and unconscious container. On one level, his work can be understood as a technical project that reduces the human body to its technically relevant functions—and would thus form a radical continuation of the principles of scientific management. On another level, by ostentatiously negating the humanistic question, his art critically asks what it means to be human, and whether that humanness has a particular site in the physical body. His work is related to a philosophy of posthumanism in which the human subject is deposed from its central position. Yet Stelarc does not fully abandon the body in the way some more recent projects of bio art have. The body that he has been working with in his art practice since the late 1960s, and that he often impersonally refers to as “the body,” is always his own body. His work, Stelarc said on one occasion, “explores what it means to be human”—to which Oron Catts from the art-science research SymbioticA Lab, where Stelarc had done much work over the previous decade, added, “and what it means to be alive.”³

It may be that the “persistence of the human body” (or, more generally, the persistence of the human) can be described as one of the conceptual horizons of the twentieth century. Mikami’s investigation of human perception and the testing of the senses presupposes an “empty” body. The vanishing point of her project is the question of whether the analyzed and mediatized sense perceptions will bring forth a form of identity that is different from the subject of the Enlightenment. In contrast, Wim Delvoye inverts the human body in a machinic mimesis of that metabolic activity which is regarded as both the lowest and the most essential, namely digestion as the production of excrements. In contrast to much of the body art of the 1970s and 1980s, which, despite its often destructive ways of challenging the human body, does not put the integration of mind, identity, and body into question, the artists of the machine body deconstruct its integrity with regard to its movement, perception, the processing of information, and the spatial and functional properties of the body as object. In the work of artists like Stelarc, Mikami, or Delvoye, the human body appears as a particularly sensitive site for exploring the meaning of technology. If the machine is a concept that derives from a subjectivation afforded by the technological apparatus, then the human body is the necessary, physical counterpart of the machine—its fleshy double.

This inquiry into the techno-logics of the human body departs from a phenomenologically founded theory of affect, in which visual and other artistic practices articulate the entanglement of the human body with perceptual and affective registers.⁴ In a way, we will take the path suggested by Anna Munster, but in the opposite direction. She asks: “What if we were to produce … a different genealogy for digital engagements with the machine, one that gave us the room to take body, sensation, movements and conditions such as place and duration into account?”⁵ Instead, we will follow the trajectory proposed by the artists and, at least hypothetically or heuristically, place that sensing and moving body in parenthesis—a trajectory that seems justified not least by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s own gradual move away from a subject-centered conception of the environment toward one where the subject is “had” by the things, and where both bodies and environments are not constant but fragile and changing.

The works we will be looking at occupy a terrain where the body is not yet seen as merely one of the sites of inquiry into the structure and the produceability of living systems, as is often the case in bio art, but where it is not the vulnerable, enduring, and finite live object of body art either. The performance work of the Serbian artist Marina Abramović, for instance, is marked by probing the limits of what the artist herself can endure, and how social relations are constructed by that experience of endurance. In stark contrast to Stelarc, Abramović has explored self-reflexivity, both toward the presence of her body and the conceptual relationship between the figure of the artist and her audience. Similarly, the American artist Chris Burden, not least in the infamous performance Shoot (1971) during which the artist had himself shot in the arm with a rifle, has designed such attack on the physical integrity of the body to test aspects like volition, endurance, and agency. Unlike Stelarc, Burden does not attempt to develop routines for superseding the body, but rather places it in singular situations of risk that affirm the body’s integrity, and presence. In the early 1990s, the Dutch artist Erik Hobijn built a mechanical installation for the participatory performance Delusions of Self-Immolation which exposes a human body to the extreme experience of being—almost—burnt by a flame thrower.⁶ The deliberate near-fatal experience is kept at bay by fire-resistant paste with which the body is covered beforehand, as well as an intricate mechanism that prevents the participant from being fried by throwing a gush of water at the body in response to the gush of fire. In less extreme exercises and performances, feminist artists like Carolee Schneemann, Helen Chadwick, and Valie Export have questioned the social meaning of the human body, and the modes of reference to one’s own body.⁷ Like the surgical-aesthetic transformation of her own body performed in a lifelong process by French artist Orlan, these practices test the human body without putting its reality as a sensing, moving, and observable entity into question. The human body forms the intact and unchanged home of a conscious subject that tests its own mental and the body’s physical limits in extreme situations of exhaustion, pain, and danger, in which technology acts as a functional tool or appliance, not as an autonomous, transformative principle. This functional coupling of human body and technical system affirms their ontological separation, rather than an existential penetration and transformation of the human body by technology. In contrast, the radicality of Stelarc’s project is constituted by the fact that it does not address the notion of the human body, and of the relationship between body and technology, from the perspective of an integral body-subject, but from the perspective of a techno-logics that, first and foremost, considers the primary obsolescence, or limited applicability, of the human body.

Stelarc: Machining the Body

Performances, Devices, Aesthetics

A year after the suspension performance in Brisbane, Stelarc was invited to do a performance in the Japanese city of Ofuna. During this Event for Stretched Skin and Third Hand, Stelarc’s body was suspended with hooks and strings in a horizontal position, hanging from a disused monorail structure (figure 5.2).⁸ Attached to this overhead structure was a motorized winch which could move the body up and down, and which was controlled by the artist by means of a small control box which he held in his hand. As in Brisbane, the body was immobilized by the suspension, yet in control of its own motorized and indirect movement. In Ofuna, however, the body was additionally wearing the Third Hand, a technical prosthesis which was designed and built in Japan with Stelarc’s participation after he had studied phantom limb sensations, and which he wore attached to his lower right arm.⁹ Moreover, the body was “amplified,” which means that measurements were taken of body functions with medical sensors attached to the body, and the data from these measurements were then used to create sounds.¹⁰ The principle of the Amplified Body was, as we will see in a moment, in other cases extended to other media, and to a “body in feedback” whose readings of physiological functions as information were externalized as images, sounds, or movements of prosthetic extensions or surrounding machinery, and fed back to the body as mediated impulses.¹¹

Figure 5.2 Stelarc, Event for Stretched Skin and Third Hand (The Last Suspension) (1988), Yokohama Art Gallery, Ofuna, Japan, 29 May 1988. Photo by Simon Hunter. Courtesy of the artist.

Another recurring motif of Stelarc’s work is mechanical and robotic structures that carry or support the human body. In a performance in Kansas City in 1993, the body was held by a crane with a fixed position, a so-called “Strong Arm.” Its hydraulic lifting arm can be used to lift and move objects. In the Strong Arm performance, the crane was carrying the medical equipment that was attached to Stelarc’s body. The “amplified” body was thus indirectly attached to the Strong Arm crane; the body controlled and guided the crane’s movements while being freed of the weight of the medical equipment. At the same time, the crane’s mechanical structure, radius, and design determined what the body could do.¹²

Such a relationship of physical interdependence also characterizes the Exoskeleton project, which Stelarc has been working on since 1998. Exoskeleton is an insectlike robotic structure with six mechanical legs and a platform which can support a human body. From its central position on the platform, the human body can control the movements of the Exoskeleton: as the body lifts a leg, some legs of the robot are lifted and thus amplify the human gait. The gesture of walking is translated into a complex set of movements by the robot; the direction of the human head determines the direction in which it moves. The sounds of the moving mechanical joints and hydraulics are amplified and turn the presentation of the device in performance into a noisy and spectacular event.

Besides such mechanical couplings of body and technology, Stelarc also began developing a rather more “dialogical” relationship with the technical systems he was using in the performances. During the Psycho Cyber performances in Helsinki and Den Bosch (1993), he performed side by side with a Scanning Robot, that is, an industrial robot that had a video camera attached to it and could be controlled by the body through the stimulation of muscles in the upper right leg.¹³ The images from the video camera were directly projected onto and behind the body and the robot, visually doubling and extending the performance space for the audience. The projected images were not recognizable for the performing body immersed in the projection, but were rather part of a theatrical staging of the scene. During the performance, the robot was made to point the camera in different directions, panning and turning continuously so that the physical performance and interaction between human body and robot was accompanied and surrounded by the video images taken from the viewpoint of the tip of the industrial robot’s arm. The aesthetics of the video images was that of a surveillance camera or video probe investigating its surroundings, and, in this case, also the human entity that was positioned next to it. At times, the camera was spun around so that the video image would suddenly show the artist’s body upside down, or sideways. The fact that the actions of the robot were controlled by the human body was not immediately visible to the audience, though for the artist there was an immediate visual feedback to the controlling movements he was making. The Scanning Robot had a dual status: it was at the same time an extension of the human body through which the body could turn an externalized, perhaps narcissistic gaze at itself; especially for the audience looking at the performing robot and the body with its video double, the Scanning Robot was also an external entity which turned its gaze at the human body, investigating, recognizing, and interpellating it.¹⁴

The relationships between body and technical apparatus constructed in Stelarc’s different projects vary considerably, though the motifs of dependency and control recur. As a way of introducing this chapter on body-machine relations, we take a first though not a comprehensive look at this variety before entering into a more thorough discussion and historical contextualization of the works.

In the mid-1990s, Stelarc began to explore the interaction of the body with objects in virtual reality environments. These were initially abstracted representations of human bodies which were controlled by motion-sensor-monitored movements of Stelarc’s own body, and presented in performances through video projections. From these experiments, the Prosthetic Head and Walking Head projects evolved, in which mimetic representations of Stelarc’s head were presented as 3D images in a virtual space, or as a 2D representation on a monitor that was fixed on a robotic base. These projects probed the “hollowness” of the human body from the perspective of representation, and asked what the difference might be between the body and its virtual double.

Also in the years around 1996, Stelarc did a series of performances that developed the notion of the “involuntary body.” During these performances, parts of his body were connected to external systems through movement actuators that would stimulate the respective muscles independent of his will. At the same time, the body was wearing the extension of the Third Hand, and it was “amplified,” i.e., equipped with sensors that took readings of physiological states and translated these into sound events. Thus, the audience would see Stelarc’s almost naked body standing in front, with multiple sensors and actuators attached to different parts of his trunk and limbs and connected through cables to peripherally placed computer systems. His limbs were moving erratically, sometimes elegantly, but often in a strange disjunction with the rest of the body’s posture, indicating that the body was not in control of the movements of all of its parts (figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3 Stelarc, Amplified Body (1994), V2_Organisation, Rotterdam. Photo by Jan Sprij. Courtesy of V2_Organisation, Rotterdam.

These performances were done in different variations, including the Parasite event (1995), during which the involuntary movements of the body were controlled by the audience through a visual interface that effected the activation of sensors and thus the stimulation of muscles in defined areas of Stelarc’s body (figure 5.4). For the Ping Body performance (1996), the muscle actuators were connected to a technical system that translated the results of ping signals from the Internet into impulses on the muscle regions. Since ping signals represent the speed at which a specific impulse is processed and returned by the multiple networked computers between two points, the impulses they produce vary according to unforeseeable fluctuations in processing and network activity on and between different server computers. The performing Ping Body’s movements were thus dependent on a precise yet volatile and unpredictable configuration and temporary structure of activities in the computer network of the Internet. In the Split Body performance (1995), only one half of the horizontally “split” body was controlled externally, while the other half was self-determined.

Figure 5.4 Stelarc, Parasite (1995), diagram. Copyright © the artist.

The different modes of supporting, moving, and controlling the body exemplified in Stelarc’s projects point to several distinct conceptualizations of what the body is. The Suspensions use the physical link of piercing metal hooks through the skin and muscle tissue to lift and hold the body, treating it as a passive object, not dissimilar to a marionette held up and guided by the player through a set of strings. This passive configuration is opened up in Suspension settings where Stelarc would either have his suspended body manually lifted and held by a rope and a pulley, or in the setting of the Brisbane performance in which the crane mechanically lifting, holding, and moving the body was controlled by means of an electrical steering interface. The body remains immobilized similarly to the Exoskeleton performances, though the body is here not pierced and fixed to the technical structure, but can move relatively freely on the vehicular platform. In contrast, the Involuntary Body performance series uses electrical impulses on the skin. The body surface is not pierced, but it is used as a conductive membrane through which the electrosensitive muscle tissue underneath the skin is stimulated and made to contract, causing the limbs to move. The physical body generates the movements not as a result of conscious or unconscious impulses from the brain or the nervous system, but in response to external impulses.

This concept of an external control mechanism is also the basis of the project Movatar which Stelarc has been working on since the year 2000 (figure 5.5). Movatar is a mechanical corset for the upper body, whose main technical unit is carried like a rucksack on the back. Connected to it are two robotic units with manacles at the upper arm and around the wrist which can force and lock both arms into defined positions. The Movatar was conceived by Stelarc as a conceptual counterpart to the “avatar”: if an avatar is a representation of a physical body or object in a virtual world that can be controlled by an agent in the real world, then the Movatar is a device that makes it possible for an agent in a virtual world to control a human body in the real world. “The body becomes a host for the agency of an artificial intelligence—a prosthesis enabling the behaviour of a virtual entity.”¹⁵ The human body strapped into the Movatar is treated as a mechanical robot, controlled not through subcutaneous electrical impulses but through physical force conducted by a metal, mechanical structure.

Figure 5.5 Stelarc, Motion Prosthesis (Movatar) (2000), drawing. Copyright © the artist.

Stelarc’s Discourse

An important dimension of Stelarc’s artistic work is his textual production. Stelarc’s discursive practice is part of his artistic project, a speculative and experimental mode through which he constructs ideas and artifacts, images and phantasms, possibilities and failures. Since this discursive practice does not serve the theoretical assertion and interpretation of the performance work but forms an extension of that work, the artist does not shy away from inconsistency or contradiction. It is put forward in published texts, lectures, interviews, and liner notes to the performances, and is carried by an idiosyncratic terminology and conceptual framework which have evolved over the years, in step with the sequence of projects. It is a textual dispositive, a discursive apparatus that Stelarc both operates and is operated by, like the Third Hand or the Movatar.

Imagine a body that can perform an action without memory; a body that can make a motion without knowing that it will carry it out; an action without any expectation; consider a body driven by multiple agents remotely situated and spatially separated; a problem no longer of having a split personality, but rather a split physicality; if you were watching this body’s movements in London, what you would be seeing would be the manifestation of a remote, spatially separated body; in other words, the body becomes a host for another agent; electronically coupled bodies could then extrude agency from one body to another body in another place; your awareness would neither be all here, nor all there. (Laughs.)¹⁶

This excerpt from an interview recorded in 1995 displays the characteristic rhetoric that does not seek merely to describe and interpret but also projects further possibilities. Stelarc’s discourse creates narrative brackets for the performances, it articulates actions with words, it “makes sense” of what he has already done, and it speculates about what could be done in the future. Thus, even ideas that are, on a technical level, purely fictitious can be made an active part of his work—and when Stelarc laughs his characteristic, loud laugh, he is clearly happy about an idea that he has expressed, like about a joke that he has accidentally happened upon. Similar to the way in which the performance dispositives are set up to allow for unplanned things to happen, Stelarc’s discourse is not controlled and strategic, but exploratory and excessive.

This play with words can be observed, for instance, with regard to the way in which Stelarc refers to his own body, or to himself. In an interview published in 2005, he points to the deliberate confusion of terms: “Words like agent, person, and body are being deliberately interchanged.”¹⁷ And when speaking at a conference in Perth, Australia, in 2013, about the experiences of realizing the performances, Stelarc at one moment says “my body,” in the next sentence he says “this body,” then he speaks of “I” (“I had an experience of people moving me”), and shortly after, regarding the Split Body performance, “The body is performing with a posture of indifference.” In a formula that frequently recurs in his discourse, Stelarc claims that one cannot distinguish between the body and an “I,” and that the person is this body. The “self,” according to Stelarc, is not a location but is based on connectivity, and “what is interesting is what is between us, the social, the institutions.” Like a mantra he repeats the question that, however general, seems to underwrite much of his artistic exploration: “How can we construct a body that is not Platonic, Cartesian, Freudian?”¹⁸

Commentators of Stelarc’s work frequently adopt the artist’s own descriptions and interpretations as secondary sources for the treatment of the artistic works. In their text about Stelarc, cybertheoreticians Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, for instance, pick up on his own rhetoric: “He can brilliantly conceptualize the Prosthetic Head because he has always lived in a relationship to his own flesh as prosthetic body.”¹⁹ The Krokers’ interpretation of Stelarc’s work must, in turn, be read in line with his own discourse—not as critical investigation, but as a form of continuation of the artistic practice and its imaginations:

When the history of the twenty-first century is written, the name Stelarc will light the intellectual horizon as one of the few artists whose aesthetic creations were imprinted under the sign of postbiologics. Present at the historical juncture in which the body, responding to the stress of technological change, suddenly doubled itself in the form of a split physiology (one part the local physiology of an earth-bound and the other part the networked physiology of an electronically mediated body), Stelarc will be spoken of as the courageous prober of the future and a relentless debunker of past illusions.²⁰

It can be seen as part of the success of Stelarc’s project that he has been able to co-opt his commentators as collaborators who propel the Stelarcian speculation: “What if Stelarc’s artistic performance practice were reversed? No longer is Stelarc the artistic probe of technology’s impact on the body, but technology … performs Stelarc.”²¹

In another variant of taking Stelarc’s rhetoric at face value, Amelia Jones has insistently argued against the rhetoric of the body’s obsolescence, claiming that the artist’s present, full and “wet” body plays a crucial role in his art.²² Jones reads Stelarc’s discourse as a somehow disingenuous or incorrect interpretation of his performative work. Instead, I would argue that besides Stelarc’s performances, images, and technosculptural installations, his discursive practice is another mode in which he develops the “Stelarc” project. Pointedly put: “Stelarc” is not so much the author of performances and texts, but “Stelarc” is a project that articulates different modes of expression. The artist who performs the “Stelarc project” calls himself “Stelarc,” and in that role his spoken and written discourse is not, of course, an attempt at objective and critical commentary about the project but is itself part of the project. The artist does not speak about but rather in the role of Stelarc. In that sense it is legitimate to correlate the artist (we could call him by his original name, “Stelios Arcadiou”) with his wet human body, but it makes little sense to demand of “Stelarc” that he assume the identity and corporeal reality of “Stelios Arcadiou.” Stelarc’s discourse springs from the same conceptual imagination that also brings forth the technical contraptions and performances of the body. This project is about the blurring or the erasure of the distinction between body and technology. It speculates about the absence of such a distinction by devising modes of lowering the threshold between them. Text, spoken and written, is one of these modes.

Self-reflection and conceptual feedback are part and parcel of this artistic project. The fact that sometimes Stelarc’s discourse seems to jump ahead of the aesthetic evidence of the performances has led to the allegation that his project is more conceptual than performative. Stelarc responds:

The ideas that the performances have generated are speculations, they are not ideologies that drive the performance, that fashion the events. These ideas shouldn’t be seen as justifications for the events. Certainly as the ideas were realised they do have feedback looping effects and they do resonate in the performances—I can’t avoid that happening. But I don’t sit there thinking, “how can I express the notion of an obsolete body,” “how will I show that I can redesign the body.” These ideas have come from doing the performances as aesthetic experiences, and if they generate these speculations, if they present alternate possibilities, then that is fine. All of the ideas that we have talked about have come from the performances and from the experiences that this particular body has, but they are not about this particular body. In fact there is a particular misconception that performance art is about the body, and that it is about a particular body, the body that is making the actions. I would query both of those assumptions.²³

This passage displays how Stelarc’s discursive practice articulates preformed concepts with aesthetic experiences and projects these to form potential new concepts. It is worth noting—though not surprising—that the perspective taken by the artist is almost exclusively the subjective perspective of the performer, not that of an outside observer or an audience.

In a style similar, though less exuberant and transgressive than that of the Krokers, the Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi has offered an extensive philosophical and phenomenological analysis of Stelarc’s project in which Massumi takes Stelarc’s own texts and interview contributions as commentary and description, rather than as art.²⁴ Massumi’s insightful analysis is thus exegetic rather than critical. Moreover, in contrast to the techno-utopian interpretation of the Krokers, Massumi’s affect-theoretical reading of Stelarc’s work remains “anthropological” in its attempt to understand what it might mean for humans, and for an understanding of the human body. The Krokers instead suggest reading Stelarc’s project from the perspective of technology. Both perspectives seem logically possible if one superimposes, as a master discourse, the artist’s discursively formulated intentions onto the work. However, how does that perspective change when the analysis focuses on the aesthetic evidence—all the textual, narrative, poetic, and performative evidence of the Stelarc project?

Body, Machine

In Stelarc’s performance dispositives, we can observe different degrees of fusion between the human body and the technical installations. Whereas the Exoskeleton and Movatar are hard, metallic frames into which the body is placed and which directly and physically enforce certain movements, the Third Hand and the Scanning Robot are structures external to the body that are controlled through muscle movements which are tracked by sensors attached to the skin. In the Involuntary Body performances, the body is made to move by electrical muscle stimulation which is activated by audience members through local or remote interface systems, or by unpredictable impulses gleaned from technical systems, like, for instance, ping signals.

The different dispositives set up interactive systems in which body parts and body functions are coupled through sensors, cables, or physical force to technical parts and functions. Importantly, there is no integrated “machine” that the body would interact with, but a structure in which systemic aspects of the body are connected to other technical systems. The technology of Stelarc’s projects is a system into which the body is inscribed; it is not a “machine” with which the body would be confronted. Rather than subjectifying technology, Stelarc’s work desubjectifies the human into a technical system.

Discussing the performance work in an interview in 1996, Stelarc responds to a question about the relationship between body and machine:

I think it’s about seeing the body in a different way, instead of the body being a biological entity, operating in this local space proximal to someone else, in fact the body becomes a body connected with other bodies in other places in a multiplicity of ways, a whole range of sensory antennae that the technology provides. In a sense the body becomes part of this greater operational structure, where intelligence is distributed remotely and spatially over the Internet. A body is not just this entity, but this entity connected to another body, where awareness is sliding and shifting, coagulating, ebbing and flowing, intensifying and dimming, depending on the connectivity of the body. So for me, what’s important now, is not so much focusing on the individual psyche of a person, but that person’s connectivity and multiplicity of operational possibilities.²⁵

With respect to a broader discussion of the notion of machine art, it is interesting to note that Stelarc hesitates to adopt a strong notion of the machine. Speaking about the Parasite performance, he remarks:

It depends what you mean by machine. In this muscle stimulation system we can physically link up over this electronic space. Now, whether you want to call that a machinic operation or whether you want to call that a new physical coupling, an interactivity between biological bodies, the system that heightens and amplifies and projects human presence simultaneously in different places, well that’s really up to a definition of what a mechanism or a machine is. Certainly the emphasis has shifted from seeing the body as a site for the psyche and as a site for social inscription to now seeing the body in a more structural way. As a body connected to other bodies, as a body embedded and interactive with other technologies and the Internet in particular.²⁶

A crucial aesthetic dimension of this work is marked by the friction between the body and the technical systems, and the empathy with which the audience observes this body which looks, at the same time, like a willingly involuntary puppet and like a tortured individual. Yet the denial of physical pain and suffering in Stelarc’s discourse—no doubt fueled by his experience in Buddhist meditation since the 1970s—is a crucial aspect of his artistic practice, like the involuntary jerking of the leg in the Parasite performance, or the deformation of the skin in the Suspensions. Thus the goal of Stelarc’s extensions is not actual technical improvement of a dysfunctional or obsolete body. Rather, they are designed and performed as signs of the limitations of the human body, as signs of its hollowness and its malleability. The Stelarc cyborg is a retro cyborg that does not so much overcome the human body as evoke the empathic and emotionally painful realization of the tension and friction between the body and its environment.

In his artistic practice Stelarc strategically undermines an understanding of the human body as the home of a conscious subject. He inserts the body and its parts into arrays of input and output devices, of robotic apparatuses and sensorial interfaces which act not so much as prostheses—which would refer to a centrally positioned body-self in control of its physical extensions—but as media: We see him write with the Third Hand, we see his body move according to control signals sent through the Internet, and we observe, in a more recent project, how the Extra Ear (since 1997) on his forearm him hears and passes on its perceptions.²⁷ The notion of the “hollow body” which is so central to Stelarc’s discourse can thus be read not only as the body as a void vessel that does not contain a conscious self, but as a medial body, a body that operates like a medium which transfers, processes, and stores data.

The apparent tension between this technical conception of the body as medium on one side and the visual presence of a middle-aged man’s body with a bald patch on the other, strapped into excessive hardware installations and tangled cables, causes the mix of fascination, surprise, and sympathy that is characteristic of the reactions to Stelarc’s art practice. The ability of this body medium to transfer, process, and store is as strongly determined as any other medium by the particular technical and physiological structure that constitutes it. It is not only a body that uses technical appliances as prostheses, but also a body that is itself a prosthesis which complements a technical system which it is integrated into, a prosthetic body. The artist insists that what he is working toward is an emptying of the body, a subtraction of subjectivity: “It’s not so much an agent desiring to be invaded by technology but rather a body that positions itself to be indifferent to invasive probes.”²⁸ The aesthetic specificity of his project resides in the fact that this invasion is not a clinically clean occurrence, but a conflictual, at times dysfunctional event in which the critical encounter between body and technology can be observed as a spectacle.

Control, Information

In the examples of Stelarc’s performances mentioned earlier—from the mechanized Suspensions to the networked Involuntary Body performances—the notions of control and information play crucial roles. Both these concepts are at the heart of the theory of cybernetics, which considers the analysis and construction of dispositions in which feedback mechanisms serve to control and modify the behavior of technical, social, and natural systems.²⁹ In his own terminology, Stelarc distinguishes between a “voluntary” and an “involuntary” body—i.e., a body that can or cannot control its own actions—and sets this aspect of steering individual actions apart from the more general aspect of the “willing body,” a body that chooses to expose itself to a situation in which it may be made to perform involuntary actions.

Generally, the projects have been structured to be performed and experienced by the willing body, which is the artist. Sometimes people have seen that, sometimes not. There is a body and there are its attachments. They function, coupled, to construct architectures of extended operations. The body inhabits a local space but can also project its presence elsewhere. The body speaks here but can also be heard over there. Tasks are performed in proximity but can also be mimicked by remote surrogate robots. Transduced, physical actions extend into virtual task environments. This body functions effectively. We constantly and seamlessly slide between the physical and the virtual, the proximal and the remote. That’s what technology coupled to the body constructs. It’s a terrain of operation that is bounded neither purely by the body physiology nor by body scales.³⁰

It is part of Stelarc’s project that, in his performances, he excludes the possibility of an “unwilling body,” a body that would be forced to perform against its will. By working only with his own body, he bypasses the ethical question of power over somebody else, even though the philosophical paradox of a “willing and involuntary” body begs the question of subjectivity, which Stelarc would like to sideline as well. With reference to the Movatar project which proposed control of body movements by a virtual entity, Stelarc commented in 2000: “I wanted the effect of Alien Agency, possessing and performing with your body. I’m reconciled to the fact that in a complex technological terrain where there’s multiplicity [sic!] of feedback loops, it’s no longer meaningful to ask who’s in control.”³¹

The actions of the body, whether voluntary or involuntary, are induced by “information” which, in cybernetic systems, distinguishes intended or effective signals from unintended noise. Stelarc’s conception of information is borrowed from such a cybernetic understanding in that it is understood as deriving not from human will but from systemic, quasi-natural effects of technology: “It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1,400-cc. brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated. … The most significant planetary pressure is no longer the gravitational pull but rather the information thrust. Gravity has molded the evolved body in shape and structure and contained it on the planet. Information propels the body beyond itself and its biosphere. Information fashions the form of the postevolutionary body.”³²

From this conceptualization arose the ideas for performances like Ping Body, in which the body’s movements are effectively controlled by signals drawn from unpredictable fluctuations in the electronic networks, i.e., by information derived from hypercomplex technical events. Yet the body that the audience observes during the performance remains determined by gravity: standing upright on the stage, trying to keep the balance as the limbs jerk involuntarily, surrounded by equipment that is all firmly placed on the ground. This image is not one of a “body propelled beyond itself by information,” but one of extreme tension between incompatible systems, an image of incompatibility and impossibility between body and “the information thrust.”³³

In their interpretation of how the notion of the human was transformed by the historical advent of cybernetics, Erich Hörl and Michael Hagner have highlighted the replacement of a mechanical by a cybernetic set of parameters: “Cybernetics differed from older conceptions of technology or science in that for it, mechanics, energetics, and thermodynamics were no epistemological categories, even if entropy did in fact play a role in cybernetics. It was rather oriented toward information and communication, logics and symbol processing. Thus cybernetics changed the theories by which the social, the political, the economic, human thought, and the philosophical interpretation of the human were worked through.”³⁴

Stelarc’s work straddles the mechanical and the cybernetic. He stands on the threshold of a cybernetic conception of the body. While in his discourse he often gestures across that threshold, his physical performances play at the border. This position on the threshold is neither a sign of inconclusiveness nor failure, but marks the special status of the Stelarc project.

Working on the Mechanical Body

The relationship between body and machine addressed in Stelarc’s work evolves along two main trajectories, one referring to the “classical,” mechanical machine, and one to the information-processing, “transclassical machine,” to use Gotthard Günther’s terminology. This second trajectory of the cybernetic body we will follow in the next section; here we will look first at the historical context of scientific management and the conceptualization of the human body as a utilitarian part of industrial production, discussing instances in which such a new understanding of the human body was translated into aesthetic conceptions by artists.

The modern history of the human body has been studied and described extensively.³⁵ Many of these studies have departed from the work of the French philosopher and historian of knowledge Michel Foucault, which describes how the physical body became a site of knowledge and of power and, from the eighteenth century onward, how the disciplined human body was a crucial factor in the establishment of modern regimes of work, and of social relations in general.³⁶ In the nineteenth century, the human organism was increasingly conceptualized in technological terms, and new scientific discoveries in areas such as physiology, experimental psychology, and ergonomics were translated into parameters of energy, efficiency, and performance of the working “body machine.”³⁷ Much of this research was predicated on the representational and analytical possibilities offered by the new, visual medium of photography, notably the chronophotography developed by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. In the scientific research of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hugo Münsterberg, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and Aleksei Gastev, among others, the new findings were applied to the “scientific management” of labor, with the aim of reducing fatigue and improving human performance in industrial production. The methods of scientific management measured the dynamic, spatial and temporal interactions in human-machine systems, with the aim of optimizing and standardizing the technical tools and installations, as well as the position and movements of the human body, and the operational interaction between body and technics in the labor process.³⁸

Aleksei Gastev, a poet who had already joined the struggle for a socialist revolution in Russia before the First World War, became an activist of improved industrial production. He founded, in Moscow in 1920, the Central Labor Institute (CIT) which, based on Taylor’s and the Gilbreths’ research in the United States, sought to bring scientific management to the young Soviet Union.³⁹ Gastev’s work is exemplary for the entanglement of economic, physiological, ideological, and aesthetic aspects, which in turn had repercussions in the field of art. He was convinced that in order to build up Soviet industry and to modernize existing production sites, it was necessary to radically transform the way in which work was conducted:

The world of the machine, the world of the mechanism, the world of industrial urbanism is creating its own collective bonds, is giving birth to its own types of people, whom we must accept just as we accepted the machine, and not beat our heads against the gears. We must introduce some corrective factors into its yoke of iron discipline; but history urgently demands of us to pose, not these small problems of the protection of personality by society, but rather a bold design of human psychology in reliance upon such an historical factor as machine production.⁴⁰

The boldness of Gastev’s claims responds to a critique against the Taylorist system which he was advocating, a critique that was put forward forcefully by Communist and Soviet trade unionists. Gastev had suggested that “even a machine, in the literal sense of the word, will manage living people. Machines from being managed will become managers.”⁴¹ For his critics, such a prospect was unacceptable, and they demanded that both the wider economic context and the psychology of the individual worker and his protection also be taken into account.⁴² In 1924, this conflict was resolved in favor of Gastev’s rather more technicist Taylorism, a trend which would become even more forceful in the years from 1929 onward when Stalin’s government intensified its industrialization program.⁴³

The discussions about Taylorism between Gastev and his critics—which are mirrored by similar debates about the implementation of principles of scientific management in the United States and other industrializing countries—are a reminder that the relation between body and machine remained problematic throughout the twentieth century, and that only in the most radical extropian dreams was the reference point of the human body given up completely. Different body-machine constellations proliferated as conceptions like those of the prosthesis, the robot, and the cyborg existed side by side, pointing to the parallel developments of the extension, the replacement, and the fusion of the human body by and with technical systems. Hence Gastev’s “order” to Soviet youths:

Youth! Enter into the iron rows of training!

Regard the machine, the tool!

Create the machine, the organization!

First intensive attention!

Then the deed!

First intensive attention!⁴⁴

And hence Münsterberg’s conception of the coevolution of human and technology which mutually constitute formative environments for each other: “No machine that a human is supposed to work with can survive the struggle for technical existence, if it is not, to some degree, adapted to the nerve and muscle system and to the possibilities of perception, attention, memory and will of trained individuals.”⁴⁵

On a pragmatic as well as an ideological level, the centuries-old struggle between anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism, between the shaping of machines after human models, and the shaping of humans after the affordances of machines is never decided conclusively, but partially and heuristically. La Mettrie’s conception of the homme machine is a case in point: while the description of the human body as a machine is in itself mechanomorphic, La Mettrie does not call the overall (anthropomorphic) shape of the human body into question. Similarly, Fritz Kahn’s illustrations of the human body and its functions from the 1920s and 1930s propose techno-logical explanations for physiological processes, but they do not suggest the necessity for reconstructing the human body according to more rational, technical principles.⁴⁶

More important than the aspect of mimesis is the form of coupling between different systems, the circuiting of human bodies and technical systems. Anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism thus seem appropriate as processual and relational terms, not as descriptions of static facts. Both terms describe the adaptation of the human and the technical system to one another, they stand at either side of the technical interface—be that a simple tool, a complex machine, or a computer screen.

The struggle which also affected the political implementation of scientific management was about whether human bodies and human behavior had to be adapted to technically optimized machines, or whether both technical design and human behavior had to be adapted in a way that was a compromise between the requirements of each. What is still a problem for Gastev, i.e., the struggle over the humanistic dimension of technology and the moral imperative to rank the well-being of humans higher than the functionality of the technical system, is superseded when computer-based systems increasingly cut out the human worker and manage the full production process as a cooperation of machines with machines.

In 1922, a “Laboratory for Biomechanics” was opened at Gastev’s Central Labor Institute. Nikolai A. Bernstein, an influential expert on human body movements whose findings still play a role in robotics research, worked there until 1925 and helped to foster the scientific management researchers’ understanding of the physiological basis of human movements. Using the same term, the Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold developed an understanding of “biomechanics” as a theater method in which the actor would not generate meaning by expressively displaying the inner feelings associated with a role, but rather by repeating formulaic movements which referred to preconceived and predetermined meanings.⁴⁷ Meyerhold’s biomechanics was thus a training program for optimal behavior that was targeted not at industrial production but at the cultural modeling of individuals.

The German Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer, who praised Meyerhold’s theater work for its revolutionary aesthetics, had developed his own Triadic Ballet from 1916. It was premiered in 1922 and was only rarely presented afterward, notably in 1926–1927 at the Bauhaus in Dessau and other venues, and in 1932.⁴⁸ The most striking feature of the Triadic Ballet is the elaborate costumes which Schlemmer developed as abstractions of human body forms and which forced a limited repertoire of movements upon the dancers.⁴⁹ Schlemmer’s main interest was in “humans in space.” This space is determined by its shape and its size. The human, without whom for Schlemmer “true theater” is not possible, is at the same time “an organism of flesh and blood” and “a mechanism of number and measurement.”⁵⁰ Its movements are directed either by its emotions or by the mind. The space of the stage “complies with the laws of an invisible network of the lines of planimetric and stereometric relations.”⁵¹ Where Meyerhold flatly rejected the validity of an emotionally guided, expressive form of acting, Schlemmer maintained that both an exterior and an interior motivation were acceptable, a dynamic guidance either by the spatial laws or by the imaginary space built by the actor’s charisma, because the cubist-abstract space was “only the horizontal-vertical scaffold of this fluid system.”⁵²

From this analysis of the relationship between human and space, Schlemmer derived four different types of costumes. His biographer Dirk Scheper summarizes:

When the laws of the encompassing cubic space are determinant, this results in a spatial-cubic costume construction which Schlemmer calls “Walking Architecture” [wandelnde Architektur]. When the functional laws of the human body in relation to the space are applied, it means a typification of body shapes and leads to the “Jointed Doll” [Gliederpuppe] which dominates the dances and demonstrations on the Bauhaus stage. The laws of movement of the human body in space translated into a costume result in the so-called “Technical Organism” [Technischer Organismus].

Finally, “the fourth basic type of a stage costume [‘The Signs in Man’ (Die Zeichen im Menschen)] visibly expresses in a costume structure what Schlemmer calls the metaphysical anatomy of man.”⁵³

While Schlemmer insists on the central importance of the human being for his aesthetic considerations, he also acknowledges the contemporary drive toward mechanization which impacts the human body: “Machine and technics afford a mechanization of contemporary life which cannot be ignored and which makes the machine of man and the mechanism of the body so insistently palpable and obvious.”⁵⁴ For Schlemmer the opposing forces of machine and body, of abstract space and organic space, are copresent, and it is a matter of artistic creation to work with this confrontation.

Schlemmer’s text for the 1925 Bauhaus-Buch about the Bauhaus stage contains two drawings that illustrate the two different principles of a relationship between human body and surrounding space. The first drawing, of the “laws of cubic space,” shows the view into a cubic space with multiple straight lines connecting important coordinate points (figure 5.6). The black outline of a small human figure, standing at a fifth of the overall height of the drawing, is positioned centrally on the bottom surface, on a line marking the first quarter of the depth of the space. The figure masks two other points of multiple intersecting lines, halfway back and at the rear end of the space, but at the point where its feet are positioned only two lines meet orthogonally. While the figure seems inscribed into a rational geometric structure, there is also, especially through the curved outline of the body, an obvious discrepancy between the figure and the surrounding space with its spiked angles.

Figure 5.6 Oskar Schlemmer, Laws of Cubic Space (1924), illustration in O. Schlemmer, “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” in Die Bühne am Bauhaus (1925), 13.

As a complementary image, the “laws of human movement” are illustrated by a drawing that shows a human figure placed centrally on a surface (figure 5.7). There are only three straight lines, a vertical one that marks the middle of the drawing and the central position of the figure, and two horizontal lines, one at the height of the figure’s sternum, the other at the height of the right knee. From the central point of the sternum, twenty circular lines, spaced at slightly increasing distances from each other, radiate out and fill the entire rectangular surface of the drawing with a regular pattern. The human figure is drawn as an outline and stands about half the height of the overall drawing. Its balanced, slightly curved pose uses the right leg as a supporting leg, the left leg being stretched to the side freely. Both arms are raised a little below the upper horizontal line, the right arm straight and supporting, the left arm bent and with the palm of the hand open and turned upward. The head is bent down with the face turned to the left side as though it was looking at the lower arm and hand.⁵⁵ Additional lines that start at different body parts of the figure, its head, arms and hands, hips, legs and feet, project outward like rays that extrapolate the potential movements of the body. All of these projecting lines reach the drawing’s frame.

Figure 5.7 Oskar Schlemmer, Laws of Human Movement (1924), illustration in O. Schlemmer, “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” in Die Bühne am Bauhaus (1925), 14, bottom.

Three coordinate systems are overlaid in this drawing: the orthogonal order of the straight lines, the circular order radiating out from the body’s center, and the rays that project outward from the body parts. If the first drawing emphasized the static inscription of a figure into a given, abstract space, this second drawing describes a spatial configuration that only exists in relation to the body’s posture and movements, which determine or constitute the coordinates of space in the first place.⁵⁶

Compared with Meyerhold’s biomechanics and Gastev’s scientific management of labor, we can see how Schlemmer’s dynamic coordinate system describes multiple floating points that are not fixed in specific positions, yet precise in their definition of spatial relations. The different body parts become addressable individually and dynamically, and as a corporeal configuration (figure 5.8).⁵⁷ Schlemmer’s conception of the human body and its articulation in the Triadic Ballet and other stage experiments thus forms a bridge between a mechanical and functionalist view of the body and a utopian imagination of what a new, an avant-garde body might look like.

Figure 5.8 Oskar Schlemmer, Dancing Human (Tänzermensch) (1924), illustration in O. Schlemmer, “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” in Die Bühne am Bauhaus (1925), 14, top.

A more radically utopian vision of such bodies was suggested by the Russian artist El Lissitzky in his 1923 designs for the figures—they cannot really be imagined as “costumes”—of the opera Victory over the Sun. Ten years after the prewar premiere of this futurist play by Aleksei Kruchenykh, Kazimir Malevich, and others, Lissitzky produced a series of graphic representations of its key figures. In these designs, he suggests a suprematist overcoming of the human body, in analogy to the opera’s depiction of the overcoming of nature by modern man. In the nine drawings of the series, some figures are more conventional and static in posture and depiction (like the Sportsmen, the Cowards, and the Grave Diggers), while others combine static and dynamic geometric elements to form complex, somewhat irrational mechanical contraptions (Announcer, Troublemaker, Guard). All figures are made up of abstract visual elements, like rectangles, triangles, squares, circles, and circle segments. Some elements or configurations resemble parts of the human body (heads, legs, arms), due either to drawn details or to their shape and structural placement. In some areas, the drawings suggest a spatial depth of the elements, which adds to the compositional tension and dynamics of the drawings and hints at a form of realistic three-dimensionality and technical pragmatism, implying that these constructions could at least in theory be put together from wood and metal parts.

Two drawings stand out from the series and seem to have received special attention from Lissitzky in their design: the New One (or The New Man, in German Neuer) and the Time Traveler (or Globetrotter (in Time)), both of which figures are assigned particularly important, positive roles in the opera’s libretto. Lissitzky’s New One is an abstract rendition of a human figure with head and trunk, two arms and two legs, which are shown in the form of a dynamic X-shaped cross (figure 5.9, plate 11). The figure appears to make a long stride toward the right, the forward and upward movement supported by the stable position of the foot on the bottom left, and the open gesture of the arm toward the upper right. A centrally placed red square that marks both the middle of the overall drawing and the left (i.e., rear) part of the trunk, and two black and red five-pointed stars at the oval-shaped head, iconographically refer to the political and artistic revolutions of Bolshevism and to Malevich’s suprematism. While the figure in Schlemmer’s drawing of the “laws of movement” is caught in a homogeneous and evenly distributed, pushing and pulling meshwork of potential forces, Lissitzky’s New One shows a constructivist body in a directed, vectorial movement that represents a determined ideological thrust.

Figure 5.9 El Lissitzky, New One (Neuer), from the series Victory over the Sun (Sieg über die Sonne), Kestner Mappe, sheet 10 (1923). Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Museum Folkwang Essen—ARTOTHEK.

For the figure of the Time Traveler, Lissitzky proposed a more abstract, hovering constellation of elements that are loosely arranged along a vertical axis (figure 5.10, plate 12). The bottom end of this axis is defined by a black circle, upon which several brown and gray rectangular and triangular shapes are piled, with a head and a double facial profile at the top. Jutting upward to the right from the black circle is a line construction that resembles the lightweight wing of a contemporaneous airplane, and centrally positioned is a gray propeller composed of two truncated segments of a circle. Unlike the New One, this figure has no clear direction; the elements that point to the right (airplane wing, triangle, facial profile) are evenly balanced by the diagonally positioned rectangular shapes that seem to pull the fragile construction to the left. This impression is enhanced by a small detail at the bottom: the point where the triangle and the airplane wing meet the black circle is not at its apex but slightly to the left of this, which seems to put the whole figure in danger of sliding down toward the left of the circle. While the New One appears to be both standing firmly in the present and moving ahead into the future, the Time Traveler seems to be poised in the present, wavering between past and future. Its image resembles Paul Klee’s drawing of the Angelus Novus (1920) which, in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation, fearfully stares into the past as it is being blown into the future by the storm of progress.⁵⁸ In contrast, Lissitzky’s Time Traveler appears to be traveling into the future lightheartedly and untroubled, like an airplane that (in Kruchenykh’s libretto) brings back news from “the 35th century, where there is force without violence, and the rebels fight with the sun, and although there is no luck, everybody looks happy and immortal.”⁵⁹

Figure 5.10 El Lissitzky, Globetrotter (in Time) (Globetrotter (in der Zeit), from the series Victory over the Sun (Sieg über die Sonne), Kestner Mappe, sheet 5 (1923). Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Museum Folkwang Essen—ARTOTHEK.

The designs by Lissitzky and Schlemmer are not explicitly technical, but they are based on a technological imaginary that has made the transformation and the technological inscription of the human body conceivable to an extent that was, in the arts, not possible before the twentieth century. In Schlemmer’s drawing of the laws of movement we may recognize an entanglement into a matrix of forces that prefigures Stelarc’s concepts of the Amplified Body—extending its physical properties into a medial space that turns the body itself into an interface, a medium of such forces—and of the Involuntary Body which is forced to move with the tides and shifts in that same matrix. With Lissitzky, Stelarc shares the rhetorics of a utopian optimism and the desire to supersede the “old” human body and to find new, desubjectified figures with, literally, hollow bodies. This lineage that comes from the nineteenth-century physiologists and experimental psychologists, from Marey, Gilbreth, and Gastev, is more relevant for an understanding of Stelarc’s work than, for instance, the “machinelike” representations of human bodies in Fernand Léger’s paintings, or the aesthetic rendering of movement in Kazimir Malevich’s Knife Grinder (1914). Both of these appear folkloristic, to use an expression by art critic Eduard Beaucamp, in comparison with the technological modernism of the constructivists.⁶⁰

A different case is that of Raoul Hausmann, whose photocollages and sculptures reflected, among other things, on the experience of the maimed and prosthetically repaired bodies of First World War veterans. Works such as Mechanical Head (1919) or the collage Tatlin at Home (1920, figure 2.4) don’t suggest an engagement with a structural reconceptualization of the human body, but are rather metaphorical treatments of the new and often involuntary body collages on display in the streets of Berlin at the time. Similarly, Hausmann’s work on typography and optophonetics was an exploration of the potentials and limits of the human body and “the permanent psycho-physiological auto-instruction of human beings.”⁶¹ For Hausmann, there was no turning back to an image of wholeness; it was necessary to adapt to the new constructivism of bodies:

We want to be transformed … through mechanical consciousness, by the bold inventions of the forward-pushing engineer. Why can we no longer paint like Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Titian? Because man has completely changed in his consciousness, not only because we invented the telephone, the airplane, the electric piano, or the revolving lathe, but even more so because man’s psychophysics has changed with his experience. The naïve anthropomorphism has come to its definitive end.⁶²

Hausmann’s own attempt at overcoming such a “naïve anthropomorphism” was his research on the optophone, a prosthetic device that—in his unfulfilled vision—would extend human perception by coupling the visual and auditory senses, with such practical applications as helping to guide blind people in open and closed spaces. However, it is not clear what Hausmann technically had in mind for the optophone, and his gestures toward the obsolete conceptions of the human body remain metaphorical.

The genealogy of Stelarc’s work suggested here is meant as an exemplary line of research into the history of the relation of art and technology in the twentieth century in general, and of the role of the human body in it in particular. It is a genealogy that is artistic rather than scientific, given that Stelarc’s body-machine assemblages are not useful but dancing, jerking contraptions. His body’s behavior may sometimes seem as involuntary as that of a laboratory rat, but it never resembles the analyzed and measured bodies of the laboratories of labor. Instead, there is a performative lineage that connects Stelarc’s work to Meyerhold and Schlemmer, and there is a lineage of the mobilization of sculpture which relates it to Umberto Boccioni, Constantin Brancusi, to Calder and Tinguely in the twentieth century, and thus to the nineteenth-century capturing of time and movement in photography and sculpture by Marey, Muybridge, and Auguste Rodin. It expands the kinetic aspect of machine aesthetics by mobilizing not a mechanical object but the human body. After physically and discursively reducing its degrees of freedom, the body is remobilized by technical installations that impose the effects of electronically relayed automatisms on it. Combining a mechanical conception of the body with an automatic conception of technology, Stelarc’s work marks a field of tension between body and machine that first emerged in the nineteenth century, between Marx’s analysis of the human-machine relation in the labor process and the attempts at its optimization by the Gilbreths and others.

The chronophotographic work of Étienne-Jules Marey not only formed the media-technological basis for the research into the scientific management of labor, but also provided an important, iconic representational form for the measurability of the human body and its mechanomorphic potentials. This iconic example resonates in the photographs that Simon Hunter took of Stelarc when he was first posing with the Third Hand in 1980,⁶³ as well as in Toshifumi Ike’s 1984 triple-exposure photograph of Stelarc with the Third Hand, holding a white ball that reminds us of the white balls and other markers used in motion-tracking experiments ever since the 1880s.⁶⁴ Even more striking is a photograph by Minoru Watanabe documenting Stelarc’s Event for Amplified Hands (1982). Here, the number of exposures is difficult to gage. The arms are captured in a multiplicity of positions, and the entire body is shown in a blur and appears as a ghostlike angel.⁶⁵

Whereas these instances mostly concern the mechanically conceived physiology of the human body, other examples of research point forward to the exploration of body-mind relations in which the technical system involved is both the interface between the two and the environment in which their interaction is played out. One of the strands of late nineteenth-century research into experimental psychology concerned the analysis of handwriting and hand drawing.⁶⁶ They were understood as expressions of the relation between mind and body, and were studied both for their pathology and for their pedagogical potential. The exercises that J. Liberty Tadd and others did with children around 1900 resonate in Stelarc’s iconic performance of Handswriting ‘Evolution’ (1982) when he wrote the nine letters of the word “Evolution” simultaneously with his own two and the prosthetic Third Hand.⁶⁷ In another performance, Event for Three Hands (1981), Stelarc stood facing a blackboard, holding a piece of white chalk in each of the three hands and drawing segments of circles by moving his arms up and down.⁶⁸ The resulting drawings may remind us of some of the costumes in Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, which in turn echo the chronophotographic images from labor research. But besides this analytical program of physical movements, Stelarc’s action also seems to be inspired by an educational program in which the human body becomes a physical interface for cybernetic systems, a program whose precursor are Tadd’s exercises for children who are trained in the free and two-handed drawing of circles.

Another stage in this development was experiments with telematic devices in which body and robotic parts were coupled in visuotactile information systems like those conceived in preparation for space flight. In the 1930s, the Polish-born space pioneer Ary Sternfeld moved from France to the Soviet Union in order to further pursue his research into a field that he was the first to call “Cosmonautics.” In 1938, Sternfeld patented a technical system called “Android” that he had been working on for a decade and that allowed for the transmission of information about the movements of a human arm to a remote, robotic arm which was modeled after a human arm and whose joints were equipped with servomotors (figures 5.11, 5.12). This early telematic device was intended for future space missions to the Moon and to Mars, when complex operations might have to be conducted at great distances.⁶⁹ The construction drawings of the Android system in the patent application strikingly resemble Stelarc’s drawing for the Amplified Body and Involuntary Body performances, in which sensors take measurements of certain states of the body while transducers translate incoming data into impulses that activate specific parts of the prosthetic device (figure 5.4). Only in Stelarc’s case, the human body can be both the source and the recipient of such impulses, collapsing the two functions that Sternfeld had imagined to be located at the largest conceivable distance—between Earth and Mars—into a single, integrated system.

Figure 5.11 Ary Sternfeld, Android (1931), drawing. USSR Copyright Certificate No. 57746, applied April 9, 1931. Archive of the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow.

Figure 5.12 Ary Sternfeld, Android (1938), drawing. USSR Copyright Certificate No. 67162, applied September 3, 1938. Archive of the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow.

Extending the Cybernetic Body

Besides the historical lineage just described, we must also consider the more contemporary context of cybernetics in which Stelarc’s work has evolved. It is not conceptual and analytical in the same way as, for instance, the artistic practice of cybernetic artists of the previous generation, like Gordon Pask, or Roy Ascott. Instead, it exposes the human body to an apparatus-based approach, so that the question that the abstract kinetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer asked about the automation of behavior is directed at the body-machine relationship. Two themes are central to this inquiry: one is the motif of the cyborg, or the becoming-technological of the body; the other is the related theme of the encapsulation, or the subsumption and ultimately the disappearance, of the body in technological environments.

The Body without Organs and the Cyborg

In his exegesis of Stelarc’s works, Brian Massumi interprets the suspension Event for Support Structure (1979) as a “veritable ‘first,’” as a kind of “Ur-suspension.” He claims that “it is of this event that all others were multiples,” even though, as Massumi affirms, it was not chronologically the first such event. Stelarc’s own description of Event for Support Structure is, as always, terse and unemotional: “The body was contained between two planks and suspended from a quadrapod pole structure in a space littered with rocks. The eyes and mouth were sewn shut. Three stitches for the lips, one each for the eyelids. The body was daily inserted between the planks and in the evening was extracted to sleep among the rocks. Body participation was discontinued after seventy-five hours.”⁷⁰

A documentation photograph reveals some further details: it shows the artist lying naked on his back on the lower wooden plank, while the upper, identical plank is placed above the body (figure 5.13).⁷¹ The distance between the two planks is fixed by means of six long screws, positioned at the corners and in the middle of the length of the planks. A steel wire is threaded through each of the screw eyes poking out just above the top plank, and all six wires are suspended from the same central hook that hangs from the peak of the wooden pole structure. The artist’s head is turned to its left slightly, presumably because the nose would otherwise be squeezed by the top plank. The breast seems to be the highest protrusion of the body; apparently it was not pressed down, suggesting that the body is not squeezed between the planks. The left hand is carefully placed on the left hip.

Figure 5.13 Stelarc, Event for Support Structure (1979), Tamura Gallery, Tokyo, July 9–15, 1979. Photo by Yuichi Konno. Yamagichi Archive, National Art Center, Tokyo. Courtesy of the artist.

In his text, Massumi compares the Event to other suspension performances and highlights the sensorial disconnection from the outside, poetically meandering around this suspended and sewn-up body, and its gravitational passivity:

If the transductive suspensions in which the body began to extend into image and sound were counteractions of the body’s objectivity, the sewn suspension goes one step further, countering the organicity of the body. A body that can express nothing, not even incipient let alone possible action, is supremely dysfunctional. It is what Deleuze and Guattari call a body without organs. On hold. Sewn and suspended, the body folds in on itself to the point that it is not only no longer an object or an organism, it is even stretched to the limit of things.⁷²

The characterization of the body in Event for Support Structure as a realization of a “body without organs” is surprising. This concept was developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a psychological metaphor for the full, open potential of a body, beyond its segmentation into limbs and organs, into a determined, organized and functional structure.⁷³ Massumi interprets Stelarc’s piece not as one that originates in and leads to a hyperarticulation of limbs or a cyborgian extra-organization, as in the Involuntary Body projects, but as one that has its degree zero in a performance of disarticulation during many hours of the passive and sensorially disconnected body lying alone, between suspended planks, or among the rocks on a gallery floor.⁷⁴

Deleuze and Guattari extensively develop the concept of the “body without organs” in their writings, especially in the two parts of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus and Milles Plateaux.⁷⁵ They take the cue for this concept from the surrealist theater artist Antonin Artaud, who strove for a radical questioning of the human body and its performance: “The body is the body / it is alone / and needs no organs / the body is never an organism / the organisms are the enemies of the body.”⁷⁶

Deleuze and Guattari applied the notion of the “body without organs” to describe a psychic state in which the body is not segmented and organized. The “organized” body is segmented by “machines” which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding, are “systems of cutting,” systems that cut, interrupt, and redirect flows. Like other machines, the “desiring-machine” cuts a flow and extracts from it, and through this cutting it separates an organ-machine from a source-machine.⁷⁷

The example often used here is that of the child sucking the mother’s breast: there is initially no need to think of child/body/mouth/nipple/breast/body/woman as separate organs; but a withdrawal of the breast can form a cut which engenders the desiring-machine that, in turn, constructs the mouth and the breast as separate organs. “The body without organs is immanent to the desiring-machines. It is the unorganized mass which forms the base of their functioning. In contrast to the desiring-machines, the body without organs is ‘full’. It is unproductive, unfertile and unconsumable.”⁷⁸

Desiring-machines and body without organs are pitched against each other: “The desiring-machines move toward the body without organs and try to form an organism there. The body without organs defends itself against the organism, i.e. against that organization of organs, which functions in the sense of a totalization, an integration, and a harmonization.”⁷⁹

This conflict between the desiring-machines and the body without organs results in three different machine types: the “paranoiac-machine,” the “wonder-machine,” and the “bachelor-machine.” The “paranoiac-machine” is created by the reaction of the body without organs against the desiring machines, against “having an organism made for itself. … What the body without organs is fending off is the harmonization and the hierarchization of its organs.”⁸⁰ However, “the rejection of the desiring-machines is not directed at the organs themselves. The body without organs also attempts to attract the organs to it. It tries to appropriate them, to attach them to its surface and to let them function in another, ‘unorganismic’ order. The paranoiac-machine of rejection is replaced by a perverse machine of attraction, the ‘machine miraculante’, the wonder-machine.”⁸¹ The bachelor-machine—a concept worked out by Deleuze and Guattari on the basis of the mythical appropriation by Michel Carrouges of the original description by Marcel Duchamp—constitutes yet another relation between the body without organs and the desiring-machines: unlike the paranoiac-machine, it does not reject but attracts the desiring-machines; and unlike the wonder-machine, it is inhabited by a subject that “experiences the relationships between the distinct points on the body without organs as intensive states.”⁸²

The historian of science Henning Schmidgen further pinpoints the difference between wonder-machine and bachelor-machine:

The wonder-machine is determined by the attraction of individual organ-machines on the part of the body without organs. … The organ-machines engender intensive feelings which are realized outside the “organismic” body and outside of genital sexuality. The wonder-machine is characterized by the fact that these excitements are involuntary, “wondered.” This is different with the bachelor-machine. At first both machines seem to be the same. Here and there, the experience of surprising and intensive states. However, in the bachelor-machine there is a subject that experiences these affects, and is no longer only bewildered but affirms the intensity in a sort of sudden sense of evidence: “So that was that!”⁸³

What can we then make of Massumi’s interpretation of the body in the Event for Support Structure as a body without organs? The characterization makes sense on a certain metaphorical level: the immobilized body between the two planks, the suspension of gravity, the reversion of eyes and mouth—organs of seeing and speaking—into unsensing body surface. But how does the state of the body change when it is not immobilized and isolated, when the suspension is done by means of hooks in the skin, when the body is attached to prosthetic and transductive impulse devices? Are the other suspensions really just “multiples” of this event? And do we really experience a suspension of organicity in the sense of the body without organs, or rather an engagement with the desiring-machines that can be interpreted, depending on our understanding of the ontological status of the artwork and the artist, as a paranoiac-machine, a wonder-machine, or a bachelor-machine?⁸⁴

It is important to keep in mind that, even though the body without organs is an initial condition of the newborn infant, Deleuze and Guattari do not conceive of it as a primary state that is then overcome once and for all. The “organization” of the body can be worked against at every stage of life and in multiple ways, as the extreme aesthetic practice of artists like Artaud testify. As Massumi puts it: “A return to the body without organs is actually a return of fractality, a resurfacing of the virtual. Not regression: invention.”⁸⁵

The body without organs is not a concept or an entity or a given state, but “an experiment, an exercise” (Deleuze and Guattari). For Massumi, Stelarc’s project is that of “a transformation of the very nature of the body (as opposed simply to adding permutations on its actions as the object it already is, with the organs it already has).”⁸⁶ This transformation is instantiated in the reinterpretation, in the Suspensions, of the body’s relation to gravity by shifting its support from the feet to the constellation of hooks-in-flesh, or in the multiplication and externalization of the organicity of the body in the Amplified Body and Involuntary Body performances. Are these transformations offered by Stelarc’s projects answers to the question “How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?”⁸⁷ Massumi asks a related question, though with a different inflection: “What subsequent extensions might then unfold? The problems are re-performed, exhaustively, in a non suspension series of experimentations with prostheses (including the Third Hand, Extended Arm, Extra Ear, Exoskeleton) and then in a further series of cyborg experimentations where the body takes its place in a cybernetic network rewiring its motional limits in radically new ways (Split Body, Fractal Flesh, Stimbod, Ping Body, Virtual Arm, Virtual Body, Parasite, Movatar).”⁸⁸

Massumi’s comment on the potential of utility that can emerge from such experiments strikingly recalls Sternfeld’s Android robotic arm system, here projected as an extrapolation from Stelarc’s prosthetic works: “When a way is invented to attach the robotic arm to a computer and remotely control it—now then there are possibilities. It really could be used in hostile off-world environments, for equipment repair or mining. It could fulfill so many wondrous functions. Why, it would be a necessity in any extraterrestrial extension of the body’s sphere of movement.”⁸⁹

But Massumi insists that the development of the body is not only a necessity for futurist visions of space travel, but a condition of evolutionary development in general: “The body’s obsolescence is the condition of change. Its vitality is in obsolescence. We are all astronauts. We are all moonwalkers without organs, taking small perceptual steps into the future on virtual legs. … The body without organs that Stelarc sews himself into is not so singular after all. Or rather, it is so singular, but the singular accompanies and conditions any … of these particularities into the general. The body without organs—the reversion of thought and perception-action into pure sensation—is a constant companion of the organism, its future-double.”⁹⁰

Massumi sees this development in Stelarc’s work as being directed “toward the cyborg”⁹¹—a figure that appears, at first glance, as the polar opposite of the body without organs: the “cybernetic organism” is cybernetic and thus inscribed into regimes of calculation, control, feedback, and predictability, and it is an organism, i.e., an assemblage of articulated elements with defined functions, totalized, integrated, and harmonized—to use Deleuze and Guattari’s formula of the organism that the body without organs rebels against. The term was first used, in 1960, by US Air Force contractors who were speculating about adjustments to be made in order to extend the physical capabilities of astronauts.⁹²

Yet the cyborg is not only a cybernetically conceived, perfectly integrated biological and technological system; it also carries the heritage of romantic automata and paranoid robots that try to escape their own functionalist and utilitarian desiring-machines toward dedifferentiation. Nowhere was this alternative lineage of the cyborg argued more forcefully than by Donna Haraway in the “Cyborg Manifesto”:

There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment.⁹³

The conceptual register is entirely different from Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Massumi’s in their footsteps, as is the agenda of her text. Haraway was arguing at the time within feminist debates that struggled with redefinitions of what it means to be a woman, and with the power structures through which the social dominance of men was implemented. By some feminist critics, technology was regarded as one of these structures. Haraway sought to argue against this interpretation, and for an embrace by women of technology in general, and the figure of the cyborg in particular:

The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.⁹⁴

Together with the concept of the bachelor-machine which Deleuze and Guattari adopted from Michel Carrouges, and the notion of “becoming-woman,” first introduced by Guattari in the 1970s and elaborated together with Deleuze in Mille Plateaux, Haraway’s notion of the cyborg as a transgender figure opens up Stelarc’s project to the discussion of its gender aspects.⁹⁵ The elision of the gender issue from Stelarc’s discourse may be taken as a symptom of the gender coding of technology. But in a more strategic sense it could also be taken as a pointer for the question that Stelarc implicitly raises regarding the status of the male body. The Stelarc body is not a heroic masculine figure but deficient and rather “helpless,” in constant need of support.

Scenarios for Encapsulated Bodies

Echoing a central dogma of scientific management, Stelarc once remarked: “We have to design bodies to match our machines.” His own artistic contributions to the relationship between humans, machines, and the environment are, as we have seen, not without historical precedent, either in scientific, technical, or theoretical terms. The association with developments in air and space flight, and the concomitant realization of certain unfavorable “technical” deficiencies of the human body, epitomized in the Event for Support Structure, point us toward a whole series of scenarios for body encapsulations, proposed by such different authors as the suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, the artist and critic of cybernetics Oswald Wiener, and media theoretician Vilém Flusser. These conceptions are neither precursors, nor alternatives, nor complements to Stelarc’s own work, but they can serve as external reference or sounding points which help to both contextualize and rethink the Stelarc body as realized not only in his discursive practice but also in projects like the Stomach Sculpture, Parasite, the Suspension pieces, or Movatar.⁹⁶

An early twentieth-century model for the new human body and a fantasy about a body-machine assemblage was put forward by the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich in a text written in 1920, entitled God Is Not Cast Down.⁹⁷ Malevich ranks among the key figures of the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s and is famous for the invention of suprematism and for painting the icon of that exclusive art movement, the Black Square. Unlike the constructivists, e.g., Tatlin, Rodchenko and Stepanova, with their belief in political and social utilitarianism, Malevich held on to an autonomous and spiritual conception of art. This he explained in a number of writings, among which was the text under consideration here, God Is Not Cast Down. This text was published as a brochure in 1922 when Malevich was head of the art school in Vitebsk and formed, at the time, part of a heated debate about the role of art in the new, postrevolutionary Soviet society.

In the 40-page essay, Malevich, in his typical meandering style, speaks about the role of art in a society that used to be dominated by religion and is now increasingly under the rule of industrialization. The three key topics of his discourse are “art,” “church,” and “factory,” and his main aim is a reconciliation of the concept of “God” with the experience of modernization.

Of particular interest in our context are two sections toward the end that deal with the transformation of the human body through technology. In section 30, Malevich lets “the factory” speak as follows: “I redesign the world and its body; I change the consciousness of Man.”⁹⁸ The factory assumes God’s omniscience and eventually becomes the mouthpiece of God himself: “I will open Man’s eyes and ears and will let his speech resound in many spaces, I will build up the technique of his body in a perfect model. … After all, the world is only a failed technical attempt by God, which I will now bring to perfect completion.”⁹⁹

Modern industrialization was understood at the time to bring about a fundamental transformation of both the social and the physiological organization of human life. Studies of scientific management, closely related to the Taylorist factory system, were in full swing. Here the adaptation of the human body to machines for the sake of production efficiency was not science fiction but science.

Malevich connects these ideas about the industrial transformation of the human body to his argument about the emergence of a new conception of humans. Whereas the Christian church had sought to save the soul by separating it from the body, thus making the soul immortal, the factory—in Malevich’s conception—reverses the body-soul relationship, ignoring the human soul altogether and instead turning the body of the human worker into the soul of the machine system:

[The factory] prepares a new body for man as spiritual power and the result will resemble the man that the church divides into body and soul. An armored weapon, an automobile, represents a small example of what I have been saying. If a man sitting in it is still separate from it, it is because his particular body that man has put on cannot fulfil all functions. The man himself, as a technical organ, can fulfil all the functions necessary for his soul, and therefore the soul lives within him and leaves him when the functions are no longer fulfilled. If an automobile could perfectly fulfil all man’s needs he would never leave it. The features of the latter are found at a larger scale: for example, the hydroplane—air and water are united in it, and when everything has been [technically] provided for, man will leave his new body no more. … Thus the factory and industrial plant intend to lead man to a new mechanical empire, changing his body, as well as his soul in a new set of clothes or tools; in that empire man can be imagined to exist in the form that the soul is imagined to exist in the human body today.¹⁰⁰

Malevich describes a technical apparatus that, like an automobile or an airplane, encapsulates the human body and forms a complete prosthetic shell for the body, one that, ideally, man would never have to leave again. Malevich’s text remains oblique as regards the adaptive changes that the human body would have to undergo, but we can assume that he had Gastev’s methods in mind, which were developed at the Central Labor Institute in Moscow, founded in 1920, the same year Malevich was writing his text.

A similar device—not a vehicle this time, but one whose sole purpose is to fully contain a human body and, over time, to gradually take over the body and mind of its inhabitant—was imagined in the mid-1960s by the Austrian artist-philosopher Oswald Wiener with his idea of the “Bio-Adapter.” At the time, Wiener was a leading member of the Vienna-based “Wiener Gruppe” of artists, while his day job from 1958 to 1966 was in data processing for the Italian office machine and computer company Olivetti.¹⁰¹

Wiener’s 1966 text—presented as a fragment, or work in progress, in its first publication of 1969—describes different functional and theoretical aspects of the Bio-Adapter, how it constructs certain experiences and how it, for instance, deals with unavoidable temporary failures. The description, grounded by a humor that oscillates between irony and sarcasm, singles out certain experiences as conducive to adaptation, namely ecstasies, and sexual ecstasies in particular, to whose induction Wiener devotes a specially long and detailed section. The Bio-Adapter is described as a “happiness suit” (“Glücks-Anzug”), and likened to an artificial “uterus.” It is there to counteract deficiencies both of the rapport between the human individual and its environment, and of the psychic makeup of the human subject itself:

It is [the Bio-Adapter’s] purpose to supersede the world. That means it will take over the heretofore inadequate function of the “existing environment” as transmitter and receiver of vital messages (nourishment and entertainment, metabolism and intellectual exchange), and will be more appropriate for its individualized task than was the so-called natural environment which was common to “everybody” and which is now obsolete.¹⁰²

The following description of the deficient human being sounds similar to descriptions that Stelarc has repeatedly given to justify the technical improvements of the obsolete body. Wiener writes:

Outside of its adapter, the human being is an abandoned, nervously activated and miserably equipped lump of slime (in terms of language, logic, thinking power, sensory organs, tools), shaken by the fear of life and petrified by the fear of death. After putting on its bio-complement, the human becomes a sovereign entity which no longer needs to cope with the cosmos and its conquest, because it now ranges distinctly higher than the cosmos in the hierarchy of possible valences.¹⁰³

Thus, the Bio-Adapter is placed “between the insufficient cosmos and the unsatisfied human.”¹⁰⁴

The gradual adaptation of the human “bio-body” to the Bio-Adapter takes place in several stages. In a first phase, the Bio-Adapter simulates the living environment that the inhabitant is acquainted with through a variety of visual, auditory, and tactile interfaces. Gradually, in the second phase, the old body functions are taken over by the Adapter and replaced by modules that can generate experiences much more suited to the wishes and desires of the inhabitant. “Mechanical aggregates become unnecessary and are dismantled by the adapter and converted, or transferred to the storage (where the cell tissues of the bio-body are also kept). … Gradual sucking up of the cell organization by the electronic circuit complexes of the adapter.”¹⁰⁵ In this second phase of the adaptation, the goal is not simplification but improvement, complexity, and expansion of the consciousness of the inhabitant—who is alternatively referred as the “patient,” “inmate,” or “bio-module.”

Wiener’s text is a fantasy about a fully cybernated human body—pushing to the limits ideas of a complete replacement of the natural living environment by a highly individualized and simulated virtual world. “Consciousness,” the text says, “becomes the self of the environment.”¹⁰⁶ In the fiction of the Bio-Adapter, the data-processing machine enables the explosion of human consciousness—which itself is the limiting capsule¹⁰⁷—up to the point where the cyberneticized, expanded consciousness becomes self-contained.¹⁰⁸

Since its inception in the 1960s, the concept of the Bio-Adapter has been used and modified for a number of science fiction narratives. But whereas these mostly presume an extreme form of exploitation of the human body by alien or enemy entities, Oswald Wiener’s Bio-Adapter is conceived as a form of improvement of an otherwise deficient human body.

This of course reminds us of a trope that Stelarc frequently brings up in his discourse: the idea of the physiological and ecological deficiency of the human body, hence the necessity of its technical improvement—however preliminary and hypothetical the improvements may be that Stelarc himself implements on his own body. Stelarc develops a comparable fantasy when he describes the vision of a “skin” that, similar to the Bio-Adapter system, completely evacuates and replaces the body:

When I first looked at alternative anatomies for the body, I speculated about engineering a synthetic skin. It would be quite plausible to make a membrane permeable to oxygen so you could breathe through your skin. And if the skin also possessed some sophisticated photosynthetic capabilities, then it could produce nutrients for the body. So simply through a change of the skin, we could radically hollow out the human body. … And a hollow body would be a better host for all the technological components you could pack into it!¹⁰⁹

Images of such encapsulated bodies had been around ever since the nineteenth century, inspired by—at times speculative—submarines and diving suits, cars, airplanes, and space travel. A number of such examples featured, for instance, in Richard Hamilton’s 1955 exhibition “Man Machine and Motion,” where they still affirmed an autonomous individual, not a hollow but a full body, as the user or pilot. The same was the case for the automobile envisaged by Malevich which the driver would never leave, if all his needs were perfectly fulfilled by the vehicular capsule, and, in a different context, for the caravans that architectural theorist Reyner Banham hypostasized as a new standard of modern housing.¹¹⁰

Even in a short text that the German theoretician of information Max Bense wrote in 1970 about the relation of the automobile and the individual, the integrity of the piloting subject is ultimately preserved, even though it comes dangerously close to fusing with the vehicle.¹¹¹ The tendency toward fusion begins with the fact that at least the German language affords that “that which drives” can be either the human I or the car. Moreover, the car becomes increasingly receptive to dialoguing with human intelligence. The most important aspect of this coupling, however, is the gradual adaptation of the human driver to the car: “at some point, everything seems to be happening all by itself … I and the car increasingly merge into an almost surreal automat.”¹¹² In the course of the process of driving, “there’s almost a new form of existence that has been created: a machine analog to consciousness, a car analogous to the ‘I’, a perfect human-machine team, an existential partnership between disruptions and fear, between machinic actions and human reactions, between signals and impulses, between noises and decisions.”¹¹³ But, alas, sixty years after Marinetti’s ecstatic accident, Bense is careful to reduce speed in time: “But when the moment of the highest speed has arrived, realizing the perfect balance between precision and security, this difficult reflection has to be broken off. So we break it off. Becoming slower, the I discovers that it simultaneously sits and drives.”¹¹⁴

In contrast to such speculations which, despite their daring speed, maintained an affirmative concept of the conscious subject in control of gears and steering wheel, the evacuation of the body shell that Stelarc would perform from the late 1970s onward had begun ten years earlier in the prospectus of the Bio-Adapter, and, around the same time, in the erosive language of the American poet William Burroughs, whose imagined fighter pilot loses the self that Bense’s car driver manages to recover:

Consider the is of identity. When I say to be me, to be you, to be myself, to be others—whatever I may be called upon to be or to say that I am—I am not the verbal label “myself.” The word be in the English language contains, as a virus contains, its precoded message of damage, the categorical imperative of permanent condition. To be a body, to be an animal. If you see the relation of a pilot to his ship, you see crippling force of the reactive mind command to be a body. Telling the pilot to be the plane, then who will pilot the plane?¹¹⁵

Such images of desubjectivation come to a head, just ten years later, in a text entitled “Toward a Map of the Body” (“Leibkarte”), in which the media theoretician Vilém Flusser develops the idea of a model of the human body.¹¹⁶ The purpose of this cybernetic model is to describe aspects of the relation between the body, the world, and the self, and to raise a number of questions regarding, for example, sensory perception, inside and outside, the body as a medium, the status of the Self, and death. This is how Flusser describes the basic features of the model of the “body map”:

Imagine a hollow sphere whose hollow space is tiny in comparison with its overall volume. This hollow sphere pulsates (whether it pulsates rhythmically or not shall remain open for now). The very thick walls of the sphere are organized with a high degree of complexity, and this organization of the walls is in question. The sphere exists in a context and finds itself in a feedback relationship with that context: the context partly flows into the sphere’s wall, partly the sphere’s wall expels secretions which coagulate as context. The context itself disperses toward the horizon, from which it is, however, set apart. This model can now be labeled: the hollow space in the sphere can be labeled as “myself” (or as “nothing”), the sphere’s wall as “my body,” the context as “my world,” and the horizon as “my death” or as “nothing,” or it can remain unlabeled. The purpose of the model is to serve as a coordinate system of my body experience.¹¹⁷

Flusser goes on to apply the model to different aspects of the human body and its interactions with the world. The deliberately reductive model makes it possible for him to think about and, in his own formulation, to think through the body. Five aspects of Flusser’s concept of the “body map” stand out and can also be posed as questions about the Stelarc body.

First, there is a distinction in German between two notions of the body: between Körper and Leib. Its relevance becomes clear when we compare the English version of Flusser’s text with the slightly later German version. The title of the German version of the text takes the term Leibkarte for the English “map of the body.” The term Leib refers to the living, conscious or soulful body, a body that is alive and, depending whether the term is used in theological or philosophical contexts, endowed with a soul or with consciousness. This understanding of Leib differs from the notion of Körper which implies an understanding of the body that is more neutral and objectifying. In the earlier, English version of the text, Flusser used the word “body,” so the fact that in the German version he chose the term Leib rather than the more neutral Körper indicates that he conceived of the body here modeled in the map as a Leib, i.e., as a conscious or soulful body.¹¹⁸

Second, Flusser’s conception of the body as medium introduces media-theoretical, epistemological, and ontological considerations about the status of perception and agency. This theme is closely connected, thirdly, to the distinction between the inside and the outside of the body, its relation to the world, and the porosity of the boundary between the body and its context or environment. The fourth aspect relates to the fact that Flusser suggests that the small hollow space, the void at the center of the model sphere, can be labeled as “myself” or as “nothing.” The question of the Self plays an important role in his interpretation of the model, and it is, I would suggest, also a very important question to ask of the Stelarc body. Who or what is it that would say “I” with regard to the Stelarc body? And is this Self continuous across the different performances, interventions, and extensions? Finally, Flusser discusses the notion of Death, and how it is built into the model—a theme that Stelarc at least at one point brushed away, musing about the relativity of death and how dysfunctional parts of the human body might be “not repaired but replaced.”¹¹⁹

Interestingly, Flusser does not relate the body map, the Leibkarte, to technological aspects, but uses the model only to discuss the human body in relation to the world in general. In a book about the development of technical images that he published in the mid-1980s, soon after the presumable date of writing the text on the body map, Flusser speaks elaborately about the relation between the human body and media interfaces, especially those used in the creation of electronic images and texts. The following quotation presents a critical, rather dystopian vision of the way human bodies might evolve in relation to technical media:

The scenario, the fable which I want to propose is this: humans will sit, each to him- or herself, in cells, they will play on keyboards with their fingertips, stare at tiny screens, and they will receive, modify, and send images. Behind their backs, robots will be bringing things to maintain and propagate their atrophied bodies. The humans will be connected to each other through their fingertips and will thus form a dialogical network, a cosmic superbrain, whose function it will be to put improbable situations into images by means of calculation and computation, and to bring about information and catastrophes. Switched between the humans will be artificial intelligences which dialogue with the humans through cables or similar nerve cords. It will therefore be functionally meaningless to want to distinguish between “natural” and “artificial” intelligences (between “primate brains” and “second brains”). The whole thing will function as a cybernetically controlled, indecomposable system: a black box.

The mood there will be reminiscent of what we experience in our most creative moments. The mood of excess, of adventure, of orgasm.¹²⁰

The ambivalence of these descriptions, which are typical of Flusser’s prose and which are deliberately nonmoralistic, may remind us of the moral ambivalence that Stelarc conveys when he speaks about his performance scenarios and contraptions that seem to oscillate between pleasure and pain, between scientific experiment, torture rack, and orgasmatron. Yet unlike Flusser’s fable of interconnected and artificially enhanced human cell inhabitants, and unlike Wiener’s fictitious concept of the Bio-Adapter, Stelarc’s contraptions are real, and they maintain a realistic conception of the human body as technological platform.

Apparently, there are neither direct references nor traceable connections between the proposals for encapsulated bodies by Malevich, Oswald Wiener, Bense, Burroughs, Flusser, and Stelarc. Each of the authors appears to have arrived at the respective models on his own trajectory, which suggests that such an encapsulation and evacuation of the human body is part of the repertoire of the technoculture of the twentieth century, like the automaton (the machine that mimics a human being), the dehumanizing mega-machine (devoid of all humane aspects), or the cyborg (the fused human-machine entity).

Seiko Mikami: The Body-Apparatus of Perception

The cybernetic conception of the human body resulted in visions not only of its hollowing out and its disappearance, but also of its segmentation. As an extreme opposite to the body without organs, the cybernetic body can be described as an assemblage of individual organs or parts. This organicity was, for instance, developed in models of vision of second-order cybernetics, from around 1960, that describe the construction of the observer and the world that he or she perceives.¹²¹ As an alternative to the generalized questioning of the status of the body in the work of Stelarc, we can turn to projects by the Japanese artist Seiko Mikami which have addressed not the whole body but individual senses, coupled to their respective intra- and extracorporeal environments through feedback systems.

The aspect of sensory perception is conspicuously absent from Stelarc’s work. In his performances, “the body” is moved, watched, amplified, and invaded, but it is not considered as a watching, listening, or otherwise sensing body—eyes and mouth are, quite literally, sewn shut. This omission is consistent with Stelarc’s quest to hollow out the body: a perceiving body could be one that opens itself to reflection, and thus to emergent forms of consciousness and subjectivation—a feedback loop that Stelarc deliberately rules out. Yet by the same token his hollow body remains a whole body; it becomes part of heterogeneous body-machine assemblages, but it is not itself segmented into parts.

Research into the perceptual “apparatus” of living beings and its experimental segmentation was crucial for the modern reconceptualization of human subjectivity, and not only since the famous analysis of a frog’s visual perception by a group of Macy cyberneticians in the late 1950s.¹²² Ever since the research into perception of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, human perception has been conceived in such technical and constructivist frameworks—a research which not least led, as described by Jonathan Crary, to applications of photographic and chronophotographic media that would form an essential basis for the physiological research of scientific management.¹²³

Marshall McLuhan spoke of media as “extensions of man,” and considered these both as mechanical extensions of the human body and its limbs and as extensions of the perceptual faculties. Beyond McLuhan’s conception of such prosthetic media which extend an integral body, the coupling of “media” and “bodies” also implies an invasion of the technological into the body, or rather a cybernetic transformation of what we understand as the body through a recoding of its physiological functions as technical, or rather techno-logical, functions. The assemblages of perception by artists like Seiko Mikami and Ulrike Gabriel couple specific parts of the human perceptual apparatuses to technical systems and interfaces for visual and sonic display. They produce particular types of perception and open up reflections about how cognition and subjectivation are transformed by technically enhanced perceiving bodies.

The senses are, phenomenologically, always already a coupling of outside and inside: seeing means to see something, and by analogy hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting form the sensations of things outside the body.¹²⁴ Importantly, these sensations occur inside the body, so they belong, at the same time, inside and outside. Their reality, or rather efficacy (or operationality), is determined by the physiological and cognitive conditions under which the sense perception is made. A smell is, at the same time, the smell of an object, and it is a sensation that is, in this particular form, only experienced by a particular body. This dual, paradoxical structure forms the basis of subjectivation.¹²⁵

The Japanese installation artist Seiko Mikami realized several projects that proposed scenarios for extending and transforming the perceptual range of the human body, most importantly two installations that are based on the mediated observation of different aspects of perception: Molecular Informatics—Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking (1996–2011) investigated the sense of seeing and the intuitive movements of the eye, while the project World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body (1997) focused on the sense of hearing and on internal body sounds.¹²⁶

In Molecular Informatics, the visitor dons a set of virtual reality glasses which are equipped with an eye-tracking device that records the movements of the pupils (figure 5.14, plate 13). These movements are translated, in near real time, into visualizations which are displayed by the head-mounted display. The user can see the traces of his or her own eye movement, observing his or her own act of looking, visualized as animated lines and shapes, like molecular chains probing into the depth of a virtual space. A number of factors, like direction and speed of the eyes’ movement, determine the movement and direction of the molecular objects in the virtual space. During exhibitions, the animation that the visitor sees in the head-mounted display is also shown in a large-size projection for the gallery audience, offering them the opportunity to observe the traces of the user’s visual perception.

Figure 5.14 Seiko Mikami, Molecular Informatics—Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking, Ver. 2 (1996). Coproduced with Canon ARTLAB. Photo by Jan Sprij. Courtesy of V2_Organisation, Rotterdam.

Through the visual feedback of the trace of the eye movement displayed in the virtual space, the gaze is involuntarily led to look “back,” to look at what it regards as its own trace. As the Japanese philosopher Sabu Kohso has observed in his essay on Molecular Informatics: “In this seeing/production of the virtual space, what is truly exposed is the uncontrollability of one’s own gaze—perhaps the most severe part of the ordeal. Indeed as a crucial lesson, the work reveals gaze, will and spirit, namely, the symbols of human intentionality, as something passive, something that is always affected by internal (corporeal) as well as external (circumstantial) conditions rather than actively affecting itself.”¹²⁷

The installation visualizes and externalizes, it creates a dynamic image of attention and awareness, and thus destroys the assumed natural congruence of will and perception, of perceptual intention and control.

Mikami develops a similarly deconstructive setting for the sense of hearing in the installation World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body. Here the participant is seated in an anechoic chamber. By means of acoustic sensors, his or her heartbeat and pulse are tracked and acoustically recorded by a computer system. These sounds are then played back through a loudspeaker system in the chamber, so that the body hears its own internal sounds, with a slight delay, from a source outside the body. While the sounds are first played back without modification, a software running on the computer system gradually introduces changes, delays, drops, amplifications, accelerations, etc. to the digitized sound material. World, Membrane turns the resonant inside space of the body into a part of its external world. What initially appeared to be a straightforward externalization of internal sounds turns into a reinterpretation, even a reinvention of the acoustic potential of the body’s interior, plunging the participant into the gap between self and perception.¹²⁸

In both Molecular Informatics and World, Membrane, the technical installation has no autonomous agency; it is an apparatus, a tool for visualization, sonification, and the programmed modification of perceptual events. The installation externalizes body functions and constructs the body as segmented, as an assemblage that is a distribution of physiological processes and sensations, disjointed from an inhabiting self.

Seiko Mikami’s works are strictly interactive in that they use and factor current perceptual and sensor data, creating feedback loops of seeing, hearing, and sensing, folding what is being perceived, back onto the act of perception. They construct the body as part of a distributed interactive system, a cybernetic apparatus with a certain set of functions and describable characteristics which can be mapped from one surface (body, sensors) to another (visual projections, sounds). As though they were experiments continuing those on frog vision, and toward Oswald Wiener’s Bio-Adapter, these works by Seiko Mikami investigate not the flesh body but its perceptual apparatus and the self-reflexive construction of a world.

Kohso interprets Mikami’s work as an exposition of a phenomenological event in which the technological setting allows the observation of the construction of the self, “the mechanism itself as to how the self is formed in the process of seeing: … [Molecular Informatics should] be read as a work which tells us how technology and the self have always/already been interacting with each other to form our cultural apparatus. This work points to a realm where the self and technology are not yet completely separated, forming a drive to construct something unknown; we do not know when it started, but we do know that the drive of this apparatus cannot be stopped.”¹²⁹

Kohso then (somewhat idiosyncratically) introduces the concept of the “body without organs” and thus points to the radicality of Mikami’s project, which suggests that the human self is only conceivable as a flickering in the technological dispositive that the perceiving mind, technical apparatus, and the object of perception form: “All of these networks [brain/retina, information networks] are part of the one whole body at the same time that each of them assumes the others to be its bodies without organ.”¹³⁰ In conclusion, Kohso claims, “in Mikami’s work, the artist Seiko Mikami is just another machine, in the same way as we, the audience, are just perception machines.”¹³¹

Jonathan Crary has analyzed the beginnings of this machining of the human body in the nineteenth century, the period when “the body, including the observing body, [became] a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological. … Subjectivity [became] a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information.”¹³² Consequently, Mikami herself imagines a joint exhibition of her works that deal with the different human senses as “a museum (or even a mausoleum) of perception. But it is really a ‘ghost house’ (or an enclave of Geist) of perception.”¹³³

A McLuhanesque, subject-affirming media prosthesis that stands in relation to Mikami’s desubjectifying sound space as Bense’s driver does to Burroughs’s pilot is the Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Personal Instrument (1969). It consists of some lightweight instruments that can be strapped to the head, the arms, and the hands of a user: a microphone component that is worn on the forehead, two earphones, and two gloves equipped with photosensitive cells (figure 5.15).¹³⁴ The sounds recorded by the microphone can either be played back directly by the earphones, or manipulated through audio filters which are controlled by the signals from the photo cells. By opening and closing the hands, moving them toward or away from light sources, the user can thus determine how much of the environmental sounds are emitted by the earphones. Fifteen years before Hosokawa’s diagnosis of the “Walkman Effect,”¹³⁵ the Personal Instrument allowed the user—which in Wodiczko’s case was only the artist himself—to isolate himself from an environment of offensive sounds.¹³⁶ Unlike Mikami’s World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body, this was a mobile and wearable contraption whose acoustic behavior and effects could be fully controlled by the user. The Personal Instrument thus affirmed rather than questioned the boundaries of an individual’s body and the perceiving self.

Figure 5.15 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal Instrument (1969–1972). Photo by Jerzy Surwiło, Warsaw 1972. Courtesy of Profile Foundation, Warsaw, and the artist.

The concept of transgression, which was so important in Mikami’s Molecular Informatics and its visualization of the constructive aspect of visual perception, was also explored by the German artist Ulrike Gabriel in her project Perceptual Arena (1993). This interactive installation used a head-mounted display that showed an abstract virtual world composed of multiple polygons. This virtual environment could be navigated by means of a data glove and a tracker that translated movements of the head into movements in the virtual space. Intensive exploration of a specific part of the virtual environment led to the growth and differentiation of the polygons in that area, whereas a lack of attention and superficial glances were translated by the system into the withering and ultimately the disappearance of the corresponding elements.¹³⁷

The position of the subject is reduced to the source of the gaze whose moment of reflexivity is that of a vectorial, visual projection into the virtual space. Viewed in terms of their projective potential, works like those by Mikami and Gabriel make it possible to imagine the trajectory of a “bio-mediated body” as considered by philosopher Patricia Clough, a trajectory that leads from the medial extension of the senses beyond the body as organism, toward a corporeal affectivity without a subject.¹³⁸

Deconstructing the Body

When he was invited, in 1993, to create a site-specific work for the Sculpture Biennial in Sydney, Stelarc proposed the realization of the Stomach Sculpture project, for which a metal capsule was inserted with a tube into the stomach of the artist. The idea was to show that the body was not the integral and impenetrable home of a human consciousness and subjectivity, but that its inside was just another site that could be used for different purposes, like for the presentation of an artwork.¹³⁹ Consequently, in 2005 Stelarc realized a project together with Nina Sellars, entitled Blender, for which both artists underwent liposuction and thus had different types of body tissue removed, which was subsequently mixed and put on display in a sculpture with a transparent glass sphere. The work questions the integrity of the body and the identitarian relationship which is usually associated with the body as a whole. While the Involuntary Body performances reflected on the functionality of the body, and Stomach Sculpture speculated about its spatiality and the tenability of a claim to interiority, Blender raises the question of the materiality of the human body.¹⁴⁰

Stelarc’s performances and projects radically question the human body as a site of agency and identity, and thus constitute one extreme of the relationship between the human body and technology. Control over the body is suspended and passed over to a technical system that is, within a range of possible impulses, both unintentional and unpredictable.

Another extreme position in the field of human-machine relations is marked by Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca project, in the course of which the Belgian artist built a number of installations that emulate the process of human digestion (figure 5.16). The project was under development from around 1992, and the first operational version was exhibited in 2000. It consists of a 10-meter-long installation whose central feature is a series of transparent glass containers which are placed in a row on 130-centimeter-high metal tables, and which are serially connected by plastic tubes. At one end of this row is a metal ladder that leads up to a platform from which food can be thrown into a first container. At the other end of the row is an apparatus that ejects the digested material in the form of a sausage from a rounded metal pipe. From here, the allantoid material drops onto a round sheet of metal that is turned by a motor, forming a moving display for what looks and smells like feces. The different glass containers are equipped with additional plastic pipes through which various chemicals and bacteria are added to the material as it travels through the different stages of this digestive process.¹⁴¹

Figure 5.16 Wim Delvoye, Cloaca Original (2000), 1157 × 78 × 270 cm, installation view, MUHKA, Antwerp. Copyright © the artist.

The problem of the terminology that can be used for describing the Cloaca installation points to the project’s core issue: what is the relation of this machine-based process to the process of human digestion? It is probably best described as an emulation, because what we can observe is the transformation of food into feces as it happens in the human body, and not a simulation—which would imply an abstraction and reduction of complexity. But is the resulting material “feces,” a term that is normally used for the excrement of living beings?

An important part of the public exhibition of Cloaca is the recurring moment when the machine is “fed,” i.e., when food is put into the machine to start another digestive process. The mix of foodstuff used for this is modeled on the normal diet of a human being. At times, these feeding sessions have been done routinely by gallery staff; at other times they have been celebrated as cooking and feeding performances with internationally renowned chefs.

The overall aesthetics of the project draws on a combination of the scientific laboratory, an industrial production line, and consumer culture. This combination is also reflected by the Cloaca logo designed for the project, which is a cross between the blue and ellipsoid logo of the Ford motor company and the wavy typography of Coca-Cola.¹⁴² In all models of the installation, the mechanisms are visible as the liquids and materials are held and moved along in transparent vessels and tubes. Importantly, the installation effuses a strong smell of feces which punctuates the voyeurism that the work elicits.¹⁴³

The technical drawings that accompany the installations show how specific physiological functions are mapped onto technical appliances, using details like chemical formulas, overall amounts, and throughput. The machine is thus mimetically coupled to the human body and its functions. The goal of the installation is not the efficient production of feces, in which case Delvoye could have looked for alternative methods. Instead, the project insists on anthropomorphic authenticity and puts the process of human digestion on display as a process that can also be performed by a technical apparatus.

But can we say that, unlike Vaucanson’s duck, this machine really shits? Christian Denker has described the process as both a “simulation” and an “imitation of biological processes,”¹⁴⁴ while Isabelle Loring Wallace writes that “what the Cloaca machines show us, at considerable expense and labor, is not digestion, but digestion’s facsimile, not shit, but shit’s representation.”¹⁴⁵ An important criterion for Denker is that Delvoye’s machine mimics only part of the functions of the human organs, while others—like the primary function of nourishing and providing energy—are lacking.¹⁴⁶

The psychological situation constructed by the exhibition of the Cloaca is particularly awkward in cultures in which the inspection of feces is a highly intimate act, if not altogether taboo.¹⁴⁷ It happens between parents and children, and possibly between carers and patients, and is a sign of the neediness of the person whose feces is being inspected. At the same time, the feces can give important indications about the conditions of health of the body, which make it a potential source of information for regulatory feedback mechanisms, like the need for medication or for changing the diet. As Kati Simon has remarked: “The work requires constant care … as if an actual human being were present. Cloaca can thus be seen as a cyborg, a hybrid form between man and machine.”¹⁴⁸ This analysis in terms of the concept of the cyborg may not be rigorous, but it is a symptom for the way in which Cloaca constructs a particular reaction by a human observer toward technology. According to curator Dan Cameron, Cloaca is “sort of frightening and funny, and it also stimulates deep anthropomorphic attachments. I know that the staff now refers to Cloaca as a baby—a large infant that needs care. It needs feeding, and we are concerned about its bowel movements because those are equated with the health of the museum.”¹⁴⁹

Such descriptions point to a posthuman provocation that echoes the Cartesian doubt: is the human body itself a shitting machine? Once again, anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism are twin descriptions of a representational situation in which human organism and machine are inseparably modeled on each other. The crucial effect is that of a symbolic emptying out of the human body that becomes a mere microbiological environment. As Delvoye put it: “For me, it’s life. This is a human being without a soul.”¹⁵⁰ This “human being without a soul” is a cyborgian successor of the obsolete and hollow body propagated by Stelarc. It is not a body without organs, but rather an organicity without a body.

Even in such negations, the human subject inhabiting a sensing flesh body remains the main point of reference, and the potential source of meaning—even for Cloaca’s virtual feces. This reference point is at least hypothetically shifted toward a machine subject in Stelarc’s Movatar project, in which the human body acts as a mere interface for a virtual entity—much like Sternfeld’s telematic Android robotic arm installed on a hypothetical spaceship on its way to Mars.

Similarly, the fictitious artificial intelligence Huge Harry, conceived by the Dutch artist Arthur Elsenaar and media theoretician Remko Scha, uses Elsenaar’s face as an interface to express emotions which make it easier for the human observers to relate to this otherwise immaterial form of existence (figure 5.17). The work is technically based on the electrical excitation of the facial muscles, famously explored by the nineteenth-century neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne. The electrocution of Elsenaar’s facial muscles causes them to twitch involuntarily and brings forth a variety of both yet-natural and rather unnatural grimaces. Of the examples discussed here, Elsenaar goes the furthest in questioning the sovereign integrity of the human body. His performances are theatrical in that the interaction with the machine is a simulation of what it pretends to be: the technical system is preprogrammed to activate certain areas of the face, while a prepared text is read out by a text-to-speech system. The possibility of how that interaction between the machine and the human interface might develop if it was in fact driven by an independent agency—maybe comparable to the Ping Body scenario proposed by Stelarc—is left to speculation.¹⁵¹

Figure 5.17 Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha, Huge Harry: “Toward a Digital Computer with a Human Face” (2000), lecture performance, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Photo by Josephine Jasperse. Courtesy of Arthur Elsenaar.

Works like those by Stelarc, Delvoye, or Mikami have at times been criticized for lacking critical edge and being overly affirmative toward the technological scenarios that they present. Such a critique may be justified in individual cases or contexts, but on the whole they reflect positions rather similar to the analyses of the posthuman condition conveyed by critics like Rosi Braidotti or Patricia Clough. The artistic explorations of the changing relation between the human body and technology might therefore be seen in the tradition of Heinrich von Kleist’s text on the puppet theater, where the solution of the aesthetic crisis of representation, rather than being sought in some nostalgic backtracking, is projected forward into a new theatrical primitivism; or it may be seen as following in Haraway’s appraisal of the cyborg—which “is our ontology and gives us our politics.”

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted material are by the author.

1. Remote Controlled Suspension by Stelarc, MOCA Brisbane, Australia, 9 August 1987; see Mic Gruchy, Stelarc—Psycho Cyber, broadcast documentary, Australia, 1996, min. 11:09–13:06. For discussions of Stelarc’s work, see especially the essays in Marquard Smith, ed., Stelarc: The Monograph (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), and Joanna Zylinska, ed., The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (London: Continuum, 2002).

2. Jules Offray de La Mettrie, L’Homme machine (1748; Paris: Fayard, 1984).

3. Comment made at “Stelarc: 2013: The Science of Stelarc” conference, Curtain University, Perth, Australia, June 19, 2013.

4. See Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), and Bodies in Code: Interfaces with New Media (London: Routledge, 2006); Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006); Marie-Luise Angerer, Desire after Affect (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014).

5. Munster, Materializing New Media, 3; see Munster’s discussions on Stelarc (133–136), Arthur Elsenaar’s machinc alter ego Huge Harry (136–138), and David Rokeby’s interactive system VNS (118–120).

6. In one instance, Hobijn’s “suicide machine” was presented alongside an Amplified Body performance by Stelarc at the V2_Organisation’s The Body in Ruin manifestation in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, in 1993.

7. See Rosemarie Brucher, Subjektermächtigung und Naturunterwerfung. Künstlerische Selbstverletzung im Zeichen von Kants Ästhetik des Erhabenen (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), for detailed analyses of the respective work phases and projects of Stelarc and Valie Export, especially on acts of self-injury in performance art, which Brucher analyzes with regard to the Kantian concept of the “dynamic sublime.”

8. Event for Stretched Skin and Third Hand, Ofuna, Japan, 29 May 1988; see Gruchy, Stelarc—Psycho Cyber, min. 13:05–14:30.

9. Stelarc, Third Hand, accessed January 7, 2014, http://stelarc.org/?catID=20265

10. Stelarc had already begun using such “amplifications” in the early 1970s when he was doing suspensions with ropes and harnesses, before he did the Suspension performances with hooks in the flesh. Of these he did a total of 27 in the period from 1975 to 1988; the performance in Ofuna was the last of this series. Twenty-four years later, in 2012, Stelarc resumed the Suspension performances with an event during which his body was suspended in a gallery, and two events where multiple bodies other than his own were suspended in auditoriums.

11. Stelarc occasionally highlights the sculptural quality that sound brings to the performances, not least with regard to the intimate sounds of bones and skin; on sonic aspects of the performances see Stelarc in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 237. It is remarkable that the earlier, technically primitive Suspensions (1977 till 1988) were performed while the concepts of the Third Hand, Involuntary Body, and Amplified Body were also being developed. This chronological observation corroborates the hypothesis put forward here that there is a conceptual continuum between more or less technical, more or less physical projects in Stelarc’s oeuvre.

12. Gruchy, Stelarc—Psycho Cyber, min. 28:40–29:50.

13. Psycho/Cyber. Events for Laser Eyes and Scanning Robot, Helsinki and Den Bosch, 1993; see Gruchy, Stelarc—Psycho Cyber, min. 29:50–34:16. Stelarc first used a Scanning Robot in London in 1992.

14. While my focus here is more on the difference that is constructed between human body and robotic device, Stelarc commented on the fusion between body and robot, pointing out the “psychological and spatial collapse between the operator and the robot” (Gruchy, Stelarc—Psycho Cyber, min. 29:50–34:16). The Dutch artist Gabriel Lester used images taken by robot-mounted video cameras for his three-channel video installation Choreography (2001), which creates a similar impression of a gaze both machinic and subjective.

15. Goodall in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 22.

16. Stelarc interviewed in Gruchy, Stelarc—Psycho Cyber, min. 56:15–57:20.

17. Stelarc in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 228.

18. Stelarc, presentation at the “Stelarc: 2013: The Science of Stelarc” conference (unpublished, quotations based on author’s personal notes).

19. Kroker in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 73.

20. Ibid., 65.

21. Ibid., 79.

22. Jones in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 87–123.

23. Gruchy, Stelarc—Psycho Cyber, min. 24:20–26:00.

24. See Brian Massumi, “The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason,” in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 125–190; first published as “The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason: Stelarc,” in Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Moment, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 89–132.

25. Stelarc in Marie Ringler, “An Interview with Stelarc,” 1996, accessed January 24, 2014, http://www.t0.or.at/stelarc/interview01.htm.

26. Ibid.

27. Stelarc has referred to the body as “a biological apparatus that determines our perception of the world,” and “as both medium of experience and expression.” See Stelarc in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 215.

28. Ibid., 232.

29. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (1948; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961).

30. Stelarc in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 238.

31. Cited by Goodall in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 22.

32. Stelarc, “Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies,” Leonardo 24, no. 5 (1991): 591, 594. For a reference to the resonance between Stelarc’s practice and Günther Anders’s dystopian view on the “obsolescence of man,” see Brucher, Subjektermächtigung und Naturunterwerfung, 247. Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa’s interactive installation Gravicells (2004) also addresses the question of gravity and of human agency in an eco-technological system, though it addresses the human body not as a sculptural form but as a moving object with certain physical properties (see chapter 6 below).

33. See Jane Goodall, “Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automation,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 441–453, who discusses the transfer of agency between humans and machines and who, with Stelarc’s mid-1990s performances, suggests a transfer from local installations to networks. It might be interesting to compare Stelarc’s performance work to Bruno Munari’s Macchine inutili with their own freedom and random agency, a family of machines more free and idiosyncratic.

34. Erich Hörl and Michael Hagner, eds., Die Transformation des Humanen. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 12–13.

35. See Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi, eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body (New York: Zone Books, 1989).

36. See esp. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allan Lane/Penguin, 1977).

37. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). According to Friedrich Kittler, this utilitarian approach to human bodies is historically coupled to the emergence of technologies of intelligence: “the media revolution of 1880 … laid the groundwork for theories and practices that no longer mistake information for spirit; … so-called Man is split up into physiology and information technology.” Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 16.

38. See Claus Pias, Computer Spiel Welten (Zurich: diaphanes, 2010), 29–56, which reviews scientific management with regard to the history of computer games and the emergence of their principles from technical and scientific research. On the relationship between scientific management and cybernetics, see Norbert Wiener, “Men, Machines, and the World About,” in Iago Galdston, ed., Medicine and Science (New York, 1954), 13–28. On the relation between the conceptions of “new man,” the economy of time, montage, and visual literacy, see Bernd Stiegler, “Der montierte Mensch,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 39 (2012): 209–226.

39. See Kendall Bailes, “Aleksei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–1924,” Soviet Studies 29, no. 3 (1977): 393, fn. 70, for references to Gastev’s engagement with American scientific management research. Contemporary sources include Franciska Baumgarten, Arbeitswissenschaft und Psychotechnik in Rußland (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1924), and the report by René Fülöp-Miller, Fantasie und Alltag in Sowjet-Rußland (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1978), 47–48, from 1926. Gastev’s writings are now available in a German translation: Aleksej [Aleksei] Gastev, Poesie des Hammerschlags, ed. Hans-Christian Herrmann and Wladimir Velminski (Berlin: Kadmos, 2016).

40. Aleksei Gastev, “Nashi zadachi,” Organizatsiya truda 14, no. 1 (March 1921), trans. in Bailes, “Aleksei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy,” 384.

41. Aleksei Gastev, “0 tendentsiyakh proletarskoi kul’tury,” Proletarskoi Kul’tury, no. 43 (1919), trans. in Bailes, “Aleksei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy,” 378.

42. See Bailes, “Aleksei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy,” 387–390. The debate about the ideological impact of scientific management was fierce. As Bailes writes, Gastev’s opponents insisted that “a Soviet system of scientific management could be developed only on the basis of the class interests of the proletariat” (390). They “criticized the Central Labour Institute for its concept of ‘the narrow base’ which began by studying simple labour processes to the neglect of the more general aspects of production, and labour institutes in general for their pure experimentation and laboratory methods uncoordinated with the needs of the economy. The use of the stop watch as the sole means of determining work norms was an especially exploitative and uncritical application of Taylorism to Soviet industry. The most important problem of Soviet industry was to raise productivity without increased intensification of labour, and to raise wages in proportion to increased productivity” (389). Gastev, in contrast, “advocated nothing less than ‘Soviet Americanism,’ wanting to see Russia transformed into a ‘new, flowering America’” (385).

43. See Bailes, “Aleksei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy,” 388–393.

44. Fülöp-Miller, Fantasie und Alltag in Sowjet-Rußland, 47 (my translation).

45. Hugo Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik (Leipzig: Barth, 1914), 380, cited in Pias, Computer Spiel Welten, 33, fn. 70.

46. See La Mettrie, L’Homme machine; for Kahn see Uta von Debschitz and Thilo von Debschitz, Fritz Kahn (Cologne: Taschen, 2013). A striking example of the mechanomorphic transference between body and machine is Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalysis of Joey in “Joey, the Mechanical Boy,” Scientific American (March 1959): 3–9; see Henning Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen. Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan (Munich: Fink, 1997), 80, on Deleuze and Guattari’s references to the case, and the polemical critique of “Bettelheim’s Myth” by Stephen Thompson, “Joey the Mechanical Boy,” in The Transtechnology Reader (Plymouth University, 2010), 85–97. Another such case study is Félix Guattari’s Monographie sur R. A. (1956); see Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, 94–97. Martina Leeker, “Digitale Operativität und Performance. Geschichte der Mensch-Computer-Schnittstelle im Moment ihrer Hinterfragung, noch bevor sie anfing,” Paragrana 14, no. 2 (2005): 26–27, has suggested distinguishing between the three logics of what she calls the “anthropomorphic histories of technology”: the “anthropomorphization of technology,” the “technologization of the anthropological,” and the “strict ontological distinction between human and technology.”

47. See Jörg Bochow, Das Theater Meyerholds und die Biomechanik (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2010); Dieter Hoffmeier and Klaus Völker, eds., Werkraum Meyerhold. Zur künstlerischen Anwendung seiner Biomechanik (Berlin: Hentrich, 1995).

48. See Dirk Scheper, Oskar Schlemmer. Das triadische Ballett und die Bauhausbühne (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1988). A reconstruction of the piece was realized by Gerhard Bohner in 1977 and revived by the dancers Ivan Liška and Colleen Scott in 2014; this reconstruction has been performed internationally over a hundred times since the 1970s. For the 1926 performance in Donaueschingen, composer Paul Hindemith wrote a piece of music for a small mechanical organ (see Fred Prieberg, Musica ex machina. Über das Verhältnis von Musik und Technik [Berlin: Ullstein, 1960], 18). On the cooperation between Schlemmer and Hindemith, see Friederike Zimmermann, “Mensch und Kunstfigur.” Oskar Schlemmers intermediale Programmatik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2014), 226–245; Zimmermann offers a very detailed, somewhat lyrical but well-founded and comprehensive study of the Triadic Ballet. See also Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003): 724–745.

49. For facsimiles of drawings and typewritten notes by Schlemmer about the Triadic Ballet, probably made in 1938, see the website of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, www.moma.org.

50. Oskar Schlemmer, “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” in Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnár, eds., Die Bühne im Bauhaus, Bauhaus Bücher 4 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925), 12 (my translation).

51. Ibid., 13. On Schlemmer’s “spatial figures” (Raumfiguren), see Tom Slevin, Visions of the Human: Art, World War I and the Modernist Subject (London: Tauris, 2015).

52. Schlemmer, “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” 15.

53. Dirk Scheper, “Die Bauhausbühne,” in Magdalena Droste and Jeannine Fiedler, eds., Experiment Bauhaus (Berlin (West): Bauhaus Archiv, 1988), 251–252; see the illustrations in Andreas Hüneke, ed., Oskar Schlemmer. Idealist der Form (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990), 149–152.

54. Schlemmer in his diary, September 1922, cited in Hüneke, Oskar Schlemmer, 95. See also ibid., 102, 106–107.

55. In some publications, the illustration is erroneously reversed, so that the profile of the figure is turned to the right.

56. A photograph taken at the Bauhaus in Dessau (Raumlineatur mit Figur, 1926, photograph by T. Lux Feininger of the dancer Werner Siedhoff, reprint of 1960 at Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; see Droste and Fiedler, Experiment Bauhaus, 271, ill. 214) shows stage experiments in which such dynamic coordinate systems are represented by suspended white threads.

57. Historian of cybernetics Claus Pias, in his own reading of Rudolf von Laban’s choreographic notation system (a similar descriptive system that Schlemmer was familiar with), has pointed to the ensuing technological inscription of body movements and claims that Laban not only strove for the “establishment of a descriptive ordering system …, but for a ranging system of individual body parts [Ortungs-System einzelner Körperteile]”; see Pias, Computer Spiel Welten, 48, also for an illustration of Laban’s textual plan for describing and addressing the different body parts. Pias builds on research in Gabriele Brandstetter, Tanz-Lektüren. Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995).

58. See the 9th thesis in Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres, 2003), 392–393.

59. Kruchenykh quoted in Hubertus Froning, “El Lissitzky. Sieg über die Sonne,” in Hubertus Froning, M.-A. von Lüttichau, and G. Werthmann, eds., El Lissitzky—Sieg über die Sonne (Essen: Museum Folkwang, 2006), 32.

60. Eduard Beaucamp, “Streit der zwei Kulturen,” in Beaucamp, Das Dilemma der Avantgarde. Aufsätze zur bildenden Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 189.

61. Raoul Hausmann, “Typographie” (1932), English version: “Typography,” Design Issues 14, no. 3 (1998): 71; cited in Cornelius Borck, “‘Sound Work and Visionary Prosthetics’: Artistic Experiments in Raoul Hausmann,” Papers of Surrealism, no. 4, article 1 (Winter 2005): 17.

62. R. Hausmann, “PRÉsentismus” (1921), in Michael Erlhoff, ed., Sieg Triumph Tabak mit Bohnen, vol. 2: Texts to 1933 (Munich, 1982), 28; cited in Borck, “‘Sound Work and Visionary Prosthetics’,” 13 (trans. Borck).

63. See the illustrations in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 42 and 224–227. Note the multiplication of pipes that Stelarc holds in the images on p. 227, which alludes to the photographic technique of multiple exposures; here, however, the multiplicity of positions is not realized in time, but by an extension of the number of pipe-holding hands.

64. See illustration in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 43. For Marey, see Laurent Mannoni, Etienne-Jules Marey. La mémoire de l’oeil (Milan: Mazzotta, 1999).

65. See illustration in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 36, above. Is this another Angelus Novus?

66. See Barbara Wittmann, “Zeichnen, im Dunkeln. Psychophysiologie einer Kulturtechnik um 1900,” in Werner Busch, Oliver Jehle, and Carolin Meister, eds., Linien. Ästhetische und epistemische Dimensionen der Zeichnung (Munich: Fink, 2007), 165–186.

67. See illustration of Stelarc’s action in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 11. For the dual-handed drawing exercises (“bi-manual training”) by Liberty Tadd, see Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 35–69, and Barbara Wittmann, “Linkische und rechte Spiegelungen. Das Kind, die Zeichnung und die Geometrie,” in Wolfram Pichler and Ralph Ubl, eds., Topologie. Falten, Knoten, Netze, Stülpungen in Kunst und Theorie (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2009), 149–192.

68. See illustration in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 36, bottom.

69. Ary Sternfeld, USSR Copyright Certificate No. 67162, applied September 3, 1938, and the earlier USSR Copyright Certificate No. 57746, applied April 9, 1931; archive of the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow. Ary A. Sternfeld, “I Was Considered an Incurable Visionary …,” exh. cat. (in Russian) (Moscow: Polytechnic Museum, 2005). See also Andrey Smirnov, ed., Generation Z: Renoise. Russian Pioneers of Sound Art and Musical Technology in the Early 20th Century (Berlin: CTM Festival, 2014), 17.

70. Cited in Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 105.

71. See photo in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 101. The blur in the bottom right corner of the image seems to be a Photoshop effect.

72. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 106; see Jones in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 100–106, for a critical, perception-aesthetic reading that tries to point out inconsistencies in what Jones reads as Stelarc’s self-interpretation of this work; importantly, she seeks to prove that there is an aspect of masochism in Stelarc’s work which he himself denies.

73. See the interpretation offered by Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 70, in which he brought the intimate knowledge of Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux to bear, which he had translated into English.

74. Coincidence or not: while Stelarc was first hollowing out his body by shooting films of its inside with camera probes that he pushed into his stomach in 1973, Deleuze and Guattari published their seminal book Anti-Oedipus, in which the “body without organs” was first conceptualized. And as the two theorists put the finishing touches to the monumental sequel, Mille Plateaux (first published in 1980), Stelarc’s organless body was suspended during an Event in a Tokyo gallery. A few years later, Stelarc mobilized his suspended body in Brisbane by means of a gantry crane; just before that, Donna Haraway had published the “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985).

75. I can here offer only a brief introduction, mainly based on the exposition in Schmidgen’s Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, which also offers a thorough discussion of the concept of the “machine” in Guattari, Deleuze, and Lacan. The terminology introduced here is complex and, even in Deleuze and Guattari’s usage, not always consistent (as Massumi remarks, the notion of the “desiring-machine,” so prominent in Anti-Oedipus, was for instance widely replaced by “assemblage” in Milles Plateaux; see Massumi, A User’s Guide, 82). This also implies not jumping too fast to associations when reading Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphorically rich prose; can their “hollow depth” (Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, 35) be related to Stelarc’s notion of the “hollow body”?

76. Antonin Artaud (1948), cited in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 2004), 9.

77. Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, 29 (my translation in this and the following quotations).

78. Ibid., 30.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid., 41; cf. 30.

81. Ibid., 30.

82. Ibid., 31. I use the two different spellings to maintain the distinction between the conceptions of Carrouges (Bachelor Machine) and Deleuze and Guattari (bachelor-machine).

83. Ibid., 42.

84. With her insistence on the presence of the artist, Amelia Jones (in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph) implicitly insinuated that Stelarc’s project is that of a bachelor-machine, whereas he himself denies the aspect of subjectivity and would therefore probably settle for the notion of the wonder-machine. Elizabeth Stephens has described Stelarc as a “wonder machine” (see “Wonder Machines: The Strange Science of Stelarc,” paper presented at the conference “The Science of Stelarc,” Curtin University, Perth, Australia, June 19, 2013); however, she uses the term not like Deleuze and Guattari but in a more colloquial sense, with reference to concepts of wonder and strangeness that she borrows from Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).

85. Massumi, A User’s Guide, 85.

86. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 107.

87. Thus the formulation in the title of the chapter of this name in Mille Plateaux.

88. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 107–108.

89. Ibid., 108.

90. Ibid., 109; emphasis in the original.

91. Ibid., 105.

92. See Matthew Price, “Man Must First Conceive: A Critical Philology of the Cyborg,” unpublished manuscript, cited in Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry, no. 21 (1994): 260, fn. 82. For the technical and social figure of the cyborg, see Chris Hables-Gray, ed., The Cyborg Handbook (London: Routledge, 1995), and Antonio Caronia, The Cyborg: A Treatise on the Artificial Man (Lüneburg: meson press, 2015), which focuses on the genealogy of the cyborg in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and movies, but in the additions made to the second and third edition, after the original 1985 Italian publication, also introduces core strands of cultural-theoretical debates on the cyborg motif. For Guattari’s critique of cybernetics and Lacanian structuralism, see Schmidgen, Das Unbewußte der Maschinen, 17, 138, 163, 169. For an alternative characterization of Stelarc as “Interface Organism” (Interorg) that is neither interface, nor body without organs, nor cyborg, see Markus Hallensleben, “Vom Cyborg zum Interface Organism. Stelarcs und TC&As Extra Ear-Performance,” Paragrana 14, no. 2 (2005): 231.

93. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 180. Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy,” critically discusses Haraway’s notion of the cyborg in relation to the history of cybernetics, a critique that is somewhat marred by the fact that Galison identifies the “cybernetic Other” (264) as the enemy operator, i.e., the pilot of the enemy plane, rather than the machine.

94. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 180.

95. For the bachelor-machine, see also Hans Ulrich Reck, Jean Clair, and Harald Szeemann, eds., Junggesellenmaschinen (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1999). For a summary of the feminist debate about Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming-woman,” see Massumi, A User’s Guide, 86–89. For a more “masculinist” reading of Stelarc’s work, see Arjen Mulder and Maaike Post, Book for the Electronic Arts (Amsterdam: De Balie, 2000), 26–31, esp. 28.

96. In private conversation, Stelarc affirmed that he had not previously been aware of the conceptions by Malevich, Wiener, or Flusser discussed here (June 19, 2013). As another, nonmachinic reference example, we can think of the German artist Timm Ulrichs, who, a year before the Event for Support Structure, for his sculptural performance Der Findling (1978) had a large rock cut open and carved out so that his body would fit in the cavity, whereupon the heavy stone lid was closed again, encapsulating the artist’s body for ten hours.

97. Kazimir Malevich, “God Is Not Cast Down” (1922), in K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art, 1915–1928, vol. 1, ed. Troels Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968), 188–223. I am grateful to Alexei Kurbanovsky for pointing out this section in Malevich’s writings.

98. Malevich, “God Is Not Cast Down,” section 30, 218; the English translation of this and the following sections has been modified according to the German version in Kasimir Malevic: Gott ist nicht gestürzt! Schriften zu Kunst, Kirche, Fabrik, ed. Aage A. Hansen-Löve (Munich: Hanser, 2004), 100.

99. Ibid. (modified).

100. Ibid., 220 (modified according to German version, Kasimir Malevic: Gott ist nicht gestürzt!, 102–103). For the notion of a machine soul, cf. Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines” (1857–1858), in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 690–712.

101. Oswald Wiener, “The Bio-Adapter” (1969), in Franz Rottensteiner, ed., The Best of Austrian Science Fiction, trans. Todd C. Hanlin (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2001), 297–311. Originally published in German as “appendix A: der bio-adapter” in Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1969; rpt., Salzburg: Jung und Jung Verlag, 2014), clxxv–clxxxiii, where it is preceded by “notizen zum konzept des bio-adapters, essay,” cxxxiv–clxxiv. See also O. Wiener, “Bemerkungen zu einigen Tendenzen der ‘Wiener Gruppe,’” in Die Wiener Gruppe (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 1998); on the Wiener Gruppe, see Peter Weibel, ed., Die Wiener Gruppe (Vienna: Springer, 1997).

102. O. Wiener, “der bio-adapter,” clxxv; English translations are mine, though I have drawn on Todd C. Hanlin’s translation in The Best of Austrian Science Fiction.

103. Ibid.

104. Ibid., clxxvi.

105. Ibid., clxxxii.

106. Ibid.

107. Ibid.

108. Ibid., clxxxiii.

109. Stelarc in Smith, Stelarc: The Monograph, 229.

110. See Reyner Banham, “Stocktaking,” Architectural Review, no. 127 (February 1960): 93–100; reprinted in A Critic Writes: Selected Essays by Reyner Banham, ed. Mary Banham et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 49–61. For Banham’s ideas of technically modified environments, adaptation, and mobility, see “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in America 2, no. 2 (1965): 70–79, and The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: Architectural Press, 1969). For a different kind of capsule, see Sebastian Vehlken and Philipp Hauss, “Brain Drain. John C. Lillys Floating Tanks und die Technisierung von Wellness,” in Claudia Mareis and Margarete Pratschke, eds., Imagine: Applied Imagination, Visual Thinking, and Creativity (Munich: Fink, 2015).

111. Max Bense, “Auto und Information: Das Ich, das Auto und die Technik” (1970), in Bense, Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 4: Poetische Texte (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 291–293.

112. Bense, “Auto und Information,” 292 (my translation in this and the following quotations).

113. Ibid.

114. Ibid., 292–293.

115. William Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution (1970; New York: Ubu Classics, 2005), 34. See also Burroughs’s novel on time travel and mind control, The Soft Machine (1961), whose title refers to the human body which is gradually invaded by control mechanisms.

116. Flusser’s text was probably written in the early 1980s, but published only posthumously in 2000; see the editorial commentary in Silvia Wagnermaier, “Zuführung zum Text Vilém Flussers [Leibkarte],” in Thomas Hensel, Hans Ulrich Reck, and Siegfried Zielinski, eds., Lab. Jahrbuch für Künste und Apparate, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2000), 113–114.

117. Translated from the German version of the text “Von den Möglichkeiten einer Leibkarte,” in Hensel, Reck, and Zielinski, Lab. Jahrbuch für Künste und Apparate, 115–124 (Vilém Flusser Archive, Best. 1608, Nr. 2058, date of writing unknown), which differs from, and seems to have been written later than, the unpublished English version (Best. 1608 Nr. 2800).

118. When discussing the Stelarc body, which of these two possibilities, the neutral Körper or the conscious Leib, would we use, and what would the consequences of such a choice be for understanding the body’s relationship to the world in general, and to technology in particular?

119. Stelarc, “Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence,” 593.

120. Vilém Flusser, Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (Göttingen: European Photography, 1996), 175–176.

121. See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 134–140.

122. Second-order cybernetics took off from research into the visual system and the construction of reality in a frog’s brain; see J. Y. Lettvin, H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” Proceedings of the Institute for Radio Engineers 47, no. 11 (November 1959): 1940–1959; see Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 131–137. The conception of vision in cybernetics is more generally addressed by Orit Halpern, “Nervous Networks and Serious Games: The Emergence of Neuro-politics and Population in Cybernetics and Design,” in Sharrona Pearl, ed., Images, Ethics, Technology (London: Routledge, 2016).

123. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

124. See Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (Oxford: Polity, 2005), and Gottfried Hattinger, Über die Sinne. Geschichten aus der Wahrnehmungswelt—Eine virtuelle Ausstellung (Linz: Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz, 2006).

125. See Yvonne Volkart, Fluide Subjekte (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006), which analyzes works of media art especially with regard to the gender aspect of such processes of subjectivation.

126. After being developed in different stages and versions in the 1990s, Molecular Informatics was taken up again in 2011 at Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media and realized in a technically and visually fully revamped version as Eye-Tracking Informatics; see http://www.idd.tamabi.ac.jp/~mikami/artworks/ (accessed December 6, 2015).

127. Sabu Kohso, “This Thing that Sees: A Reflection on ‘Molecular Informatics’ by Seiko Mikami,” in Kazunao Abe and Yukiko Shikata, eds., Seiko Mikami: Molecular Informatics. Artlab 6 (Tokyo: Canon ARTLAB, 1996), 1 (4 pages, no pagination); an earlier version of this text is online at Mikami’s website; I quote from the edited, printed version. Kohso, in this text, develops a reading of Mikami’s work emphasizing the relation between the perceiving human subject and the technically enabled perceptions, relating his own detailed reading of the first, 1996 version of the installation to Descartes, Žižek, Lacan, and Heidegger. In Sabu Kohso, “Parables on the Morphogenic Substance,” in Seiko Mikami and Oscar Abril Ascaso, Molecular Informatics—Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking / LTM (Low-Tech Music) (Málaga: Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación, 2004), he looks more broadly at Mikami’s work from Molecular Clinic 1.0 (1995) through to World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body (1997) and focuses on the constructive aspects of the connection between body and technology, referring to the theories of Deleuze, Crary, Wundt, Kant, Bergson, and Valéry, among others.

128. For examples of such acoustic introception by artists of the 1960s, see Douglas Kahn, “Let Me Hear My Body Talk, My Body Talk,” in Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, eds., Relive: Media Art Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 235–256.

129. Kohso, “This Thing that Sees,” 3.

130. Kohso, “Parables on the Morphogenic Substance,” 47.

131. Ibid., 70. I believe that it is necessary to distinguish analytically between the perceptual process and “the body”; Kohso conflates these: “the bodies of the audience members, their retinal senses in this case [of Molecular Informatics], are both the subject to construct and the object to be constructed” (49). Similarly, I believe that it is imprecise to refer to the situation created in the versions of Molecular Informatics for two participants, in which the traces of their eye movements are visualized and intersect in the same virtual space, as “social” or “communal” (see 67–68). Of course the copresence of two participants and the intersection of the projected traces of their gazes construct a special setting; but in the same way that the interaction of two machine agents is not “social,” the coupling of the gazes through the simultaneous projection of their virtual traces into the same virtual space is a technical, not a social, event. This coupling is not a social encounter, since the experience of one’s own abstracted sensorial trace is only increased by the presence not of another person, but of another virtual entity roaming the virtual world on the beam of an involuntary eye, as it invades that fragile virtual space of the already segmented self.

132. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 2, cited in Kohso, “Parables on the Morphogenic Substance,” 58. Kohso underpins these considerations with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis of paintings by Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne (62).

133. Seiko Mikami, in Mikami and Ascaso, Molecular Informatics—Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking / LTM (Low-Tech Music), 38. Kohso, in his discussion of Seiko Mikami’s Molecular Informatics, refers to the split of the self-observing Cartesian subject from its body. He reminds us of a comment by Slavoj Žižek in which he identified Descartes with Deckard, the hero of Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, who—himself a human—considers the ontological status of the replicant Rachel; the precariousness of this status points to the Cartesian doubt about whether the thinking subject itself might be a figment of some machine memory: “the very notion of self-consciousness implies the subject’s self-decenterment, which is far more radical than the opposition between subject and object.” Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (1993), 15, cited in Kohso, “This Thing that Sees,” 3.

134. See Krzysztof Wodiczko, Instruments, Projections, Vehicles (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1992), 69–77. The displacement of listening to an acoustic sensor on the forehead predates Stelarc’s Extra Ear implant, also potentially listening, on his forearm.

135. See Shuhei Hosokawa, “The Walkman-Effect,” Popular Music, no. 4 (1984).

136. Wodiczko has highlighted the sociopolitical context of socialist Poland in the late 1960s which led him to the design of the Personal Instrument; see Wodiczko, Instruments, Projections, Vehicles, 71. His later projects, including Alien Staff (1995), Aegis (1998–1999), and Dis-Armor (1999–2000), have sought to extend the body’s expressive range in communicative situations; they are social rather than solipsistic communication prostheses.

137. Gabriel had already used this principle of coupling the human body’s perception with a responsive machine environment in the installation Terrain 01 (1993). It consisted of a flock of 25 electronic bugs, each about 20 centimeters long and equipped with wheels, a light-sensitive surface, and an infrared sensor that prevented them from bumping into other objects. The bugs were placed in a round area with a 5-meter diameter, encircled by a narrow metal ring that the bugs could not cross. Above this terrain was a light installation of dimmable spots whose light was the energy source for the electronic bugs, and whose brightness was controlled by the second main component of the installation: a participant wearing a headband with a sensor with which brain activities were tracked. The more this participant concentrated his or her attention, the lower the brightness of the lamps and thus the lower the activity of the bugs. And the more relaxed and “disinterested” the participant was, the higher the measured brain wave activity, and the more active the bugs became. The Perceptual Arena project was developed by Ulrike Gabriel in 1993 at the Canon ARTLAB, where two years later Mikami developed her Molecular Informatics installation; other projects realized in the 1990s by Canon ARTLAB, curated by Yukiko Shikata and Kazunao Abe, included Knowbotic Research’s IO-dencies Tokyo (1997) and Polar (2000) by Carsten Nicolai and Marko Peljhan. About Perceptual Arena, see http://www.t0.or.at/arena/arena.htm (accessed February 27, 2014).

138. Patricia Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies,” Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 1 (2008): 1–22. See also Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013).

139. The idea of the body as an inhabitable architectural space had already been explored by Stelarc in 1973 in three films about the inside of his body. See Brucher, Subjektermächtigung und Naturunterwerfung. For a complete series of stills from the Stomach Sculpture video, see V2_Organisation, eds., Technomorphica (Rotterdam, 1997).

140. Somewhat surprisingly, the identitarian aspect is highlighted in this project. In earlier projects Stelarc had always downplayed the idea of a “self” being involved, positing the body not as a subject but as a sculpture that takes a posture of indifference and allows things to happen, suspended between states; in contrast, with regard to Blender the fact is emphasized that the materials are from his own body and that of Sellars.

141. Other Cloaca installations that Delvoye constructed in the course of the following ten years were variations of this original model. They introduced mechanical and chemical improvements of the flow of material through the different parts of the machine, and tried out different overall shapes, from the vertically oriented Cloaca No. 5 (2006), through the washing machine-based Personal Cloaca (2007), to the small, suitcase-size Cloaca Travel Kit (2011).

142. See the remarks by Delvoye in Dan Cameron, “Conversations with Artists Series: Wim Delvoye (transcript, January 25, 2002)” (New Museum, New York), accessed November 30, 2015, http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/9417; Isabelle Loring Wallace, “Deep Shit: Thoughts on Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Project,” in Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsh, eds., Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 218.

143. See for instance Ji Hoon Han, “Cloaca: une innovation artistique?,” unpublished manuscript, 2007, 5.

144. See Christian W. Denker, “Schöner verdauen mit Wim Delvoye,” Kunsttexte.de, no. 3 (2009), 2, accessed December 6, 2015, http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/kunsttexte/2009-3/denker-christian-w.-1/PDF/denker.pdf.

145. Wallace, “Deep Shit,” 224.

146. See Denker, “Schöner verdauen”; see also Delvoye’s related suggestion that Cloaca was not meant to be a perfect replica of the human body, but that it was intended as an imperfect and wasteful apparatus (ibid., 9). Its anti-utilitarian aesthetics is further pinpointed when compared with eco artworks like the Survival Pieces by the Harrisons (1970–1974), or Hans Haacke’s Rheinwasseraufarbeitungsanlage (1972).

147. Feces is a generic feature of human existence which, for Delvoye, transcends constructions of individuality and social difference. The mechanical creation of feces is rife with psychological and mythological references and tests some of the most deeply ingrained taboos. See comments by Delvoye in Cameron, “Conversations,” n.p., and Wallace, “Deep Shit,” for a discussion of the Cloaca series with regard to classical myth and psychoanalytic theories, especially those of Freud and Kristeva.

148. Kati Simon, ed., Wim Delvoye, exh. cat. (Budapest: Ernst Múzeum, 2008), n.p.

149. Cameron, “Conversations.”

150. Delvoye in Cameron, “Conversations.” In Delvoye’s own discourse, the Cloaca is not only a machine about humans and their ontological status but also a machine about art and art production. Other works in his oeuvre, which include decorated readymades, wood-carved machines, gothic-style architectures and vehicles in laser-cut steel, stained glass windows with X-ray images of intimately caressing human bodies, tattooed human and pig skin, show a distinct understanding of the workings of the art market, as do strategically placed references to artists like Piero Manzoni, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons. “All this romantic idea of ‘making art’ will not be individual ever again, the world is no longer anthropocentric: the machine is in the centre. We will never be the centre of the Universe again.” Delvoye, cited in Alvaro De Benito, “Wim Delvoye: The End of Anthropocentrism,” Arte al limite (February 2010): n.p. For the blurring of the boundary between art and life, see also Denker, “Schöner verdauen,” 10.

151. For a discussion of Elsenaar and Scha’s Huge Harry project, see Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 156–159. See also Remko Scha’s speculative research on the possibility of machine-made art, documented on the site of the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam, www.iaaa.nl (accessed December 6, 2015).

6 Ecology Machine

Encounters with Computer-Aided Nature

The gallery space is empty and dark, save for some pulsating light patches on the floor, and a large-scale video projection which shows configurations of white pixels on black, at times dispersed into amorphous clouds and waves, at other times organized into geometric and three-dimensional shapes (figure 6.1). These virtual objects are in movement continuously, changing shape and floating past, as though drifting through a virtual deep sea with microbic life forms, or through galaxies of artificial stars. The exhibition visitor can use a small hand-held interface which, together with a head-mounted tracking and display device, allows her to navigate through this pixel world, the virtual camera eye changing position according to the position of the tracker on the visitor’s head. As she turns her head, the perspective onto pixel cloud objects changes, together with the trajectory of the virtual flight. The physical interface—a button on a little metal stick—can be used to target specific pixel objects and select them by clicking the button, which brings up textual information near these objects.

Figure 6.1 Knowbotic Research, Dialogue with the Knowbotic South (DWTKS) (1994), installation view, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany, 1997. Copyright © the artists.

Elsewhere in the room, and independent of the large projection screen, glowing pads of ca. 40 by 40 centimeters are placed on the floor. They emit a cold and gray light with a slow, irregular pulse. A third module of the installation is made up of the cooling unit of an air conditioning device which blows cold air into the exhibition space from time to time.

The installation Dialogue with the Knowbotic South (DWTKS) by the artist group Knowbotic Research was first presented in 1994.¹ It uses real-time data from research stations in the Antarctic, relayed by global electronic networks, in order to create, as the artists called it, “a public knowledge space for a potential dialogue about potential nature.” The eponymous “knowbots,” knowledge robots or “Knowledge-Based Object Technology,” are dynamic, algorithmic interfaces that are active in computer-based networks, where they collect and process information. Their representation as geometric clouds of pixels is metaphorical; they drift in what appears as a sea of potentiality, shape-shifting, interacting. The information that can be accessed by selecting individual knowbotic clouds is displayed in thin white frames and refers to research projects that explore aspects of the Antarctic region, meteorological, geological, biological among others, specifying the title, the theme, and the date of the project which this pixel object represents, the respective researcher and his or her institutional affiliation, and the source of funding. These data are drawn from a database compiled by the artists about early-1990s Antarctic research. In contrast, the light pads indicate fluctuations in current temperatures in selected icebergs as recorded by measuring stations, ideally in real time. When these pads light up, this does not refer to specific temperatures or the transgression of temperature thresholds, but to any changes, literally highlighting temperature variation as an event. Finally, the temperature zone translates data from meteorological stations in Antarctica into cold streams of conditioned air.

The installation thus does not provide sensory renditions or simulations of actual phenomena and their natural conditions, but of artificial phenomena and events in data landscapes—the knowbots on which the “dialogue with the knowbotic south” is built are not definable objects but processes, accumulations of data points that can but do not have to be read as meaningfully aligned configurations. The installation asks what it is that can be known of “nature” through data gleaned from technical sensors, and it critiques the epistemological status of this “knowledge.” It points to the polyvalent relationships between information, perception, and experience, and addresses the problem of agency in such hybrid and hypothetical environments of nature and technology.

Knowbotic Research themselves have emphasized how this form of nature, reconstructed from scientific data by means of digital devices, becomes the dominant form of how we engage with the natural environment. The hypothetical “reference nature” can only be ascertained through such constructions, computer models, and simulations: “Reconstructed nature detaches itself from its technological synthesizing process. It becomes emancipated, disjointed from its reference basis, and assumes the role of an autonomous partner in the dialogue, emerging as Computer Aided Nature (CAN).”² At the same time, and through the same technical means, this knowledge becomes accessible for a broad spectrum of nonexperts. The artists thus described—at an early moment in the emergence of digital knowledge regimes—a dual detachment: the shift of a physical “reference nature” to the simulated and “reconstructed nature” based on data, and the detachment of the public handling of such knowledge from exclusive science institutions toward a broader, more participatory availability.

Chapter Introduction

In the discourses on artistic encounters with technology reviewed in this study, the concept of the machine articulates a particular relationship between human subjects and the apparatuses that construct them. This concept remains based on a mechanical understanding of technology which constructs the machine as a functional, kinetic, and automatic object, in relation to which the modern human subject conceives itself as a nontechnical being. Throughout the twentieth century, the machine therefore represented both the existential threat of an autonomous, alien entity, and the affirming Other of a subjectivity that appears contiguous to, yet different from, the techno-ontology of the machine.

From the middle of the century, however, the emerging paradigms of systems theory and of cybernetics combined to transform the conception of the human environment, and of technology. In systems theory, the environment was conceived as ecological, a system of interdependent forces and agents in which the human subject was no longer the focus around which an Umwelt is constituted. Instead, the human now represented a set of systemic factors that could be more or less beneficial or obstructive to the ecological system. Around the same time, cybernetics introduced an understanding of technology that no longer saw it as mechanical assemblages of materials for the generation, transformation, and application of physical force, but as systems of control and interaction.

The main marker of this development is the concept of “ecology,” which designates the dissolution of conceptual boundaries between nature, technology, society, and the individual, and the dual movement of the world becoming technological and technology becoming ecological. In the visual arts, such an ecological conception of technology was first applied in the 1960s and 1970s by artists like Hans Haacke, Joseph Beuys, and Otto Piene, whose exploration of the aesthetic and symbolic potential of such systems we will review in this chapter. The ensuing artistic engagement with issues like sustainability, the preservation of life, the reconstruction of natural conditions, or the critique of pollution and destruction inherited from systems theory and its derivative ecological theories an inherent techno-logics which informed both the aesthetic and the transformative potentials of ecological art projects.

The wider availability of digital and network technologies in the 1990s further intensified the application of such systems-theoretical and cybernetic principles in the work of artists like Marko Peljhan, Seiko Mikami, and Knowbotic Research, who in their discourses toyed with the notion of the machine, but finally abandoned it in favor of aesthetic conceptions that addressed technology without recourse to the machine—providing another indication that the “pre-ecological” concept of the machine articulated in machine art and discussed in this book is specific to the twentieth century.

Ecology and Ecological Art

The early examples of what would later be called “eco art”—like Robert Smithson’s land art projects, Alan Sonfist’s nature reconstructions in urban environments, or the regeneration projects by Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison—emerged in a context of intense social and political debate on environmental issues. The modern conceptualization of the “environment” as the natural habitat of living beings goes back to the nineteenth century and its debates about the evolution of living beings.³ However, it was only after 1960 and in the context of systems theory that the concept of an “ecology,” as both the science and the practice of working and modifying environments, attained a broader societal relevance. The two concepts, though frequently used synonymously, are distinctly different: while the “environment” is a given context of a living being in which specific factors exert an influence on the organism and its living conditions, “ecology” is construed as a comprehensive system in which all forces, objects, and beings are seen as interdependent. The environment is organized centrally, around a given focal point, whereas ecology is a relational system that is horizontally organized, a network without a center, and that does not reserve a particular ontological position for human beings. In contrast, the notion of Umwelt (German for “the world around”), as conceived by the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the 1930s, places even more emphasis on the central position of a subject around which a world is constituted.

The genealogy of ecological thinking is multifaceted. Since the nineteenth century, it has been closely linked to the observation that human activities, not least through the technical and engineering projects of industrialization, their aftermath and debris, have a direct impact on the natural environment. Whereas “nature” was conceived as a force that takes effect independently of human agency, and the “environment” circumscribes the set of relations between living beings and their natural surroundings, “ecology” refers to the evolving system of relations between different elements and forces. Such a systems-theoretical understanding of the concept of “ecology” is often associated with a moral obligation toward a natural environment whose ecological diversity and balance should be kept, or restored to their original condition.

This understanding emerged at a time when, in the combined processes of increased rationalization, exploitation, and preservationist concern, the natural environment was increasingly seen as part of a global technological assemblage. Its icon is the “Blue Marble,” the image of the Earth as photographed by the astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon in 1968, a vision that not only shows the abstract beauty and fragility of the planet but is deeply inscribed into the high-technological paradigm of space flight. Less iconographically pertinent, yet possibly as formative for the collective imaginary, were earlier visions of the “entire Earth” like the one presented by Wernher von Braun in an article series in the popular Collier’s Weekly magazine in 1952. Here one of the main rocket scientists spoke not only of the future conquest of space but of the useful applications that space exploration would entail, namely the possibility of shooting from orbiting satellites at any spot on the Earth’s surface.⁴ The images complementing the articles were drawings, not photographs, but the idea of any place on Earth becoming visible from above, and a potential military target, no doubt left its mark on the imagination of one’s place on the “whole Earth.”

A multiplicity of events and research projects catalyzed ecological awareness during the 1960s. In the United States, the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, about environmental depletion, influenced the formation of a social movement that led to the founding of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. That same year in Germany, the renowned West German scientist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker received funding to establish a national Max-Planck-Institut for Research into the Living Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World (Erforschung der Lebensbedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Welt). And the US futurist writer Alvin Toffler published the international best-seller Future Shock (1970) with its decidedly critical attitude toward technical innovations and a strong plea to investigate the ecological and social effects of new technologies before their implementation. Toffler demanded that such technologies be rejected if their effects were overall negative.

Also in 1962, the architectural visionary R. Buckminster Fuller and the British artist John McHale started work on the World Resource Inventory. McHale had been a student at Yale University in the 1950s and had brought back materials on cybernetics and American pop culture to his fellow British artists of the Independent Group; he would write a book on The Ecological Context (1970) after finishing work with Buckminster Fuller. Together with McHale, Fuller edited six volumes of the World Resources Inventory between 1963 and 1967 which constituted, as they wrote, “the first attempt at a comprehensive inventory of global resources and development trends, with regard to a technically advanced and ecologically oriented redesign.”⁵

This early ecological discourse was metaphorically grounded in a technological conception of the world. In a lecture manuscript from 1963, “New Forms vs. Reforms,” Fuller claimed that improvement of man’s situation was possible “if the principles of industrialization as the external metabolic organisms of man, serviced by an intelligence feedback system were to be professionally fostered by comprehensive, anticipatory, design scientists as are the internal metabolics and nervous organisms of man fostered comprehensively and anticipatorily by medical science.”⁶ The metaphor here is not one of the human body as a technical system, but of the industrial system as a bodylike, organic metabolism that needs medical help from specialists.

In his conclusion to the research into global resources, presented in 1968, Fuller iconically compared the Earth to a spaceship. Describing the dangers of the current situation, however, he turned to the gravity-bound image of an airplane: “This all brings us to a realization of the enormous educational task which must be successfully accomplished right now in a hurry in order to convert man’s spin-dive toward oblivion into an intellectually mastered power pullout into safe and level flight of physical and metaphysical success, whereafter he may turn his Spaceship Earth’s occupancy into a universe exploring advantage.”⁷

Fuller’s conception takes a distinctly human-centered perspective that envisages the possibility of a conscious and able pilot mastering the “power pullout”—unlike the more skeptical vision of William Burroughs, writing around the same time, who wondered about such a human-machine symbiosis and asked who, in such a situation, would in fact be piloting the plane.⁸ Fuller’s human collective pilot has the potential to stay in control of his ecological systems, just as he masters his technical machines:

The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobile’s storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engine’s self-starter. Thereafter, our “main engine,” the life regenerating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy. The fossil-fuel savings account has been put aboard Spaceship Earth for the exclusive function of getting the new machinery built with which to support life and humanity at ever more effective standards of vital physical energy and reinspiring metaphysical sustenance to be sustained exclusively on our Sun radiation’s and Moon pull gravity’s tidal, wind, and rainfall generated pulsating and therefore harnessable energies. The daily income energies are excessively adequate for the operation of our main industrial engines and their automated productions.⁹

The conception of ecology as a dynamic system of forces and agents emerged at a time when the dangers of industrialization, environmental depletion, and nuclear war opened up a planetary perspective on life on Earth, while intersecting with theoretical and pragmatic possibilities of operationalizing these forces and agents into systems that could be worked on technically. It appears paradoxical that Buckminster Fuller’s metaphorical model for this operationalization was the industrial machinery that had brought on the ecological crisis. But his discourse at the end of the 1960s precisely marks the gradual shift from a mechanical to a systemic paradigm of technology. During the same years, Humberto Maturana was developing a language that attempted to establish a vocabulary, as he hoped, more adequate to the cybernetic conception of natural and technical processes. Yet, as Fuller indicated, the old metaphorical machinery was still required to serve as the new machinery was being built.

Eco Art and Its Techno-Logics

One strand in the development of environmental concerns in culture and politics and the emergence of the ecological movement in the 1960s was an increasing engagement of artists with such environmental issues.¹⁰ Not all of these endeavors were “ecological” in the normative sense of championing environmental awareness, the preservation and restoration of an endangered nature, sustainability of human and natural habitats, and activism on practical or imaginative proposals for environmental improvement, a practice that has become identified with the label of “eco art” in a more narrow sense. Conceptual art, systems aesthetics, or kinetic art formed alternative contexts from which such environmental art practices derived. Importantly, the normative conceptions of eco art were also underwritten by systems-theoretical thinking. The eco art curator Linda Weintraub, for instance, summarizes: “The ecocentric worldview honors life’s sanctity, augments its diversity, protests its neglect, and optimizes its vitality.”¹¹ Holistic celebration and political protest are here coupled with the interventionist approaches of “augmenting” and “optimizing,” both deriving from a language register of systems theory. Weintraub describes the processes of natural industriousness into which eco artists intervene as a machinery more refined than that of Buckminster Fuller’s spaceship:

Ecocentric productivity … is defined by ecologists as the creation of new organic matter by the process of photosynthesis. It bears little relation to the anthropocentric focus on mechanical and industrial productivity. Ecocentric productivity is a measure of how much new growth occurs when light energy fuels the metabolic machinery of plants, which enables them to synthesize the new compounds and structures that make cells divide. It is measured by the amount of biomass generated by organisms occupying an ecosystem. In essence, ecocentric productivity is a measure of life.¹²

The notion of productivity proposed here may not be anthropocentric, but it is systemic and techno-logical insofar as it is based on the conception of a “metabolic machinery” which works according to the same laws of mathematics and physics as the factory of the nineteenth century, only this time not for the benefit of Capital but of planet Earth.

The eco art discourse has pitched the invasive and brute examples of early land art by artists like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, and James Turrell, presented in a seminal exhibition, “Earth Works,” at Dwan Gallery in New York City in October 1968,¹³ against, for instance, the pioneering work by the Harrisons, Joseph Beuys, or Alan Sonfist whose Time Landscape (1965–1978) sought to reconstruct a plot in Manhattan as a piece of original, pristine forest. However, these examples of eco art are also infused by technological and scientific research and experimental methods. Sonfist’s Time Landscape required extensive research into the historical flora of the island that would become Manhattan, and careful adaptation of the project to the conditions of the modern urban environment to allow for such a reconstruction. Even more so, the projects by the Harrisons have included crafted interventions into urban and nonurban environments, as well as—especially in the early works—the construction of more or less independent, highly engineered ecosystems, as for instance in the Survival Pieces of 1970 to 1973 (Portable Fish Farm, 1971, Portable Orchard, 1972–1973).¹⁴ The Harrisons presented one of their first projects in the context of LACMA’s infamous and technophilic “Art and Technology” exhibition of 1971, and described their initiation into environmental issues as a moment of insight into a systemic understanding of the Earth:

The first indication of what would become an important salient feature was recognized during a morning conversation in 1970 after making a world map of endangered and extinct species for the “Fur and Feather” exhibition at the Crafts Museum in New York City. The research with a team of students had been exhausting. We asked ourselves a question, “What is the most Endangered Species on earth?” We concluded that the most endangered species wasn’t a species at all but a system. The Earth itself, or topsoil, was this endangered system.¹⁵

The artists’ concern was here directed not at a particular group of living beings, a species, or an area of land with its flora and fauna, but at a system, a complex of relations which itself is recognized as endangered. The example illustrates how systems thinking engenders the overlapping of what used to be considered separately as “nature” and “technics,” and constructs ecology and technology as interdependent aspects of the same structure.

This shift is inscribed in a broader, techno-logical discourse on nature and ecology, which according to the philosopher Timothy Morton frequently reverts to a notion of ecology that is ahistorical and claims to preserve and protect a “nature” that never existed. In his Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), Morton describes the construction of contemporary notions of nature, the environment, and ecology as a parallel development to industrialization, so that ecology is something that cannot be “restored,” since it is itself a product of modernity.¹⁶

Morton’s conception is predated by the techno-philosophy of Gilbert Simondon who, writing On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects in the 1950s, described technology as an aspect of the environment in which processes of innovation and problem solving have always been taking place. Simondon insists that the human has always been a technical individual—a fact that, however, only becomes clear when technology develops a certain level of autonomy and this autonomous “machine” appears to adopt certain traits from the human, even though it is in fact a continuation of the technical existence of the human.¹⁷

The idea of the world as a machine of course has a much longer tradition, and is directly related to the forms of knowledge through which it is articulated. In a short study of the metaphor of the “machine,” and of the metaphorical contrast between “the organic” and “the mechanical,” the philosopher Hans Blumenberg focuses on the changing interpretations of the “world as machine” which, in the modern era, have the clockwork as their central metaphor. Alternatively, there is the metaphor of the Book of Nature which points not only to the legibility of nature and its laws, but also to the notion that this book has been written with the aim that it should be read, deciphered, and understood.¹⁸ Since the eighteenth century there has been a discernible change, for, according to Blumenberg, the metaphors of the machine and of the book “no longer relate to the meaning and the structure of the world as reality, but to the meaning and the structure of the world as science. This is no accident; because the sum of results of science increasingly pushes itself between the subject and its world, a world which increasingly ‘is’ identical with the paradigm of the theoretical utterances about it (which is not to claim that there had ever been an ‘immediate’ and pure experience of the world).”¹⁹ And this science, Blumenberg infers by quoting Husserl, might not be directed at insights, but at the useful working (Bearbeitung) of the world: “Doesn’t science and its method resemble a machine that is obviously and reliably achieving something useful, a machine that anyone can learn to handle properly, without having the least understanding of the inner possibility and necessity of such achievements?”²⁰ The productivity that an author like Weintraub praised in ecological systems is based on the same technological understanding of nature. While 300 years earlier, for Galileo, the clear and positive legibility and comprehensibility of the Book of Nature was a given, now a technological notion of nature prevails and frames the conceptions of ecology. Blumenberg comments that “the mathematical language appears as the ‘mother tongue’ of nature, which the human has to learn.”²¹

Suggestions for the date of this modern detachment of human from nature, or rather for the historical reconfiguration of a modern conception of “nature” from an entity and a counterpart, “Nature,” into an organizational, systemic principle, “Ecology,” vary from the announcement of the “Law of the Conservation of Energy” by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1847, marking the insight into the mathematical calculability of all phenomena, to the launch of the first satellite 110 years later, as suggested by Marshall McLuhan:

Perhaps the largest conceivable revolution in information occurred on October 17, 1957, when Sputnik created a new environment for the planet. For the first time the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container. At the moment that the earth went inside this new artifact, Nature ended and Ecology was born. “Ecological” thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the status of a work of art.²²

The conception of ecology, abstracted from nature, has been broadened by Félix Guattari, who insisted that ecology does not only refer to nature: “Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists. Ecology in my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations.”²³ Therefore, according to Guattari, the current ecological crisis does not only affect the natural environment, but it is a crisis of social, political, and cultural dimension which requires a complete reorientation of the aims of the production of material and immaterial goods. “Therefore this revolution must not be exclusively concerned with visible relations of force on a grand scale, but will also take into account molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence and desire.”²⁴

Whatever the frame of reference set for conceptions of ecology—and for ecological art—they always seem to be grounded in a systems-theoretical, cybernetic and technological understanding of the environment and of nature. The “apparatus” of this system, in the sense of the mega-machine, is not primarily determined by politics and economics, the state and capital, but encompasses scientific knowledge, concerns about sustainability, as well as political and economic interests. The subjectivities constructed in this eco-logical structure are not formed in relation to images of a technical and functional machine; the image of subjectivation is now that of an ecological system which is instantiated in processes, events, and behaviors.

For the aesthetics of such ecological art, a crucial question is which role is ascribed to the human agents within this system—whether they are seen as participating elements, as disruptive environmental factors, or as conscious social and moral subjects—because this role also marks the position that they hold in relation to technology. The integration of human actors into eco-technological systems leads to a reconceptualization of the rapport between human and technology which also challenges the very conception of what constituted “the machine” as a double or counterpart. The becoming-ecological of technology undermines the double-bound structure of human and machine—and thus also erodes the conditions of possibility of a machine art.

Such ecological and systems-theoretical discourses formed an important basis for the work of artists as diverse as Otto Piene, Hans Haacke, and Joseph Beuys, whose work developed in the same post-Second World War context. For all three of these pioneers of ecological art in the 1960s and 1970s, the concepts of system and nature played a significant role. While Haacke investigated the workings of both physical and social systems, Beuys coupled the notion of systems to the plasticity of social processes. Piene, in turn, explored the interaction of technical, natural, and human systems in large-scale kinetic installations.

Hans Haacke summarized the motivation of his artistic practice in the late 1960s with an explicit reference to systems theory: “The working premise is to think in terms of systems; the production of systems, the interference with and the exposure of existing systems. … Systems can be physical, biological or social; they can be man-made, naturally existing, or a combination of any of the above.”²⁵ Haacke developed his systems-theoretical thinking in dialogue with the artist and theorist Jack Burnham, who in turn used Haacke’s works of this period as prime examples of what he conceptualized as systems aesthetics. For Burnham, contemporary art, product design, industrial production, and consumer capitalism were parts of the same cultural formation: “The kind of product design that once produced ‘better living’ precipitates vast crises in human ecology in the 1960s. A striking parallel exists between the ‘new’ car of the automobile stylist and the syndrome of formalist invention in art, where ‘discoveries’ are made through visual manipulation.”²⁶ Writing in 1968, Burnham connected this notion of an ecological crisis with that of modernist forms of production and design, and spelled out systems aesthetics as a program for an expanded notion of ecology that considers not only the natural environment but also technical, social, and economic aspects:

Increasingly “products”—either in art or life—become irrelevant and a different set of needs arise: these revolve around such concerns as maintaining the biological livability of the Earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding the growing symbiosis in man-machine relationships, establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and defining alternate patterns of education, productivity, and leisure. In the past our technologically-conceived artifacts structured living patterns. We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.²⁷

Haacke’s works from that period included Weather Cube (1967), a sealed Plexiglas cube in which the moisture cyclically evaporated and condensed, depending on the temperature difference between the inside and the outside of the cube.²⁸ Haacke’s Ice Stick (1966), technically a 130-centimeter-high refrigeration unit on a 35-centimeter pedestal base, also developed over time, the moisture in the exhibition space leading to a slow accumulation of ice around the metal rod. The resulting sculptural form was determined by the interaction between the technical device and its environment, using the technically derived difference in temperature as the interface.²⁹

Ice Stick was presented in Hultén’s 1968 “Machine as Seen” exhibition, in the curatorial epilogue which pointed beyond the mechanical conception of technology that dominated the show. In Ice Stick, the technical apparatus does not operate on its own but forms part of a system which includes the air around it, the moisture exhaled by the breathing public, and the gravitational force of the Earth. Ideally, Haacke would even have wanted to exclude the technical devices from the systems that made up his installations at the time: “I would want all the machines to disappear and for the sails or balloons or whatever to become completely autonomous.”³⁰ With regard to this rejection of the technical apparatus, the US art historian Caroline Jones has asked: “How can we understand the artist’s resolute desire to circumscribe the human or the machinic from the system, when cybernetics itself originated in an application of mechanical feedback theories to psychological human processes? Was Haacke alone in reading systems art as black-boxed from the human, at least before 1968?”³¹ An answer might be that for Haacke, as for most other artists of the twentieth century, and for their lay contemporaries, the “machine” was a companion of the human, infusing the works with an anthropomorphic signature, whereas a true “system” would run independently of the idiosyncratic effects of such a subjective apparatus.

In contrast, for Joseph Beuys the notion of the system was closely tied to that of a social gestalt practice. Beuys’s “expanded concept of art” (erweiterter Kunstbegriff) embraced human agency as well as cultural artifacts and the natural environment. Art, for Beuys, is the field on which these forces come together, and where they can be transformed by their mutual “plastic” capacities. In the sense of these plastic faculties that are available to everybody, Beuys decreed that “everyone is an artist.”

On the occasion of the Documenta 6 exhibition in 1977, Beuys created a sculptural and discursive environment, Honey Pump in the Workplace (Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz). Its main technical component was an electrically powered pump that pushed 150 kilograms of honey through a cyclical system of over one hundred meters of transparent tubes that were arranged throughout the Museum Friedericianum in Kassel. Visitors would therefore encounter the honey flowing through the tubes in different parts of the exhibition. The space where the pump itself was placed could only be viewed from above, as though looking into an animal pit, or into a part of the urban water and sewage system. Next to the pump was a large lump of margarine in which an electrically driven axle was spinning.

Close to this “machine room,” and also traversed by honey tubes, undulated into aggregate-like spirals, was a room that was used as a discussion space of the newly founded “Free International University (FIU)” where Beuys held extensive discussions with invited and accidental visitors about topics like the expanded concept of art, social plastics, and direct democracy. Beuys commented:

With Honey Pump I am expressing the principle of the Free International University working in the bloodstream of society. Flowing in and out of the heart organ—the steel honey container—are the main arteries through which the honey is pumped out of the engine room with a pulsing sound, circulates round the Free International University area, and returns to the heart. The whole thing is only complete with people in the space round which the honey artery flows and where the bee’s head is to be found in the coiled loops of tubing with its two iron feelers.³²

The pump is described as the “heart” of the installation, which in its entirety is a metaphor for both the human and the social organism and its metabolic system, in which a distinct place is dedicated to the system of language, communication, and dialogue. The experience of the Honey Pump—its soundscape of electrical motors and human dialogue, the visual impression of the liquid honey flowing through the tubes as a metaphoric “flow” of people and ideas into and out of the FIU, and the sculptural presence of the pump at the core and basis of the installation—is built around the technical apparatus, which thus forms a pivotal aesthetic component of the installation.

In comparison, while Beuys used the technical apparatus in a symbolic function to refer to the circulation of energy in hybrid ecological systems, Haacke’s Ice Stick and Weather Cube were intended as concrete, conceptual pieces of art. Haacke inherited this notion of a pure system from the Zero group whom Haacke had encountered in Düsseldorf in the early 1960s. Programmatically, Zero tried to affirm an artistic and historical tabula rasa, a gesture that Otto Piene, one of the founders, explained at the time: “The title ZERO was the result of months of search and was finally found more or less by chance. From the beginning we looked upon the term not as an expression of nihilism—or a dada-like gag, but as a word indicating a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning as at the count-down when rockets take off—zero is the incommensurable zone in which the old state turns into the new.”³³

In 1958, Piene had founded Zero together with the concrete art painter and light artist Heinz Mack. They were influenced by the aesthetic conceptualism of Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana, as well as by Jean Tinguely and other kinetic artists.³⁴ By the time the young Hans Haacke encountered the Zero artists, Günther Uecker had also joined them. Zero’s interest in nature was not so much spurred by environmental concern as by a modernist and romanticist desire for harmony in which art and its apparatuses served to balance human, nature, the universe, and technology.³⁵

One of our most important aims proved to be the attempt to reharmonize the relationship between man and nature—nature offers enormous impulses, from the elements: the sky, the sea, the Arctic, the desert, air, light, water, fire as means of expression and form—not putting the artist into the position of a fugitive from the “modern world” but rather having the artist use the tools of actual technical invention as well as those of nature.³⁶

Piene’s artistic work explored the aesthetic potentials of light, air, fire, and movement. Jack Burnham related Piene’s practice to the kinetic art movement and pointed out its special status, since it crucially also involved the observer and his or her sensory perception.³⁷ Like Burnham, Piene was one of the first fellows of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) which the former Bauhaus student and Moholy-Nagy collaborator György Kepes had founded at MIT in 1967, and which Piene would lead a few years later. Kepes started off with the strong commitment to practical cooperation between art, science, and engineering that had also dominated the later years of the Bauhaus in Dessau, as well as Moholy-Nagy’s “New Bauhaus” school in Chicago, but he became increasingly disenchanted with the effects that technologies were having on the environment and human livelihood. His publication on Art and the Environment (1974), which includes illustrated essays by Kepes himself and by other writers and scientists, voices great concern and pleads for urgent measures against environmental destruction.³⁸

When Piene took over the directorship of the CAVS from Kepes in 1974, he shifted its program toward a stronger focus on artistic practice, continuing in the utopian vein of his own earlier work. This process culminated in a series of “Sky Art Conferences” which heralded the modernist conviction of a harmonious relationship between art, technology, and the environment. A key work of that period was the outdoor installation Centerbeam, which was realized by a whole team of CAVS members and collaborators for Documenta 6 in 1977—not far from the galleries of the Friedericianum where Beuys’s Honey Pump featured prominently. Retrospectively, Documenta 6 curator Manfred Schneckenburger described Centerbeam as a postindustrial assembly line:

An aqueduct in the shape of a hissing, steaming dragon in which a multiplicity of technical media produced their specific visual effects. An action theater of the most varied energies and media, from biological growth processes and ice crystals through the archaic forces of water and wind, the early industrial energy of steam, to prismatic mirror reflections, stroboscopic lamps, radio waves, lasers, holograms, relay circuits of electronic complexes. Above all of this, at night, Piene’s star flower, like compact fireworks. The whole thing unpretentiously lined up and assembled, as in the Paleolithic phase of the shift from the mechanical to the cybernetic era. An attractive abbreviated version of technological progress since the beginning of the industrial revolution and further back.³⁹

Elsewhere in the same text, Schneckenburger described this form of dealing with natural and technical forces as being “beyond machine art,” as an art that was not heroic or utopian but that approached media and technology as a field of aesthetic research.⁴⁰ Even without a critical concept of the machine, Schneckenburger—like Burnham and Hultén before him—diagnosed the shift from a focus on the technical object and its exploration to a formation and observation of systems and processes as a mainstay of an ecologically engaged art.

In this context, Hans Haacke sought to devise a desubjectified system that ideally excluded the human subject—and thus also excluded the machine. His works from the 1960s stand in a formalist aesthetic tradition which now, however, does not seek the beauty of machines or machine parts, but the beauty of system processes without machines.

The aspect of automatism, which such a process-oriented aesthetic inherited from the aesthetics of machines, was a formal and conceptual question for Haacke, not something that itself carried meaning. This was different for Beuys, who took the machines, their forces and kinetic effects, as a metaphor for social and creative processes, symbolic of the exchange between different agents, human and nonhuman—though, as in Picabia’s mechanomorphic machine paintings which were symbolic of human psychological relations, for Beuys the true motor of exchange and creativity was the communicating and gestalt-forming individual. If Haacke’s 1960s works thus revived the formalist aspect of machine aesthetics, and Beuys applied the machine symbolically, like Picabia and Duchamp, Piene’s experimental celebration of systemic interactions was utopian and constructivist in spirit, and related these interactions to the associative and kinetic aspects of machine aesthetics.

Machining Ecology

There is no clear-cut differentiation between mechanical and cybernetic conceptions of technology, just as there is no sudden arrival of a systems-theoretical conception of ecology. The works discussed here all stem from a period in the 1960s and 1970s when artists like Schöffer, Ascott, or Pask were working with cybernetic models, whereas Haacke, Beuys, and Piene conceived systems that were not focused on technical aspects like feedback, interaction, or control.

Twenty years later, the situation had changed considerably, after the emergence of digital and network technologies giving rise to a more integrated understanding of ecological and technological paradigms. Projects by Marko Peljhan and Knowbotic Research, developed in the second half of the 1990s, are a case in point. While Peljhan’s Makrolab project (since 1997) follows a constructivist and utopian tradition of exploring the aesthetics of ecological formations, Knowbotic Research, in their project IO_dencies (1997–1999), took a systemic approach to social structures in order to articulate their autopoietic potentials. Another decade later, Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa’s Gravicells (2004) installation focused on the systemic relations and interactions between technical, natural, and human actors. In all of these projects, scientific research and scientific methodologies play an important role, emphasizing the aesthetic dimension that not only technical installations but also scientific processes bring to artistic practice. Their conception of ecology borrows its broad approach to environmental, social, psychological, and technological issues from the “heterogenetic” thinking of Félix Guattari and, less directly, Edgar Morin, both of whom developed concepts of machines that emphasize their abstract, generative, complex and processual qualities.⁴¹

Marko Peljhan: Technological, Social, and Constructivist Machines

The Makrolab project of Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan and others has been developing in several stages since the mid-1990s.⁴² Its main tenet was the construction of a mobile environmental research platform that could maintain itself independently of its surroundings, housing eight researchers for up to 120 days and withstanding even extreme weather conditions (figures 6.2, 6.3; plate 14). The broad research program of the lab was to be focused on the monitoring and investigation of the telecommunications spectrum, the natural environment, the weather system, networks of migration, and connections between these systems. At its onset in 1997, Peljhan had planned that the Makrolab project would end its 10-year mission in the Antarctic. Attempts to land the project there were started during the International Polar Year in 2007 and two Antarctic missions testing the system components for a more permanent station were executed, as well as a series of placements of the Makrolab in Germany, Italy, Scotland, and Tasmania, and an extended research stay in the Canadian arctic region. Also in 2007, Peljhan together with his collaborator Matthew Biederman founded the Arctic Perspective Initiative which has since focused on collaborative works with indigenous Arctic cultures and led to the realization of the first larger exhibition, “Arctic Perspective,” in Dortmund, Germany, in 2010.⁴³

Figure 6.2 Marko Peljhan, Projekt Atol/PACT Systems, Makrolab markII, Rottnest Island, Western Australia (2000), installation view, exhibition “Home,” Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Festival 2000. Photo by Robert Garvey. Copyright © Projekt Atol/PACT Systems.

Figure 6.3 Marko Peljhan, Projekt Atol/PACT Systems, Makrolab markIIex, Campalto Operations (2003), installation view, Campalto Island, Biennale di Venezia, 2003. Photo by Steve Dietel. Copyright © Projekt Atol/PACT Systems.

In a text from 2003, Peljhan relates the situation which he says generated the first concrete ideas for the Makrolab. On a late winter day in 1994, during the war in Bosnia, he and some friends were on the Croatian island of Krk, observing the barren landscape, listening to the sound of shelling from the Bosnian city of Bihac, 100 kilometers away, and seeing airplanes in the sky above, possibly on reconnaissance or human relief missions. “The visible and the invisible merge into an extensive landscape, the past and the future converge, the machines of construction and destruction working in unison.”⁴⁴ Talk among the artist friends was about how to respond to this Yugoslav calamity, and what a performance art of the future might be. Peljhan, twenty-five years old at the time, thought of Velimir Khlebnikov, Russian poet and futurist visionary who himself was in his early thirties when, in the course of the First World War, another world went down in ruins. Khlebnikov’s utopian poem Ladomir—whose “principal preoccupation … is the destruction of the old order and synthesis of the new”⁴⁵—merged in Peljhan’s mind with the scene on Krk, generating the vision of a technoid vehicle:

A stage appears on the horizon and walks slowly forth. On it the sailors of Ladomir work the spinnaker of thought. Large sails propel it forward, a complex mechanism allows its legs to lift and twist. There are no metal noises. The materials are new and unknown. It does have legs and it looks like an insect. It has the functionality and energy balance of a bee and the armour of an Armageddon cockroach.⁴⁶

The program of the Makrolab that Peljhan sketches in the following passage from 2003 no doubt blends his seminal ideas from 1994 with the later experience of the lab that had been in operation since 1997:

What would the people do [on that mobile stage]? … I am quite sure about that. Survive and understand would be my first answer. By, for and on themselves. Operate and keep the legged drifter working, functioning. They will connect themselves to the satellites, they will roam the globe. They will discover its deep laws. They will be creators from all directions, brought on the platform by different winds. Scientists and artists. Discovering the laws of time. Of communication. Of the electromagnetic flux. Of the navigation of whales, birds and people. They will measure and calculate the dynamics of thunder and cells. They will equate and understand. The final equation and law. They will sail far away. At incredible speeds. And the world will become their stage.⁴⁷

The intended research is hugely diverse—into flora, fauna, topography, climate, into receiving and analyzing images made and transmitted by satellites, into broadcasting and receiving radio signals (figure 6.4). The basis of this diversity is the realization of an ecology that is complex and requires what Peljhan calls “systemic awareness”:

Figure 6.4 Marko Peljhan, Projekt Atol/PACT Systems, Makrolab Communications Console, Electronic Media Monitoring Project (2000), installation view, “World-Information.Org” exhibition, Brussels, 2000. Copyright © Projekt Atol/PACT Systems.

When you board a plane and fly over the ocean you are part of a very vast system of communications, migrations, economics, capital exchange, and so on. Yes it is you that is travelling, but you are part of a system and you accept the rules of that system and it’s good that you understand that. I don’t say that we should understand everything that we do, but definitely it’s good to build this awareness. Because with the build-up of awareness, the mystification fades away. And maybe the gratification of the sublime can be achieved. If you want.⁴⁸

Peljhan’s work folds the systems aesthetics of artists like Haacke and Piene back into an avant-gardist constructivist approach that is aimed not at the autonomy of art but at the effective intervention into the construction of a political and ecological reality. These political implications of his work are also reflected in his use of particular technical systems, which have included devices for the inception of satellite communication as well as the construction of military-grade unmanned aerial vehicles. For Peljhan, part of a systemic, ecological awareness is a critical understanding of the technological condition of environmental research, including the military aspects of those technologies, which have to be understood both with regard to their engineering history and to potential future applications.⁴⁹

We can distinguish three levels or dimensions of Peljhan’s ecological conception of technology: a technical, a social, and a utopian dimension. First, the technical dimension refers to the technical apparatus in the sense of a utilitarian installation with set functions. Second, Makrolab functions as a social machine in which the inhabitants attain a particular state of mind that is a result of the “insulation and isolation” of the research platform from its environment, “a McLuhanesque counter-environment that apprehends the world by removing itself from it, … not so much a secession as a tactical retreat.”⁵⁰ The British writer Kodwo Eshun describes the social dynamics between the participants, the “production of affective sociality,” as the second task of the Makrolab, this “machine for producing a stylised life.”⁵¹ It is the possibility for the participants to become the object of their own chain of experimentation: “The connection of power to resources to systems to operations to instructions to humans creates a systemic awareness among the crew that is immediate and pressing. They are obliged to consider themselves as communicating elements in a functioning machine. This internalised systemic responsibility in turn induces the necessity for a loose fitting social bond between the participants.”⁵²

Peljhan insists that this machinic “intersection of mental spaces,” this “affective osmosis,” is crucial for the functionality and the success of the Makrolab, which in his documenta X lecture in 1997 he had described as though it was indeed a psycho-technical experiment:

What is Makrolab? I defined it as a closed and isolated/insulated environment which in its inner structure, the structure of the micro-social events, functions as a communication center and a reflective tool-machine. But it is declaratively set into isolation, a position in which it is supposed to observe the world only through mediators. The thesis is that only this kind of isolated position can produce the code for the evolution of social relations. … The environment will serve as a development surface for the further formation of new, creative social, spiritual and economic relations, based solely on integral individuality.⁵³

A third dimension of Peljhan’s machine conception is constructivist and utopian. Beyond technical functionality and social machinization, he conceives the Makrolab as a machine of utopian realization: neither a quasi-autonomous machine nor a formalist artwork, but an element in a constructivist practice that aims at the transformation of society by means that are artistic, technological, and social at the same time.⁵⁴ Peljhan employs the full utopian, productivist pathos inherited from the constructivists of the Russian avant-garde, and with explicit reference to Velimir Khlebnikov’s exalted manifestos of the First World War period:

We will start gathering the building blocks of the language of the new equation. Five more years of this project and this vision. We already treat the lake as the soup of life. It is time to go to work, as Velimir the First would say, Presidents of Planet Earth. The barren landscapes of the first EarthMoon are waiting and the new building is being shaped. We shall provide data for its perfect alignment. It will be armoured, autonomous and insulated. No energy will be wasted, no heat will escape. And it will talk with the planetary expanse.⁵⁵

A concept that Peljhan introduces at the earliest stages of the project is that of “faktura,” already present in the overarching project title, Ladomir—Faktura, of which Makrolab was conceived as the “third surface.” For the Russian constructivists, “faktura” was a key aesthetic concept contributing to overcoming a mimetic conception of art in favor of a material realism and concrete interaction with the world.⁵⁶ For Peljhan, instead, faktura is a method of materialization, with the aim of overcoming the abstractions of art and science. German art historian Inke Arns has analyzed Peljhan’s work as “retro-avant-gardist” and emphasizes that here the aspect of faktura accounts for the immateriality of electronic and digital media: in the Makrolab project, faktura “designates a method by which Peljhan creates tactile surfaces open to sensorial perception, for the invisible communication spaces that are permeated by immaterial streams of data.”⁵⁷

This impetus of opening up the immateriality of data and the electromagnetic spectrum to human perception and understanding marks the period in the 1990s when digital data were becoming a dominant form of information-based governance. It is shared, around the same time, by artists like Knowbotic Research and Seiko Mikami, whose projects also seek such sensorial materializations not in an isolated human-machine interaction but in a systemic, ecological context.

The “machine” of the Makrolab is conceived not as an abstract principle of generativity and complexity but as an engine of materialization, a medium through which immaterialities are made available to human perception and human agency. Peljhan explicitly places his work in the tradition of Velimir Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, Nikola Tesla, John Cage, and Jack Northrop, juxtaposing the formalist and futurist writer, the suprematist painter, the inventor and technological visionary, the radical composer, and the aircraft engineer.⁵⁸ Peljhan’s artistic practice is the type of constructivist machine art which the Berlin Dadaists were celebrating as “Tatlin’s” in 1920 because of its transgression of the regimes of autonomy in contemporary art. But more importantly, and like Tatlin’s own artistic practice exemplified by the Monument to the Third International or Letatlin, Makrolab is oriented at the social and the productivist aspects of an artistic engagement with technology.

Peljhan’s work is thus both ecological and constructivist. It is based on an assemblage of technological, social, and utopian machine concepts that serve to support an activism that is utopian only in the sense that it strives to push and cross the boundaries of possibility and impossibility. This is neither a conception of the world as machine nor one of technogenesis and the creation of a new world by means of technology, but rather one that seeks to broaden the knowledge about, and a critical interaction with, complex eco-technological environments. Peljhan’s political aesthetics combines technical knowledge and the transgressive strategies of exploration with political agency, engineering, and design.

Knowbotic Research: Networked Ecologies

In contrast to Peljhan’s work, which is grounded on an individual’s ability to act within systemic structures, the work of the artist group Knowbotic Research in the 1990s hinged on a critical exploration of agency in electronic communication networks. Their conception of the “machine” was therefore also less functional than Peljhan’s, and more an attempt to describe the dynamics in the assemblages of technical and social, interactive and networked agents. In the installation Dialogue with the Knowbotic South, this assemblage was geared toward the collection and abstracted representation of environmental measurement data. While this project implied a rather passive model of perception and interaction for exhibition visitors, the group’s later projects constructed more diverse and more complex assemblages of networked agencies and representations.

The project Anonymous Muttering (1996) was presented in urban space and combined the sounds from a live-DJ set with interactions with on-site visitors and with users of a dedicated website (figure 6.5). A computer system “granulated” the DJ sounds and turned them into what appeared a malleable, feltlike acoustic material that could be manipulated, “stretched” and “bent” by handling a silicon interface in the on-site installation, or by clicking and pulling a gridlike structure on the website. The resulting crystalline clouds of noise were projected by a sound system surrounding a rooftop platform that was additionally flooded with stroboscopic lights, creating for the audience standing on the platform an intense sense of disorientation.

Figure 6.5 Knowbotic Research, Anonymous Muttering (1996), installation view, Dutch Electronic Art Festival 1996, Rotterdam. Photo by Jan Sprij. Courtesy of V2_Organisation, Rotterdam.

From this experiment of a networked structure in which human and technical agents could simultaneously interact with the same digital material through different interfaces, and its cacophonic results, Knowbotic Research developed the concept for a series of works under the title IO_dencies (1997–1999) which explored the possibilities of more articulate and more deliberate forms of interaction with the data materials—in this case, collected from urban space analyses launched first in Tokyo and later in São Paulo and the German Ruhr area, and from collaborative and discursive processes among researchers in these different cities. Elaborate exhibition installations provided the audience access to the collected data material and an interactive engagement with it.

The notion of the “machinic” that Knowbotic Research brought into play for these installations was based on Félix Guattari’s concept, which in turn had been developed by the Chilean biologists and second-order cyberneticians Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The concept that the artists used to articulate the question of agency in such assemblages was that of “tendency,” describing a form of impact on movement and directionality that is not definitive but that is also not without impact:

We understand the biological as a form of movement that is characterized by tendencies which lead in one or more specific directions. One should not attempt to control these tendencies from the outside, for instance by searching for rules or evaluating them otherwise. Rather, one might develop modes of agency which are based on the understanding that one forms part of the machinic assemblage. From there it might then be possible to decide whether one wants to cooperate with the dispositive or resist it, whether one wants to take up, amplify, or divert the tendential forces.⁵⁹

Guattari’s concept of the machine relates not to particular technological or mechanical objects, nor to the technical infrastructure or the physical flows of the urban environment. “Machines” in his sense can be social bodies, industrial complexes, psychological or cultural formations, such as the complex of desires, habits, and incentives that create particular forms of collective behavior in groups of individuals, or the aggregation of materials, instruments, human individuals, lines of communication, rules, and conventions that together constitute a factory or administrative institution. For Guattari, machines are assemblages of heterogeneous parts, aggregations that transform forces, articulate and propel their elements, and force them into a continuous state of transformation and becoming.

[The] processual aesthetic paradigm [of ontological heterogenification] works with (and is worked by) scientific and ethical paradigms. It is installed transversally to technoscience because technoscience’s machinic Phylums are in essence creative, because this creativity tends to connect with the creativity of the artistic process. But to establish such a bridge, we have to shed our mechanist visions of the machine and promote a conception which encompasses all of its aspects: technological, biological, informatic, social, theoretical and aesthetic.⁶⁰

Such machines are conceived as multiplicities without unity, crisscrossed by multiple lines of forces—a model that was adopted by Knowbotic Research both for its descriptive potential, and as an aesthetic conception for designing the interfaces for the IO_dencies installations. It suggested a “faktura” of the technological that was not geared, as in Peljhan’s conception, at making tangible and visible the abstract communication and data streams, but a “faktura” that highlighted the friction implicit in technological systems:

What we are interested in is dealing with indeterminacy and ambiguities between the spaces of experience and the data spaces, between technology, perception, and agency. Possibly this movement is part of a biologization of the technological which no longer has to be understood as a system which functions according to specific rules. The principle of the machinic, applied to technology, means that it is furrowed by the tendential, the uncontrollable, and that it only exists in relation to other elements of the assemblage.⁶¹

As their test sites, the late 1990s projects of Knowbotic Research investigated the hybrid ecologies of urban environments. The installation of IO_dencies Tokyo—Questioning Urbanity (1997) used the sociological and situationist mapping of an inner-city area of the Japanese capital as a basis for an interaction that involved gallery visitors, web users, and computers (figure 6.6). Digital information, physical movement, and interaction via a variety of interfaces created a complex mesh of relational agencies. While the data sets and the presence of the visitors were based on their concrete sites and positions in the urban space, the project sought to construct the installation space as a site of action, interaction, and communication:

Figure 6.6 Knowbotic Research, IO_dencies Tokyo (1997), installation view, Hillside Plaza Tokyo. Coproduced with Canon ARTLAB. Copyright © the artists.

We did not want to stage our research into the urban in an independent and virtual space. The goal was not the immersion into a separate environment, but to promote a conscious oscillation between the fields of agency in the real city space and those in the data space. We are not so much interested in the border between electronic and nonelectronic fields, but in their overlaps which require new forms of agency and new forms of work.⁶²

The question of whether human subjectivity can emerge in such assemblages, and what type of agency they enable, crucially came to the fore. Borrowing from Guattari’s conception of the autopoietic dimension of the machinic, Knowbotic Research inquired “whether perhaps, by means of technological machines, it is possible to develop new ways of dealing with one’s desires. What the machinic as a tendency shows is that one does not steer one’s desires, but that they are set free in a structured field where one can observe their nonlinear evolvement. … It allows us as artists to target this point and deal with the multilayered desires by generating operative fields in which it is possible to test the forces and relationships, both individually and collectively.”⁶³

The models of such mappings used in IO_dencies Tokyo included data about car traffic, pedestrians, homelessness, social media infrastructures, real estate speculation, etc., and the exhibition crucially relied on the lived experience of visitors in the sites that were also modeled in the virtual event field. The artistic exploration of the urban as a field of actions was thus also geared to the evaluation of the degrees of freedom of a social space, and the concomitant forms of subjectivation.⁶⁴ Guattari conceived of “becoming” as a form of subjectivation which is in a constant process and which implies a continuous modification, a liquefaction of the subject position which Knowbotic Research sought to model in their installations. Especially with regard to the overwhelming and disorienting experience in the granular sounds and stroboscopic lights of the Anonymous Muttering installation, the artists affirmed: “The schizophrenia of the situation was important to us—poised between this absorption and the awareness of the mediatedness, relationality, and tension between user and machine. A complete dissolution or blending, not knowing any more where I am, does not make sense if this state does not alternate with phases during which I am conscious of this.”⁶⁵

It is noticeable that the systems-theoretically informed works of Haacke, Beuys, and Piene put forward no strong notion of the machine; here, the technical components performed their function without being featured as participating actors. In contrast to these ecological artworks, the projects by Peljhan and Knowbotic Research from the 1990s attempted to address and explain the forces and mechanisms that drive the hybrid ecological systems. For them, the machine was not a technical device or an apparatus of governance, nor a homeostatic feedback and control system like in CYSP 1 or the Colloquy of Mobiles, which are classical works in the spirit of first-order cybernetics. Instead, Peljhan and Knowbotic Research referred to the machine as an engine of processuality and transformation. In that sense, projects like Anonymous Muttering, IO_dencies, or Makrolab can be characterized as works of machine art of second-order cybernetics.

Mikami and Ichikawa: Beyond Subjectivity

If the question of the subject was still critically addressed even by a deconstructive work like Anonymous Muttering, this question was not an issue a few years later for the Japanese artists Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa in their installation Gravicells—gravity and resistance (2004).⁶⁶ The work correlates the physical presence of the visitors with the gravitational forces of the Earth and of communication satellites (figure 6.7, plate 15). It provides visual and acoustic displays of the complex of forces that combines the gravitation of the movement, weight, and acceleration of human bodies and the gravitational impact of telematic technical devices—here, GPS satellites. Importantly, however, the exhibition visitor is represented only as an area of gravitational force, and walking through the installation is an inscription of a body-object into a force field that provides no identitarian feedback.

Figure 6.7 Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, Gravicells—gravity and resistance (2004), installation view. Commissioned by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), Japan. Photo by Ryuichi Maruo. Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.

The Gravicells installation includes a ca. 10-by-10-meter floor made up of white tiles, a bar of white LEDs suspended at 2 meters’ height around the square of tiles, and a large-scale projection screen hanging above the rear side of the square. A field of narrow lines is projected onto the tiled surface from above in consecutive, wavelike scan movements. As one or more visitors step onto the floor surface, these lines shift, the distance between them indicating the weight of the bodies in their particular positions. The lines represent the gravitational force field that enwraps any body on the Earth’s surface. A virtual 3D model constructed by the computer system is displayed in changing perspectives on the large projection screen above. When one of the virtual lines of gravitational force intersects with the virtual representation of the LED bar circumfencing the platform, the LEDs in the physical installation are activated and light up, providing an indication of the three-dimensionality of the gravitational field around the body. A modulating, hissing sound further accentuates this intersection of the virtual and physical models.⁶⁷

Also calculated into the gravitational model are satellites that send GPS signals and that are traced, in the actual exhibition situation, in the sky above the exhibition site by means of an antenna. These orbital objects also influence the gravitational field—though their impact is exaggerated in the Gravicells scenario. In the projected virtual model above the platform, neither the human bodies nor the satellites themselves are visible, but only visualizations of their gravitational effects in the shared space. The installation thus represents different states in which a human body may exist—as an object with a certain weight in a physical space, as a virtual parameter in a conceptual space, and as a subjective experiential body. It is inscribed into a system of forces that is at the same time precise, volatile, and highly abstract, both rational and incomprehensible.⁶⁸

The Gravicells installation resonates with conceptualizations of the human body on the one hand and with ecological conceptualizations of space on the other. The consideration of gravitational forces and the implication of the body points back not only to Stelarc’s Suspension performances⁶⁹ but also to Oskar Schlemmer’s drawings of the force fields into which the human body is inscribed (Bewegungsgesetze des Menschen, 1925, figure 5.7). While Schlemmer conceived this space as striated and continuous, Gravicells suggests a scenario in which gravitation and the mutual influence of different objects—bodies, satellites, the Earth—form a dynamic system.

At the same time, the feedback relations constructed between bodily movements, the tilting of the tiles, and visual and sonic events in the installation’s virtual-real simulations remind us of the feedback systems in the cybernetic art installations by Gordon Pask and Nicolas Schöffer. However, Gravicells creates a systemic space that involves the visitor’s body not as external but as an integral component.⁷⁰ As in the performative installation setting of Anonymous Muttering by Knowbotic Research, Gravicells requires the self-inscription of the interacting human body into an interdependent, techno-ecological system that, however—unlike Mikami’s own Desire of Codes, or Rokeby’s n-cha(n)t—does not speculate about an independent machine subjectivity.

Of course, the forces that ecological artworks like the Weather Cube, Honey Pump, or the Survival Pieces by the Harrisons deal with are physical forces, whereas the ecological installations of Peljhan, Knowbotic Research, and Mikami are based on digital data and coded information about such physical forces and processes of communication. This difference marks an important epistemological shift in ecological art and raises questions not only about an aesthetics of indexicality, but also about the normativity and critical potential of ecologically engaged artistic practices.

Moreover, if we look back at the conceptions of technology in the work of Beuys, Haacke, and Piene, we can see how the understanding of an ecological system has shifted from an external, objectified notion of the technical to a distributed notion. In Piene’s work and similarly in Haacke’s system works from the 1960s, the technical apparatus or installation is an object that operates in front of the human observer. The latter may be entangled through active or passive interaction, but there is a clear ontological distinction that can be drawn between the two. In contrast, the technical installation in Gravicells interfaces between technical infrastructures and natural forces, and places the human visitor to the installation into this matrix of interdependence. The communication-based model proposed by Beuys’s Honey Pump comes closer to such an integrated system in which natural, technical, and social dimensions intersect, even though in the case of the Honey Pump this dynamic interaction is purely metaphorical. Here, the “machine”—if there is one—is not an alien Other, but a mode of existence in which it becomes possible to act and to transform the living environment. Such a plasticity of infrastructural, social, and technical relations was also tested by Knowbotic Research in the IO_dencies series, arriving at highly abstract models of machinic agencies. More clearly than other works of ecological art, Gravicells dispels the concept of a “machine” in favor of a system that aesthetically integrates technical, human, and natural elements and treats them on a single plane, as gravitational forces.⁷¹

Working on Life

In contrast to such deconstructive scenarios in which concepts of agency and subjectivity are supplanted by systemic effects and machinic automatisms, we can, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, observe attempts at a recuperation and affirmation of human agency in technologically informed art practices. The work on living or synthetic materials and systems in bio art is a case in point, as is the Maker culture which combines digital and analog production methods in its redefinition of industrial production and craftsmanship. The practice of bio artists like Eduardo Kac or the group Tissue Culture and Art, working since the late 1990s, marks a decisive shift in the way artists deal with technology, bringing something into the world that is not a concept or a representational form but a new existence, a hybrid techno-biological and living entity.

This shift, closely identified with the increasing medialization of materials as aggregate states of information, had been diagnosed over a decade earlier by Jean-François Lyotard who, in a conversation in preparation for the 1985 exhibition “Les Immatériaux,” explained the changed relation between subject and object through the concept of the “immaterial”:

The concept of the “immaterial” is a somewhat daring neologism. … It only means that today—and this has asserted itself in all areas—the material can no longer be viewed as something that places itself like an object in opposition to a subject. … The effect of the increasing interpenetration of matter and spirit—equally clear in the use of text-processing systems—is that the classical problem of the unity of body and soul is shifting.⁷²

This interpenetration of matter and spirit, and of the technical and the living, brings forth a new conception of the biological that is not a natural but a biotechnical form of living, and the basis for what Foucault conceptualized as biopolitics.⁷³ It points back to Descartes’s seventeenth-century conception of the human as a “thinking machine” and an automaton created by God—a conception that mentions the possibility of creation by humans, though Descartes disqualifies this as inferior to divine creation:

This will not seem at all strange to those who know how many kinds of automatons, or moving machines, the skill of man can construct with the use of very few parts, in comparison with the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and all the other parts that are the body of any animal. For they will regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any such machine.⁷⁴

In his analysis of this famous passage, the Japanese philosopher Sabu Kohso highlights the aspect of makability:

He [Descartes] compares the poorly made automaton with a great natural machine made by God. But if one shifts the focal point away from “who makes,” the question of the creator itself, the idea of “making a better machine” comes to the fore. Then Descartes’s position is not so different from today’s ideal of engineering nature itself. Here arises an inevitable faith in modernity, that is, in making. Whoever made it, a machine is a machine. The maker’s name, whether it is “I,” Tyrell Corporation or God, is not the issue. … What is at stake here is the view to see the self and the world as intentionally made: this is the constructionism that grounds modern science; here, the dichotomy of whether something is man-made or god-made is subsumed.⁷⁵

The will to engineer, to create and to intervene drives the work of contemporary artists, engineers, and designers like Natalie Jeremijenko, Tue Greenfort, Kelly Dobson, or the Tissue Culture and Art group, who affirm a sense of agency that resists subsumption into asubjective ecological systems. These artistic approaches are concomitant with the so-called “Maker” culture, named after a magazine called Make which has been published since 2005 and which has popularized do-it-yourself approaches to electronics, 3D printing, robotics, etc. The self-empowerment of technical amateurs in the face of an increasingly autonomous techno-ecology in the name of the Maker, i.e., the creator God, is not so much ironic, or an irony of fate, but a consequential humanistic response to the refinement of the Cartesian mechanics workshop. The sovereign concept of the Maker sidelines the dependency and subjection of the human-machine relationship, and reinstates a subject as a premodern maker and user of tools.

The three developments of eco art, bio art, and the neo-crafts movement mark aspects of a reconceptualization of technology in which the schema of the apparatus and the dual subjectivation of human and machine are replaced by other forms that continue the tradition of productivism, and may also share its fate. Their analysis lies beyond the scope of our narrative that focuses on the history and aesthetics of machine art.

Observatories of Dusk

In the Russian avant-garde movement, an alternative to the productivist approach that put artists to work was formulated by suprematism and its striving to reach beyond materialism and concrete nature and grasp the spiritual, mystical dimension of reality. The suprematist sublimation of the technological world and its negation of a strong subject position in the face of the modern apparatus-based regimes was instantiated again in two works realized by Marko Peljhan together with the German artist Carsten Nicolai. In Nicolai’s work, nature is usually approached as a structured and generative system that brings forth aesthetic phenomena which can especially be gleaned through scientific observation. Unlike in Peljhan’s work, nature for Nicolai is not a field of strategic operation, but an aesthetic space of crystalline and chromatic order that has a role similar to the role of the computer for artists like Morellet or Molnar, i.e., as a useful source of formal inspiration, and a conceptual motor that compensates the less pronounced authorial position of the artist.

Peljhan and Nicolai collaboratively produced two large-scale installations, polar (2000) and polar m [mirrored] (2010), both of which were presented only once, in exhibitions in Tokyo and Yamaguchi, respectively.⁷⁶ In the two polar projects, Nicolai’s material rationalism and Peljhan’s interest in communication were combined in an exploration of the experiential layering of the natural and the technological environment beyond human perception. The worlds that they refer to are neither algorithmic nor materialist but ecological in the sense of an open and hybrid field of technical, natural, and aesthetic dimensions. The works are romanticist in the sense that both installations seek to open up this field to human experience.

Polar (2000) was based on the metaphor of the ocean in Solaris, the novel by Stanisław Lem that was realized as a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, in which the surface of the ocean on the planet Solaris represents emotions, memories, and thoughts—a planetary-size mind that materializes such memories as ghostlike yet physically present “guests” of the researchers on the space lab orbiting the planet. In Peljhan and Nicolai’s installation, the metaphor was applied to the world of networked data, a matrix that the exhibition visitor could submerge himself or herself into.

A cubic space, lined by semitransparent material onto which images and data graphics were projected from the outside, could be entered by two visitors at a time. The space enabled the exploration of a virtual knowledge environment through a hand-held interface that provided access to a dynamic and networked database system.⁷⁷ Sounds, light, projections, and a temperature conditioner transformed the experience in the space according to the actions of the visitors, and according to the data accessed. In an attempt not dissimilar to Knowbotic Research’s Dialogue with the Knowbotic South, the installation was intended as an immersive interface to the matrix of information in the global electronic networks. Polar also used the image of an uninhabitable polar region as a metaphor of the inaccessibility of data and network environments, which can be visited and experienced only through mediated representations. Both installations also explored the problem of the interface and of the possibility of human agency within such data environments. The approaches of the two installations differed, though, in the sense that Dialogue with the Knowbotic South focused on the abstraction of scientific research data, placing the exhibition visitor at a critical distance from the represented data clusters, whereas polar suggested an immersion into the matrix. As Peljhan and Nicolai describe it: “Basically, we wanted to create an interface between the human body and senses and the matrix, which would, by the sheer presence, let alone the activities of these humans, already transform also the structure of the matrix that is being observed/experienced and of the physical space that is being inhabited during this process.”⁷⁸ This was a cybernetic model of encapsulation which constructed a feedback loop between the presence and interaction of the visitor and the formation and plasticity of the datascape.

Ten years later, Nicolai and Peljhan took up the theme of a representation of the invisible again, this time focusing not on infoscapes and electronic data but on the world of matter and on radiation. The installation polar m [mirrored] inserted the visitor into a space where the radiation and particle events that happen at a level normally not sensed by humans were visualized and sonified (figure 6.8). The exhibition space was filled with the irregular hissing and humming of electronic sounds, enhanced radio static, intersected by short acoustic events, clicks and occasional hard hits, digitally treated to form a tense, continuous soundscape that was ever changing. The space appeared bathed in black and white; the only color appeared in the display of some radio receivers and small LED pilot lights on different sensors.

Figure 6.8 Carsten Nicolai and Marko Peljhan, polar m [mirrored] (2010), installation view. Commissioned by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM). Photo by Ryuichi Maruo. Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.

As on a theater stage, the main elements of the installation were stacked in three layers. The first consisted of three technical apparatuses, each placed on a small black platform. On the left there was a cloud chamber; in the middle a white robotic arm rotated its sensor-armed head, elegantly and inquisitively, among four light-gray granite rocks; and to the right there were three high-frequency radio receivers, together with a Geiger counter placed on its meter-high stand.

The second spatial layer of the installation was made up of 36 small and cubic granite stones, each placed on a dark, transparent Plexiglas plate that was suspended from above. The stones were placed in two symmetrical fields left and right of a central corridor, on each side in three rows of six stones. The stones on the right side all had a relatively rough and untreated surface, while those on the left had been cut into exact and identical 7-centimeter cubes. An electronic Geiger counter sensor was placed on a thin, meter-high stand in the middle of each of the two fields.

The third layer consisted of two almost identical white cubic spaces (both 7 by 7 by 4 meters, the same size as the space in polar, 2000), symmetrically placed and separated from each other by a narrow corridor. The cube frames were covered with white fabric on the four sides and the ceiling. A video projector suspended above each cube projected abstract images of moving white lines and visual static onto the white fabric. The front side of the right cube was half-open, and here it was possible to walk onto the white floor and to see the projected light from inside the cube. The spatial changes of the soundscape appeared to correspond to the movement of the thinner lines, and to other visual events in the projection. The cube to the left was closed on all four sides and could not be entered. The deflections of the projected light passing through the fabric covering the sides of each cube could be seen, as could the symmetry of these deflections between the two cubes.

At the exit of the exhibition space, a video monitor displayed different scales indicating events and changes in the movements of the robotic arm, as well as the intensity of radiation measured by analog and digital Geiger counters and spectrum readings from the three radio receivers. This monitor offered clues to activities and forces which, in the space, the visitors could sense without being able to comprehend them: The cloud chamber was an instrument for making events visible that take place at a particle level. The images projected onto the cubes were taken from this cloud chamber and showed visual interpretations of minute and fully indeterminate events. The radio receivers, connected also to an array of high-frequency antennae on the roof of the YCAM exhibition center, picked up noise from the electromagnetic spectrum. The immersion of the cubes with a sonification of this noise complemented the visual immersion and extended the field of reference from the located particle events in the cloud chamber to the unlocated presence of radio waves. From the material of the stones, finally, radioactive impulses were released at irregular intervals. The Geiger counters, not least the one on the robotic arm, picked up these impulses, and when a defined threshold was reached they were sonified and visualized as short bursts of light and sound, placing the visitor in the cube at the center of these uncontrollable, amplified micro-events.

Polar m [mirrored] presented these forces and fluctuations as a dynamic system which was observed by technical apparatuses and visualized and sonified in an immersive environment. The project does not share the ambition of many works of eco art to use such observations as a basis for devising strategies of intervention for improvement, and to approach an ecological system as something that has been disturbed by humans and that has to be protected and, where, possible, restored. Instead of such an interventionist aesthetics of sustainability, polar m [mirrored] inquires into the possibilities of experiencing the ecology of matter and forces, taking radiation as a token of the boundary between materiality and immateriality, between physicality and information.⁷⁹

Like other works of ecological art, polar m [mirrored] does away with the image of a machine that would either drive the system or form the means by which the system could be worked upon. The installation offered no interactive interfaces through which the visitor could observe and explore the scene and indirectly interfere through his or her bodily presence with the electromagnetic and radiation fields that were measured and represented by the different devices; there is no reflection of the visitor in the installation’s operations.

The only active agent, a last hero of this scenario, is the little robot that inquisitively scans the rocks for signs of radioactivity (figure 6.9, plate 16). This final staging of an apparatus can be taken as symbolic of a technological world devoid of human drivers or pilots, a world in which the machines, as the doubles of humans, dissipate.

Figure 6.9 Carsten Nicolai and Marko Peljhan, polar m [mirrored] (2010), installation detail (robot). Commissioned by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM). Photo by Ryuichi Maruo. Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.

The subsumption of the human and the technological into the ecological eliminates machine love. Beyond the quadrangular structure of apparatus and living being, of subject and machine, and after both their faces have been washed away, the romantic solitude of machines might, an equally disconcerting thought, be replaced by machinic indifference.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted material are by the author.

1. The group of three artists—Christian Hübler, Alexander Tuchacek, Yvonne Wilhelm—worked together as “Knowbotic Research” from 1993, sometimes also using the acronym “KR+cF” (“Knowbotic Research and cultural Formation”). Since 2010, Tuchacek has operated mainly under his own name, while Hübler and Wilhelm continue to work together as “knowbotiq.”

2. Knowbotic Research, “dwtks. developer kit,” in Knowbotic Research, ed., Nonlocated Online: Digital Territories, Incorporations and the Matrix, Medien Kunst Passagen no. 3 (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1995), Vb. For a reflection on the foundations of such simulation models in the mathematical tradition, from Leibniz to Shannon and Turing, and on their epistemological status, see Volker Grassmuck, “Computer Aided Nature in the Turing Galaxy,” in ibid., Va.

3. For a critical differentiation between the concepts of “environment,” “milieu,” and “Umwelt,” see Florian Sprenger, “Zwischen Umwelt und milieu—Zur Begriffsgeschichte von environment in der Evolutionstheorie,” Forum Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte 3, no. 2 (2014): 7–18.

4. See Wernher von Braun, “Man Will Conquer Space Soon: Crossing the Last Frontier,” Collier’s Weekly (March 22, 1952): 24–29.

5. Cited in Joachim Krausse, Your Private Sky. R. Buckminster Fuller, Diskurs (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2001), 263. On Fuller, see also Christina Vagt, “Neighborhood Design: Buckminster Fuller’s Planning Tools and the City,” in Tobias Harks and Sebastian Vehlken, eds., Neighborhood Technologies: Media and Mathematics of Dynamic Networks (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015), 81–98; and Christina Vagt, “All Things Are Vectors. Kosmologie und Synergetik bei Richard Buckminster Fuller und Alfred North-Whithead,” in Tatjana Petzer and Stephan Steiner, eds., Synergie. Kultur- und Wissensgeschichte einer Denkfigur (Munich: Fink, 2016), 233–251.

6. Krausse, Your Private Sky, 260.

7. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969; Zurich: Lars Müller, 2008), 130 (emphases added).

8. See William Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution (1970; New York: Ubu Classics, 2005), 34; cf. chapter 5 above.

9. Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 128–129 (emphases added). For a conception of a machine metabolism, cf. Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines,” in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 690–712: the machine which “consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion” (693).

10. Recent publications on the topic include Andrew Brown, Art and Ecology Now (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), which takes a strongly conservationist stance and places a strong focus on the US scene; in the introduction, Brown traces the history of eco art especially in romanticism and in 1960s and 1970s land art, and describes Fluxus, conceptual art, and institutional critique as the context from which ecological art has grown. See also Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Ine Gevers, ed., Yes Naturally! How Art Saves the World (Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2013); Sacha Kagan, Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013); and the theoretical discourse on ecological aesthetics in Gernot Böhme, Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989); Anja Osswald, “Die nicht mehr schöne Natur. Ästhetik und Ökologie in der Moderne,” Kunstforum International 199 (2009): 104–115. I use the term “eco art” for the normative strand of these practices, while I call the broader engagement with ecological issues and structures discussed in this chapter “ecological art.”

11. Weintraub, To Life!, 9.

12. Ibid., 11.

13. See Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and Kagan, Art and Sustainability, 274. See also William Kaizen, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham, and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 86–106; and Dan Graham, “Subject Matter,” in John Gibson, ed., “Ecological Art” (unpublished, 1969).

14. For an example of how the technical aspects of ecological art are written out of this discourse, see for instance Weintraub’s list of “Eco Art materials” (Weintraub, To Life!, 43–50), which features no technical devices and materials.

15. See http://theharrisonstudio.net/?page_id=806 (accessed October 5, 2014).

16. See Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

17. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. C. Malaspina (1958; Minneapolis: Univocal, 2016).

18. See Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 103; and see chapter 1 above.

19. Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, 109.

20. Edmund Husserl, cited in Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, 110.

21. Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, 103, fn. 118. Cf. Dieter Mersch, ordo ab chao (Zurich: diaphanes, 2013), for a contemporary critique of the modern attachment to mathematics.

22. Marshall McLuhan, “At the Moment of Sputnik the Planet Became a Global Theater in which There Are No Spectators but Only Actors,” Journal of Communication 24, no. 1 (1974): 49. (In fact, as Christoph Neubert and Serjoscha Wiemer point out in “Rewriting the Matrix of Life: Biomedia between Ecological Crisis and Playful Actions,” communication +1, vol. 3, article 6 [2014], 3, the date of Sputnik I’s launch was October 4, 1957.)

23. Félix Guattari, Three Ecologies (London: Athlone, 2000), 52.

24. Ibid., 28. Guattari’s notion of the “three ecologies” has been extended by the German philosopher Erich Hörl into the project of a “general ecology” that addresses the new status of technical objects in the world, which Hörl describes as the “technological condition.” Erich Hörl, ed., Die technologische Bedingung. Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011). Hörl’s hypothesis of a “general ecology” yet begs the question of what an ecological, or cosmopolitical (Stengers), concept of politics might be. Possibly such an “eco-politics” has to be conceptualized in analogy to the “bio-politics” of modernity—a dark vision for the eco-logical age.

25. From the catalog for “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” (1970), cited in Luke Skrebowski, “All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke’s Systems Art,” Grey Room, no. 30 (Winter 2008): 67.

26. Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 31; cf. chapter 3 above.

27. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 31.

28. The piece was first titled Weather Cube, later Condensation Cube, presumably because this more conceptual term better fitted its art-theoretical insertion into the emerging canon of conceptual art; see Caroline A. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” in Jones, ed., Hans Haacke 1967, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011), 11–12. Jones’s catalog text accompanied the 2011 restaging of Haacke’s exhibition at MIT’s visual art gallery in 1967.

29. In an ongoing debate, art historians have been arguing about the relationship between Haacke’s systems-oriented works from the 1960s and the works that he did starting around 1970 that targeted social issues, like his minute analysis of housing speculation in Shapolsky et al. (1971). Whereas Benjamin Buchloh—who was Haacke’s main theorist in the 1970s, eager to separate Haacke’s more recent works from the time when Jack Burnham had influenced the artist’s thinking—posited a “social turn” (Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason” [1988], in Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000], 202–241), art historian Caroline Jones argues that it was difficult to chronologically delimit the systems work from the socially engaged work (Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” 21). She adds: “There is a widespread presumption that Haacke’s systems art was merely the trial run for later institutional critique. I propose instead that [the exhibition] Hans Haacke 1967 looks back to a last, exquisite apogee of techno-utopianism. In 1967, ‘natural’ systems would be captured for art with an elegant minimum of technology in order to eradicate sentiment and contemplate non-human agency” (7). What Jones regards as a “paradox—that mere months before his turn to the social, Haacke was capable of arguing for a systems art that was wholly independent of the humans perceiving it” (11), is taken as a characteristic of Haacke’s work by art historian Luke Skrebowski, who claims: “we rediscover a fundamental continuity in Haacke’s work that is occluded by any accounting of his practice as ideologically split” (Skrebowski, “All Systems Go,” 57). Against the assumption of a social epiphany, Skrebowski argues that Haacke’s interest in systems remained and merely shifted from physical to social and behavioral issues (61). As an example, Skrebowski analyzes Haacke’s unrealized proposal for the “Art and Technology” show at LACMA in 1971, Environment Transplant, in which images from Los Angeles streets would have been live-broadcast into the gallery space in a panoramic projection. Against Buchloh, Skrebowski argues that Haacke’s practice is not split, that there is no contradiction between making political art and systems thinking. Skrebowski affirms the social and political relevance of the technically overambitious project and concludes that “a common conceptual articulation links Manhattan Real Estate Holdings and Environment Transfer: real-time systems” (73).

30. Cited in Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” 15.

31. Ibid.

32. Beuys, cited in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979), 254.

33. Otto Piene, “The Development of the Group ‘ZERO,’” Times Literary Supplement (London, 1964); reprinted in Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, eds., Zero 1–3 (Cologne: DuMont, 1973).

34. See ibid. The journal published on the occasion of Zero’s inaugural exhibition in October 1958 contained, among others, a text by Max Bense. See the reprints with historical commentary and reflective essays in Dirk Pörschmann and Mattijs Visser, eds., ZERO 4321 (Düsseldorf: Richter Fey, 2012).

35. See Manfred Schneckenburger, “Jenseits der Maschinenkunst—Beyond Machine Art,” in Otto Piene und das CAVS, exh. cat., Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe (Berlin: Deutscher Künstlerbund, 1988), 20–24.

36. Piene, “The Development of the Group ‘ZERO,’” 46. (Possibly Piene did not mean “actual technical invention” but “current technical invention,” a mistaken translation of the German aktuell.)

37. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 35.

38. See Judith Wechsler, “György Kepes,” in György Kepes: The MIT Years, 1945–1977 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 7–19. On Kepes’s understanding of cybernetics and his communications with Norbert Wiener and others involved in its development, see Orit Halpern, “Perceptual Machines: Communication, Archiving, and Vision in Post-War American Design,” Journal of Visual Culture 11, no. 3 (2012): 328–351.

39. Schneckenburger, “Jenseits der Maschinenkunst,” 23.

40. See my discussion of this conception of machine art in chapter 1 above.

41. For a comprehensive treatment of Morin’s theory, see Kagan, Art and Sustainability, 153–216. Kagan diligently introduces the systems-theoretical foundations of ecology and eco art from a normative position that seeks to develop a “culture and aesthetics of sustainability.” Among many other examples, Kagan for instance critically engages with the transgenic art projects by Eduardo Kac, and acknowledges that he does not discuss the tactical eco-media work of the US Critical Art Ensemble, or the “technologically oriented work on ecology” of the Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan.

42. Since the early 1990s, Peljhan has always worked with teams of people and constructed several organizations, including his main artistic institution, Projekt Atol, the technical research and development unit of PACT Systems, the INSULAR international telecommunications network, and the Arctic Perspective Initiative. His name therefore stands in for different constellations of people who participate in these projects.

43. For an overview of Peljhan’s projects, see www.ladomir.net and www.arcticperspective.org; information on video works that Peljhan produced in the 1990s, mainly prior to his work on Makrolab, is at www.videodokument.org/peljhan/peljhan.htm (all accessed October 21, 2014). For a critical appraisal, see also Brian Holmes, Coded Utopia: Makrolab, or the Art of Transition (London: Mute, 2007). The “Arctic Perspective” show included the exhibit Piruqsivik, an LED-lit hydroponic garden for use in regions with extreme temperatures and natural light, reminding us of the portable farming projects by the Harrisons in the Survival Pieces (1971–1973).

44. Marko Peljhan, “Krk,” in Rob La Frenais, Gillean Dickie, and Paul Khera, eds., Makrolab (London: Arts Catalyst and Zavod Projekt Atol in association with Tramway, 2003), 46.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid. Around the same time, Stelarc was working on the insectlike vehicular project Exoskeleton. Equally striking is the parallel between Peljhan’s image of the bee and its energy balance and the architectural structure of the Honey Pump, which Joseph Beuys had described as the body of a bee. An early programmatic work by Peljhan, Egoritmi (Egorhythms, 1992, realized at Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana), featured a fully functional beehive through which the public entered. Beuys’s work with insulation materials like felt and fat was also influential for Peljhan’s conception of “insulation/isolation strategies” (Peljhan, private correspondence with the author, December 2015).

47. Peljhan, “Krk,” 46. In another retrospective comment, in 2002, Peljhan speaks about his considerations in the mid-1990s to find an artistic response to the experience of fear and protracted political crises that had torn apart the country he had grown up in, Yugoslavia: “It’s not going to be performance. It’s going to be real. It’s time to sort of infuse reality with our own coding if you want. That’s when the project was really born. It came out of this machinic logic of constructing a vehicle for survival, for work. When somebody asks ‘What is this vehicle actually going to do?’ the answer is well, it’s going to assess the state of the planet, right. So there was all this utopical considerations that were there that were very real for me.” Peljhan, cited in Kodwo Eshun, “Makrolab’s Twin Imperatives and Their Children Too,” in La Frenais, Dickie, and Khera, Makrolab, 11.

48. Cited in Eshun, “Makrolab’s Twin Imperatives,” 10. The concept of “systemic awareness” was also explored in Peljhan’s exhibition “Situational Awareness” (Linz, Austria, 2007), where technical, scientific, and aesthetic aspects of the Makrolab project were presented in a form resembling the documentation of a piece of romantic landscape art, poised between isolation and connection, abstracted natural materials and floating antennas and drones, detailed infoscapes and empty icescapes.

49. Marko Peljhan, “Conversation between Nikolai Jeffs and Marko Peljhan. Self-Cancellation as Artistic Consummation: Urban Colonisation, Dialogisation, Reclamation, Conceptualisation” (1997), in Zdenka Badovinac, ed., Form-Specific Art, exh. cat., Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2003), 120; cf. Marko Peljhan, “The Art of Gathering Information about the Art of Warfare,” in LF4S Materiali-Writings (Ljubljana: Projekt Atol, 1996), a booklet that accompanied the project Ladomir-Invoice: Fourth Surface—the Surface of Contact! Peljhan has connected the activist agenda of his art practice to situationism and Guy Debord’s critique of the spectacle. In a discussion of the 1996 locative art project UCOG-144 (Urban Colonisation and Orientation Tool) he emphasized the necessity to distance oneself from co-optation into the spectacle, an operational form that requires “constant adjustment, recognition, attack, retreat, transformation, observation, adjustment, attack, retreat” (Peljhan, “Conversation between Nikolai Jeffs and Marko Peljhan,” 121). See also Honor Harger, “Unmanned Aerial Ecologies: Proto-Drones, Airspace and Canaries in the Mine,” manuscript of lecture for Cinematics seminar “Look Up in the Sky!,” Brussels, April 16, 2013, accessed October 20, 2014, http://honorharger.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/unmanned-aerial-ecologies-proto-drones-airspace-and-canaries-in-the-mine, on Peljhan’s unmanned aerial vehicle projects.

50. Eshun, “Makrolab’s Twin Imperatives,” 10.

51. Ibid., 6–7.

52. Ibid., 9. Similarly, Fraser MacDonald, one of the artist researchers on the 2002 mission of the Makrolab in Scotland, casually called it a “machine for looking and living” (in La Frenais, Dickie, and Khera, Makrolab, 17), and Lisa Parks and Ursula Biemann, on the same occasion, referred to it as “an earthbound satellite” (34).

53. Marko Peljhan, “Insulation/Isolation Proceedings,” 1997, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.ladomir.net/documenta-X-lecture-1997-1. Cf. also a comment of Peljhan from 2002, cited in Eshun, “Makrolab’s Twin Imperatives,” 10.

54. See Peljhan, “Krk,” 48.

55. Ibid.; reference to a statement from 1917 by Velimir Khlebnikov and G. Petnikov, “We are the Government of Planet Earth.” Cited in La Frenais, Dickie, and Khera, Makrolab, 1.

56. See Peljhan, “Conversation between Nikolai Jeffs and Marko Peljhan,” and the discussion of faktura in constructivism in chapter 2 above.

57. Inke Arns, “Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel,” PhD dissertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2004, 329, accessed December 6, 2015, http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/docviews/abstract.php?id=20894. Cf. Marko Peljhan, “Information on Pact, Collaborators and Projekt Atol,” in Projekt Atol, eds., LADOMIR-ФАКТУРА: Četrta površina—površina stika! Ritmično-scenska podobe. Materiali (LADOMIR-ФАКТУРА: Fourth surface—the surface of contact! Rhythmical-scenic structure. Writings) (Ljubljana: Projekt Atol, 1996), 16.

58. See the announcement for a program Peljhan co-curated at the Dutch Electronic Art Festival in Rotterdam in 2004, accessed May 7, 2016, http://v2.nl/events/the-evening-of-marko-peljhan/.

59. See Knowbotic Research, unpublished interview with the author, January 1997.

60. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992; Sydney: Power Publications, 1995), 107.

61. See Knowbotic Research, unpublished interview with the author, January 1997.

62. Ibid. For this concept of encounter and overlap in human-machine interaction, cf. Lucy A. Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

63. Ibid.

64. It might be interesting to compare the conception of interaction and subjectivity described here with those implied in the machine performances by Stelarc; around the same time, Stelarc was developing the Parasite performance in which the movements of the body were triggered by image data downloaded at random from the Internet and simultaneously projected, as images, onto the body, and in which the question of prosthesis and interface, subjectivation of the machine and desubjectivation of the body, is raised distinctly differently than in the installations by Knowbotic Research.

65. Knowbotic Research, unpublished interview with the author, January 1997. Later works by Knowbotic Research have gradually abandoned the strongly technical iconography of these works in favor of more performative scenarios in which the questions of knowledge and agency, of visibility and identity, are articulated not in virtual spaces and on-screen interfaces but in relation to the human body and its presence in urban environments. See Andreas Broeckmann, “The Naked Bandit in the Theatre of Visibilities: Control, Attention, and Performance in Recent Projects by Knowbotic Research,” in Andreas Broeckmann and Stefan Riekeles, eds., Knowbotic Research: Room for Maneuver (Ljubljana: Škuc Gallery, 2006), 11–17. In their own discourse, Knowbotic Research have since around 2007 all but abandoned the notion of the machinic, in line with their move away from a systems-theoretical framing of their work, suggesting that there is a continuity in their work since the 1990s insofar as it explores the active and passive transformation of subjectivities.

66. Gravicells marks Mikami’s passage from the focus on human perception, through a more systemic thinking in which the human participant plays but a partial role, to the dispositive of Desire of Codes which was inspired by political reflections on the power of surveillance technologies in determining contemporary identities, and by a sense of powerlessness in the face of complex and uncontrollable machine systems; see the discussion in chapter 3 above.

67. Gravicells uses mainly visual and sonic metaphors for the gravitational forces, not physical ones. The tilting of the tiles, when a visitor steps on them, is rather subtle. Mikami explored this effect in an early version of the project, then entitled Gravity and Resistance, Version 1.0 for anechoic room (2003) which included a round, tilting platform for the visitor to stand on.

68. As in other works by Mikami, the exhibition presentation of Gravicells also includes monitor displays that provide explanations of the technical setup. In the catalogs, the diagrams and technical descriptions always play a prominent role. Mikami comments on this explicit use of technology: “My role as an artist is not to express an idea or opinion about a certain thing (or the world), but to construct an alternative environment where the body and technology interact. And if there is anything that I would hope the audience to know about my work beyond their actual experience of involving themselves in it, that is my use of technology—the kinds of technology that I used for this and that purpose.” Seiko Mikami, Molecular Informatics: Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking (Málaga: Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación, 2004), 8.

69. See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Moment, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), on aspects of gravitation in Stelarc’s work, esp. 104–107, 111–112, 114, 124.

70. Two other historical reference pieces for Gravicells are Hans Haacke’s Photo-Electric Viewer Programmed Coordinate System (1966–1968) and James Seamwright’s Network III (1971); in Haacke’s piece, the position of the visitor in the space was tracked by infrared sensors and mirrored by coordinate lamps in the walls, whereas Seawright took the position data from weight-sensitive floor sensors which activated lights in the ceiling; cf. Thomas Dreher, “Der Beobachter als Akteur in Happenings und umweltsensitiven Installationen. Eine kleine Geschichte der re- & interaktiven Kunst” (1996), accessed December 6, 2015, http://dreher.netzliteratur.net/4_Medienkunst_Text.html.

71. If the concept of the machine is as gender-stratified as we speculated in chapter 1, then it might not be mere accident that this model of entangled forces comes from a woman artist.

72. Lyotard, in Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and François Burkhardt, Immaterialität und Postmoderne, trans. M. Karbe (Berlin: Merve, 1985), 25 (my translation to English); see also Antonia Wunderlich, Der Philosoph im Museum. Die Ausstellung Les Immatériaux von Jean-François Lyotard (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006), 87, 95–96.

73. This concept reaches its next level of abstraction with the leveling of the distinction between living and nonliving entities, suggesting a form of “eco-politics” in which government regulates by exerting political power over all aspects of existence. The internalization of such eco-political regimes is described in the critique of affect, such as in the media ecological considerations of Marie-Luise Angerer, or those of Luciana Parisi who describes the “affective” transfer of machinic-ecological regimes from the outside to the inside. In response, Anna Tuschling has pointed out that the reconsideration of the notion of affect coincided with increasing technical capabilities for facial recognition.

74. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 139.

75. Sabu Kohso, “This Thing that Sees: A Reflection on ‘Molecular Informatics’ by Seiko Mikami,” in Kazunao Abe and Yukiko Shikata, eds., Seiko Mikami: Molecular Informatics. Artlab 6 (Tokyo: Canon ARTLAB, 1996), n. pag.; referencing Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

76. See http://special.ycam.jp/polar-m/ (accessed May 7, 2016). Both works were curated by Yukiko Shikata and Kazunao Abe; polar formed the last commission by the Canon ARTLAB, while polar m [mirrored] was commissioned by the Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media (YCAM).

77. See the video documentation at http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/polar/video/1/ (accessed December 6, 2015).

78. Marko Peljhan and Carsten Nicolai, “Polar: An Essay on the Project Polar” (2002), accessed December 6, 2015, http://v2.nl/archive/articles/polar.

79. A different approach has been taken by Martin Howse, whose project Earthcodes (2014) speculates about the abstract computational dimension of geology; cf. Robert Smithson’s description of his own early works as “abstract geology” in “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Artforum, September 1968; reprinted in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 82–91; see Etienne Turpin, “Robert Smithson’s Abstract Geology: Revisiting the Premonitory Politics of the Triassic,” in Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, eds., Making the Geologic Now (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012), 173–178.

Epilogue: Fantasies of Destruction

“Each period of technological development, with its instruments and machines, brings its share of specialized accidents, thus revealing en negatif the scope of scientific thought.”¹ The French architect and critic of technology Paul Virilio thus famously introduced his idea of a “Museum of Accidents” that would exhibit for every period of technological development its concomitant accidents, like the derailment of the locomotive, the crash of the automobile, or the meltdown of the nuclear power station. Virilio saw this idea as a contribution to raising awareness of the risks inherent in technological innovation, and he concluded that, in a sense, this Museum of Accidents already existed, namely in the form of television where all forms of possible accidents are continuously shown, analyzed, and repeated.²

The human fascination with the destructive potential of technical apparatuses and systems, the gleeful observation of technical failure and the frustration it elicits, and a certain desire for the destruction of machines seem integral to the modern conception of technology. In light of an understanding of the machine as a mythical sibling of the human subject, a stand-in for the apparatuses that subjectivate living beings, such visions of destruction take on two distinct forms: one that is directed at the apparatus and seeks to wrest the living beings free from their submission to technological power structures, or a form of destruction that temporarily suspends the machine’s status as a technological Other, only to reinstate it with the closure and repair that follows the moment of the accident. The crucial distinction between these two possible paths is whether the accident is conceived as a moment of affirmation, or as one of transformation in which the very processes of subjectivation, of becoming-subject and of becoming-machine, are reinvented. And thus also, whether the accident, or the destructive moment, implies the possibility of thinking the machine differently, and thus also thinking the human subject differently.

Probing the transformative potential of particular artworks or performances that have staged or included such accidents and moments of rupture, we can determine which of these works are oriented against the structures of subjectivation that the apparatuses they derive from engender, and ask which paradigms of technology they articulate and whether they offer alternatives to them. We see Filippo Marinetti emerge from the maternal ditch into which he has just driven his car, immediately recovered and back in control behind the steering wheel. We see Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York titillate the art audience with the self-destruction of an artwork, the wasteful consumption of potential capital value, a consumption that would not for a moment threaten the stability of the oedipal triangle of museum curator, artist, and audience. And we see the macho machine theater of the performances by Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Laboratories battle it out against each other, affirming a safe ontological distance between the martial automata and the thrilled and untainted onlookers. Like the love for machines, the eroticized pleasure in accidents appears to be a distinctly male myth and ritual which repeats the affirmation of the subject in the moment of technical failure. These are bachelor machines that bind the human subject to the exoskeleton of technological apparatuses, even if, lurking behind the surface of affirmation, the twitching light of transformation flickers in the corner of the eye.³

We can sense this flickering in the project for an “Auto-destructive Art” that the German-British artist Gustav Metzger developed in the early 1960s and that Metzger himself sees as unrealized.⁴ In the years from 1959 to 1966, Metzger attempted to lay the foundations for what he hoped would become a movement of Auto-destructive Art. He published several manifestos that described the practical and ideological aspects of such an art. In them, he rejected the recuperation of art by capitalism and consumerism, and sought to reconcile the generative potentials of technology with the threats that he, along with many others, identified in particular in the military and nuclear technologies of the time.

Metzger’s activities of those years and the list of people with whom he crossed paths read like a summary of our account of machine art.⁵ An important initial impulse came from Metzger reading the manifestos of the futurists and the Dadaists at the end of the 1940s, and from seeing an exhibition of the MERZ-Dadaist Kurt Schwitters in 1958. Metzger combined Dada’s iconoclasm with a growing concern about cybernetics and the threat of nuclear war which led him to a lifelong engagement in antiwar and anti-nuclear-power activism. Metzger was absorbed in the work of the Independent Group, especially their exhibition “This Is Tomorrow” of 1956, and his own first exhibited works—a series of machine-folded Cardboards—resonated with the Duchampian readymade, and with Wolf Vostell’s contemporaneous work that was critical of television and consumer culture. Duchamp would feature again in a lecture that Metzger gave in 1962, where he juxtaposed Man Ray’s photograph of the dust gathering on the Large Glass with a vision of nuclear annihilation. Metzger experienced Jean Tinguely’s lecture-performance in November 1959 at the ICA in London on “Art, Machines and Motion,” held alongside a presentation of the Metamatic and Cyclomatic drawing apparatuses, and he had heard in advance of the autodestructive Homage to New York machine performance that Tinguely staged at MoMA in March 1960, encouraging Metzger to organize his own destructivist event in London a few days earlier. In the summer of that year, Metzger organized an event that was introduced by Jasia Reichardt, art historian and future curator of the “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition. In Metzger’s 1961 manifesto “Auto-Destructive Art Machine Art Auto-Creative Art” there is an echo of Barr and Johnson’s machine aesthetic formalism of the 1930s (“certain machine produced forms are the most perfect forms of our period”), as well as a reference to the cybernetic, feedback-controlled artworks of his time by artist-engineers like Schöffer or Pask: “The immediate objective is the creation, with the aid of computers, of works of art whose movements are programmed and include ‘self-regulation’. The spectator, by means of electronic devices can have a direct bearing on the action of these works.”⁶ William Burroughs and Brion Gysin were in the audience at a presentation Metzger gave in Cambridge that autumn; and his lecture in 1962 at Ealing College of Art, on “Auto-Destructive Art, Auto-Creative Art: The Struggle for the Machine-Arts of the Future,” which Metzger later regarded as his most refined and important public statement of that period, took place in the context of Roy Ascott’s cybernetics-inspired “Groundcourse.” Many of the politically minded performance and Fluxus artists of the 1960s contributed to the “Destruction in Art Symposium” (DIAS) that Metzger organized in 1966, and in 1969 Metzger contributed, as the secretary of the London-based Computer Arts Society, to the annual meeting of the New Tendencies movement in Zagreb.

Metzger was, and still is, an angry advocate of an antiwar and antinuclear politics, famous for his rabid anticapitalist attacks on the art world. When, in his 1961 manifesto, he decreed that a new integration of art with the sciences and technology had to be reached, he hinted at the need for a fundamental reconsideration of what “technology” meant in the technological society. But he never got round to conceptualizing “machine art” as such a mode of reconsideration, despite its being mentioned in the manifesto’s title. What Metzger came up with, speaking about “machine art” in his 1962 Ealing lecture, was a new productivism, when he remarked that “Machine Art” would lead to “the entry of the artist into factories and the use of every available technique from computers downwards for the creation of works of art,” while, as he put it, the image multiplication of Auto-Creative Art would go to prove “beyond doubt that only the collaboration of the artist and technology and the use of machine forms can give us certain experiences we need.”⁷ There is no indication in statements like these that machines, factories, and technology itself might have to be rethought, and rebuilt, in order to become productive in the sense of a new, transformative creativity.

In another manifesto of 1960, Metzger wrote:

Auto-destructive art mirrors the compulsive perfectionism of arms manufacture—polishing to destruction point. Auto-destructive art is the transformation of technology into public art. The immense productive capacity, the chaos of capitalism and of Soviet communism, the co-existence of surplus and starvation; the increasing stock-piling of nuclear weapons—more than enough to destroy technological societies; the disintegrative effect of machinery and of life in vast built-up areas on the person.⁸

Metzger denounced the destructive apparatus of the military-industrial complex and of the Cold War antagonism, and he hinted at the critical aspect of subjectivation when pointing to “the disintegrative effect of machinery … on the person,” but he never got to the point where he would address the corollary of this observation and plan an effective strike on the structures that construct machines and subjects. Instead in his work he went on to shore up the ruins of a society in the grip of the mass media and the danger of mass destruction, and to devise, from around 1966, the Liquid Crystal Light Projections whose infinitely transforming, amorphic color fields tried to give an image of what an autocreative, unpredictable, variable and generative art might contribute.⁹

Almost fifty years later, Herwig Weiser’s installation Lucid Phantom Messenger (2010) appropriated liquid crystal display technology in order to offer a vision of what such a transgression of the technological apparatus might mean (figure 4.14, plate 9). Weiser conceives his works in the lineage of experimental films—whether they are realized in the material, granular form of the zgodlocator installation (figures 0.4, 0.5), or in the Lucid Phantom Messengers’s wild crystallizations,¹⁰ or in the quantum dots of Ambiguous Cut into Space of Conjecture (2010–2012), thrown into turbulence by kinetic movement, disruptive ultrasound signals, and LEDs strobing flashes of complementary colors. These are installations—based on the deconstruction of the image apparatus and its materials—that demonstrate the unbridled generation of images in the sense of Metzger’s autocreative art. Yet by reinventing the medium through which these images are conveyed, Weiser also questions the technical dispositif, the apparatus of image creation, and thereby also the technological condition of such a machine-based image production. Of the other artistic examples discussed here, Weiser’s contraptions might therefore form the most radical challenge to the modern dual construction of subject and machine.

In contrast, Metzger’s vision of a machine art that would serve to transform the tendencies of autodestruction into tendencies of autocreation remained unfulfilled. But this unrealized vision may well be indicative of an impossibility that lies at the basis of the formation of the machine and of the subject. Can a disconcertingly loud live set by the Japanese noise artist Merzbow, the disorienting experience of the Anonymous Muttering installation by Knowbotic Research, or the disruptive screen interfaces by JODI do more than scratch the surface of this formation, like an instance of slapstick in a movie by Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin which animates the conflictive encounter of machine and human, in their case, as a form of humor? Despite all the celebration of death, of deterritorialization, and the desire for attaining the body without organs, will the machine in the machine art of the twentieth century ever have been something other than a sign of loneliness and detachment from the apparatuses that made humans what they were?

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quoted material are by the author.

1. Paul Virilio, “Museum of Accidents” (1986), Public, no. 2 (Toronto, 1989), 81.

2. Ibid., 85. See also V2_Organisation, eds., The Art of the Accident (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998), and the V2_Organisation’s “Manifesto for the Unstable Media” (1986) in V2_Organisation, eds., Book for the Unstable Media (’s-Hertogenbosch: Stichting V2, 1992), 42, originally published in the Dutch daily newspaper, De Volkskrant, on 31 December 1986.

3. We could speculate about the destruction of the killing machine in Franz Kafka’s novella “In the Penal Colony” (1914), which does not affect the visiting narrator but is fatally transformative for the officer who, so long as the legal apparatus allowed him to, used to operate the machine.

4. See Metzger, quoted in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Gustav Metzger: The Conversation Series (Cologne: Walther König, 2008), 11.

5. For the following listing, see Andrew Wilson, “Gustav Metzger’s Auto‐Destructive/Auto‐Creative Art: An Art of Manifesto, 1959–1969,” Third Text 22, no. 2 (2008): 177–194. Cf. also Justin Hoffmann, “The Invention of Auto-Destructive Art,” in Sabine Breitwieser, ed., Gustav Metzger: History, History (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2005), 19–39. See also Justin Hoffmann, Destruktionskunst. Der Mythos der Zerstörung in der Kunst der frühen sechziger Jahre (Munich: Silke Schreiber, 1995); Kristine Stiles, “The Story of the Destruction in Art Symposium and the ‘DIAS Affect,’” in Breitwieser, Gustav Metzger: History, History, 41–65, on the motif of destruction in art since the 1960s, and on what Stiles calls the “DIAS affect”; and Sophie O’Brien et al., eds., Gustav Metzger—Decades: 1959–2009, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London (London: Koenig Books, 2009).

6. Quoted after facsimile in Wilson, “Gustav Metzger’s Auto‐Destructive/Auto‐Creative Art,” 185.

7. Wilson, “Gustav Metzger’s Auto‐Destructive/Auto‐Creative Art,” 190–191.

8. Quoted in ibid., 185.

9. See O’Brien et al., Gustav Metzger—Decades, 48–53.

10. See chapters 1 and 4 above.

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Index

Abramović, Marina, 170

Accident, 42, 57, 79, 207, 255–256, 274n29, 282n92

Aerial reconnaissance, 133, 160, 306n97

Affective, 170, 180, 212, 215, 238–239, 327n73

Affordance, 65, 153, 157, 170, 186, 305n85

Agamben, Giorgio, 28–29, 265n71

Albers, Anni, 39, 142

Albers, Josef, 142

Algorithm, 20, 45, 85, 89–97, 108–110, 114, 120–123, 127, 133–134, 141–148, 162, 249, 286–287n4, 287n7, 289n30

Althusser, Louis, 19, 28, 156

Anders, Günther, 262n34, 268n92, 286n129, 309n32

Android, 196, 202, 219, 264n47

Angerer, Marie-Luise, 327n73

Antheil, George, 72–73, 260n15, 281n86

Anthropomorphism, 22, 60, 92, 100, 113, 116, 135, 159–160, 186, 194, 217, 231, 266n73, 278n62, 294n80, 310–311n46. See also Mechanomorphism

Apparatus, 17–24, 28–30, 32–34, 84, 92, 95–96, 119, 126–127, 133–135, 140, 144, 149–157, 178, 210–213, 230–231, 249, 253, 255–258, 262n34, 265n71, 270n112, 309n27

Arctic Perspective Initiative (API), 324n42

Arns, Inke, 239

“Art and Technology” (exhibition), 52, 228, 323n29

Artaud, Antonin, 200–201

Ascott, Roy, 49, 102–103, 234, 257

Asendorf, Christoph, 289n33, 290n40

Ashby, W. Ross, 96

Associative (aesthetics), 42, 53, 59–68, 71–72, 82, 84, 126, 138, 234

Auto-destructive art, 51, 79, 82, 117, 256–258, 272n12, 283n105

Automata, 22, 32, 54, 85, 202, 264n47, 266n73, 272n136

Automatic (aesthetics), 11, 24–25, 27, 42, 54, 59, 79, 82–86, 89–90, 93, 97, 108, 110, 117, 126–128, 134, 138, 144, 195, 223, 234, 247, 262n32, 284n111, 293n76

Automobile, 42, 47, 50, 54–57, 60, 72, 82, 204–205, 207, 226, 231, 255, 273n21, 274n29

Autonomous (aesthetics), 1, 8, 18–20, 24, 26, 28, 43–44, 54, 84–85, 89–91, 93–100, 106–107, 115–123, 126, 152, 171, 204, 207, 212, 223, 228, 231, 237–240, 248, 286n129, 294n80

Avraamov, Arseniy, 64

Babbage, Charles, 21, 39, 262n35, 264n53, 270n111, 273n18

Bachelor machine, 36–38, 70–71, 77, 80, 113, 200–201, 256, 269n102, 269n105, 269n107, 270n113, 314n82, 314n84

“Bachelor Machines” (exhibition), 37, 53, 269n105

Baecker, Ralf, 115

Baginsky, Nicholas, 294n84

Balla, Giacomo, 60

Banham, Reyner, 101, 207, 272n7

Barker, Tim, 304n75

Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 12–17, 23, 50, 72–73, 80, 84, 115, 256, 261n16, 273n13, 284n109

Barthes, Roland, 128

Bauhaus, 80, 136, 145, 186–187, 233, 290n42

Beaucamp, Eduard, 194, 261n22

Beer, Stafford, 292n64, 292n65

Bell Laboratories, 49, 79, 102, 295n85

Belting, Hans, 126, 298n8

Benjamin, Walter, 57, 191

Bense, Max, 143–144, 207, 213, 303n69, 323n34

Bergson, Henri, 155

Bernstein, Nikolai A., 186

Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 106–107, 289n33, 293n68

Bertillon, Alphonse, 165, 287n12

Bettelheim, Bruno, 92, 266n78, 310–311n46

Beuys, Joseph, 224, 228, 230–234, 244, 247, 324n46

Biederman, Matthew, 236

Bigelow, Julian, 95–96

Billeter, Erika, 261n22, 276n44

“Bio-Adapter,” 205–207, 209, 213

Bio art, 169–170, 247–249

Biomechanics, 65, 186, 189

Biopolitics, 248, 322n24

Birkhoff, George D., 143–144, 303n69

Blindness, 131–132, 165, 194

Blumenberg, Hans, 22, 229

Boccioni, Umberto, 59, 195

Body without organs (concept), 199–202, 210, 213, 217, 258, 313n74, 314n92

Boehm, Gottfried, 127, 141, 148, 298n8, 298n11, 298n14, 302n59

Boissier, Jean-Louis, 286n1

Bolognini, Maurizio, 1, 6, 115–116, 296n101

Braidotti, Rosi, 219

Brancusi, Constantin, 195, 261n16, 302n61

Braun, Wernher von, 225

Bredekamp, Horst, 126, 132–133

Breer, Robert, 84, 85, 89, 283–284n106

Brown, Andrew, 321n10

Brucher, Rosemarie, 307n7

Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 57–58, 61, 64, 323n29

Burckhardt, Martin, 21, 112–113

Burden, Chris, 170

Burnham, Jack, 53–54, 94, 97–98, 106–107, 230–231, 233–234, 280n81, 285n125, 289n33, 293n66, 293n71, 323n29

Burroughs, William, 207, 209, 213, 226, 257

Cage, John, 102, 240, 284n111, 304n75

Calder, Alexander, 49, 73, 74, 101, 195, 290n42

Cameron, Dan, 217

Camfield, William, 68–69, 273n21, 278–279n66, 280n82

Campbell, Jim, 152, 305n82

Canales, Jimena, 299n23

Canguilhem, Georges, 22–26, 38, 295n94

Čapek, Karel, 33, 65

Capsule. See Encapsulation

Car. See Automobile

Carels, Edwin, 155

Carrouges, Michel, 36–37, 200, 203, 269n102, 315n82

Catts, Oron, 169

Cavell, Stanley, 96–97, 122

CAVS (Center for Advanced Visual Studies), 15–17, 233

César, 54, 82

Chadwick, Helen, 171

Chatonsky, Gregory, 85–86, 108, 286n129

Childs, Lucinda, 102

Clough, Patricia, 214, 219

Computer software, 90, 92, 108, 123, 145, 270n113

Constable, John, 54

Constructivism (art movement), 14–17, 49–51, 57–66, 69, 74, 80, 84–85, 107, 191, 194, 204, 234–240, 275n35, 277n58, 304n75

Couchot, Edmond, 119

Crary, Jonathan, 149, 163, 210, 213, 295n94, 304n76

Critical Art Ensemble, 324n41

Crotti, Jean, 69

Cyberfeminism, 35, 39–41

Cybernetic art, 97–108, 110

Cybernetics, 19, 21, 23–27, 34, 38, 43, 49–50, 94–108, 110, 113–114, 119, 131, 169, 182–184, 196, 202, 206–212, 223–227, 231, 234, 242, 244–246, 250, 256, 261n22, 266n73, 286n129, 288n22, 288n23, 288n24, 289n33, 314n92, 315n93, 317n122, 324n38

“Cybernetic Serendipity” (exhibition), 52, 85, 94, 102–106, 256–257, 273n16, 288n21, 292n60, 292n65

Cyborg, 38–40, 169, 181, 185, 196, 200–203, 209, 217–219, 270n115, 271n128, 278n62, 314n92, 314n93

Dadaism, 9–11, 14, 17, 49–51, 59–60, 62, 66–70, 82, 146, 240, 256, 259n1, 270n115, 278n63, 278–279n66, 279n74

Dammbeck, Lutz, 293n71

Daniels, Dieter, 37, 270n113

Daston, Lorraine, 163, 307n104, 314n84

Dean, Max, 109, 116–119, 294n79, 296n103

Deleuze, Gilles, 19–21, 36, 53, 163, 199–203, 311n46, 314n82, 317n127

Delvoye, Wim, 113, 169, 170, 215–217, 219, 319n141, 319n146, 319–320n147, 320n150

De Maria, Walter, 227

Denker, Christian W., 217

Destruction, 33, 56, 68, 79, 112, 119, 140, 170, 224, 233, 237, 255–258. See also Auto-destructive art

Dittmer, Peter, 110–113, 287n7

Dobson, Kelly, 248

Documenta, 15, 160, 232–233, 239

Doesburg, Theo van, 72, 100, 142, 145, 302n61

Duchamp, Marcel, 36–37, 49, 51, 53, 68–71, 80, 84, 107, 113, 149–150, 152, 200, 234, 256, 269n102, 270n113, 273n16, 279n73, 280n76, 280n77, 280n81, 282n91, 284n109, 305n79, 320n150

Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand, 219

E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), 49, 52, 273n13, 285n124, 289n33, 296n101

Eco art, 224, 227–234, 249, 253, 272n2, 319n146, 321n10, 321n14, 324n41

Ecology, 20, 31, 42–45, 86, 90, 106, 108, 145, 160, 168, 206, 221–253

Eco-politics, 322n24, 327n73

“Electra” (exhibition), 53, 98, 273n16

Elsenaar, Arthur, 169, 219

Embodiment, 38–39, 119, 160, 163, 203

Encapsulation, 169, 196, 203–209, 215, 229, 250, 315n96, 316n110

Environment, 18, 20, 31, 34, 44, 49, 84–85, 93, 97–98, 100–101, 106–109, 134, 145, 148, 163, 170, 173, 182–183, 185, 195–196, 202–208, 210, 213–214, 217, 223–253, 316n110, 320n3, 327n68

Environment (art form), 4, 74, 101, 107

Ernst, Max, 69, 278n62, 279n72, 279n73, 279–280n74, 291n53

Error, 157, 293n76, 304n75

Eshun, Kodwo, 238

Esposito, Elena, 287n7

Export, Valie, 171, 307n7

Faktura, 57–58, 80, 239, 242, 275n34, 275n35, 304n75

Farocki, Harun, 128–133, 165, 298n12, 299n16, 306n97

Feedback, 84, 94–96, 101–104, 106, 131, 133, 167, 171, 173, 179–180, 182–183, 202, 208, 210, 212, 217, 226, 231, 234, 244–246, 250, 257, 285n125, 291n56, 294n84, 297n107, 297n4

Feminism, 39–40, 56, 171, 203, 315n95. See also Cyberfeminism

Fillìa, 60–61

Flusser, Vilém, 203, 207–209, 315n96, 316n116

Fontana, Lucio, 141, 233

Formalism (aesthetics), 17, 42, 50, 59, 71–73, 76–77, 80, 84, 100, 126, 136, 146, 231, 234, 239–240, 256, 260n15, 279n71, 282n96

Förster, Heinz von, 19, 262n13, 292n64

Foster, Hal, 279n73, 279n74, 299n16

Foucault, Michel, 28, 114, 184, 248

Fried, Michael, 107

Friedrich, Caspar David, 119

Froning, Hubertus, 65

Fuller, Matthew, 158

Fuller, R. Buckminster, 54, 225–227, 283

Futurism, 11–14, 17, 42, 47–49, 53, 55–57, 59–61, 65, 69–70, 72–74, 82, 84, 190, 202, 237, 256, 267n83, 272n136, 273n19, 273–274n22, 274n29, 276n43, 278n60, 281n83

Gabo, Naum, 14, 65, 261n16, 302n61

Gabriel, Ulrike, 210, 214, 318–319n137

Galison, Peter, 94–96, 119, 163, 297n107, 307n104, 314n93

Gan, Aleksei, 58, 65, 275n35

Gastev, Aleksei, 24–25, 31, 65, 184–186, 189, 194, 205, 277n58, 310n39, 310n42

Gender, 34–41, 56, 170–171, 203, 256, 270n113, 270n115, 315n95

Giedion, Sigfried, 25, 101, 273n21, 291n53

Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian, 24, 31, 184–185, 194–195

Glitch, 293n76, 304n75

Goodall, Jane, 85, 309n33

Götz, Karl Otto, 301n51

Gough, Maria, 62, 276n47, 277n58

GRAV (Groupe de Recherche Audio-Visuelle), 303n66

Gravity, 168, 183, 199, 201, 226, 231, 245–247, 309n32, 327n67, 327n69

Greenfort, Tue, 248

Grosz, George, 9, 50–51, 66, 278n63

Guattari, Félix, 19–21, 36, 53, 145, 199–203, 229–230, 235, 242, 244, 263n36, 299n22, 311n46, 313n74, 313n75, 314n82, 314n84, 315n95, 322n24

Günther, Gotthard, 18–20, 23, 25–27, 30, 47, 85, 184, 261n23

Günther, Ingo, 159–161

Gysin, Brion, 257

Haacke, Hans, 52–53, 84, 107–108, 224, 230–234, 237, 244, 247, 285n124, 285n125, 319n146, 322n28, 322–323n29, 327n70

Hagner, Michael, 26, 183

Hamilton, Richard, 49, 50, 69, 101, 207, 291n53

Hansen, Mark, 126, 128, 320n151

Haraway, Donna, 38–41, 202–203, 219, 271n128, 314n93

Harrison, Newton and Helen Mayer, 224, 228, 247, 319n146, 324n43

Hausmann, Raoul, 9, 15, 66, 90, 194, 270n115

Hayles, N. Katherine, 25, 35, 119, 256n58

Heap, Jane, 50, 72, 260n14

Heartfield, John, 9, 50–51, 66

Heizer, Michael, 227

Helmholtz, Hermann von, 229

Hershman Leeson, Lynn, 39

Hesse, Eva, 69

Hill, Gary, 302n59

Hindemith, Paul, 311n48

Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig, 82, 142, 145, 302n54

Hobijn, Erik, 170, 307n6

Höch, Hannah, 66, 270n115

Hodges, Andrew, 262–263n35

Hollowness, 169, 173, 181–182, 194, 206–208, 210, 217, 313n74, 313n75

Hörl, Erich, 26, 183, 288n33, 322n24

Horn, Rebecca, 39, 282n96

Hosokawa, Shuhei, 213

Howse, Martin, 328n79

Hultén, K. G. Pontus, 32, 42–43, 47–54, 76, 78–85, 94, 234, 272n7, 273n13, 278n63, 282n91, 283n106, 284n109. See also “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age”

Hunter, Simon, 195

Husserl, Edmund, 229

Huyssen, Andreas, 57

IAAA (Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam), 320n151

Ichikawa, Sota, 235, 245, 309

Ihnatowicz, Edward, 105–106, 109, 292n65, 297n4

Ike, Toshifumi, 195

Image (in art), 9–11, 39, 66, 68–71, 100, 121–122, 171–173, 199, 249, 251, 257–258, 286n129, 287n7, 296n102, 298n8, 298n11, 298n14

Image (as medium), 35, 43, 45, 87, 123–165, 196, 209, 237

Immaterial, 84, 160, 219, 230, 239–240, 248, 253, 290n47

Independent Group, 50, 101, 225, 256, 289n33

“Information” (exhibition), 53, 288n20

Information aesthetics, 90, 97, 143–144, 289n33

Ingold, Tim, 260n6

Interaction, 1, 4, 25–26, 84, 91, 93, 102, 104–113, 134, 146, 156–158, 168, 173, 184, 195, 208, 213, 219, 221, 224, 230–231, 234–235, 239–247, 250, 264n42, 285n125, 318n131, 326n64

Interactive art, 43, 54, 84, 89, 91, 93–94, 97, 103–113, 122, 123, 126–127, 148, 153, 181, 212–214, 240–242, 253, 286n1, 294n80, 294n82, 296n101

Invention, 11, 16, 18, 21, 40, 44, 47, 59, 73, 77, 102, 114, 136, 152, 157, 194, 201, 212, 233, 255, 258, 266n73, 271n129, 303n63

I/O/D (artist group), 145

Ioganson, Boris, 277n58

Jarry, Alfred, 36, 280n82

Jeremijenko, Natalie, 248

JODI (artist group), 32, 145–146, 258, 304n75

Johnson, Philip, 12, 17, 50, 72–73, 80, 256

Johnston, John, 299n22

Jones, Amelia, 179, 313n72, 314n84

Jones, Caroline A., 231, 322n28, 323n29

“Junggesellenmaschinen/Les Machines célibataires.” See “Bachelor Machines”

Kac, Eduardo, 247, 324n41

Kafka, Franz, 36, 328n3

Kagan, Sacha, 324n41

Kahn, Fritz, 186

Kandinsky, Wassily, 65

Keenan, Thomas, 133–134, 298n15, 300n38, 301n47

Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 54, 117

Kepes, György, 15, 233, 293, 306n97, 324n38

Khlebnikov, Velimir, 61, 65, 237, 239–240, 274n29, 325n55

Kiesler, Friedrich, 65, 82, 277n60, 285n122, 304n76

Kikauka, Laura, 294

Kinetic (aesthetics), 17, 42, 54, 59, 73–82, 84, 89, 98, 105, 109, 115–116, 126, 135–138, 145, 223, 234, 258, 293n76

Kinetic art (genre), 15, 47–49, 73–82, 105, 146, 195, 227, 233, 260–261n15

Kittler, Friedrich, 114, 287n5, 298n11, 309n37

Klapheck, Konrad, 69, 280n75

Klee, Paul, 128, 191, 278n65, 298n14

Kleist, Heinrich von, 219

Klüver, Billy, 49, 52, 79–80, 102, 283n106, 284n108

Knowbotic Research, 85, 221–224, 234–235, 240–247, 250, 258, 318–319n137, 320n1, 326n64, 326n65

knowbotiq. See Knowbotic Research

Kohso, Sabu, 212–213, 248, 317n127, 318n132

Koons, Jeff, 320

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 267n83

Kraftwerk (music band), 32

Krämer, Sybille, 132–133, 300n36, 300n38, 303n63

Krauss, Rosalind E., 298n14

Kroker, Arthur and Marielouise, 85, 179–180

Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 61, 190–191, 274n29

Kuehn, Gary, 302n61

Laban, Rudolf von, 312n57

Laboria Cuboniks, 40

Lacan, Jacques, 263n36, 267n83, 299n23, 313n75, 314n92, 317n127

La Mettrie, Jules Offray de, 22, 168, 186

Le Corbusier, 98, 272n7, 302n61

Leeker, Martina, 311n46

Léger, Fernand, 51, 72–73, 82, 194, 260n15, 281n86, 281n89

Lem, Stanisław, 249

Lester, Gabriel, 306n100, 308n14

Lewis, C. S., 31

LeWitt, Sol, 157, 302n61

Life, 14, 19, 23, 33, 51, 54, 56, 65, 68, 74, 85, 113, 158, 160, 201, 204, 206, 217, 221, 224, 226–227, 239, 247–249, 296n103, 320n150

Lissitzky, El, 51, 57–58, 62, 65, 169, 189, 190–194, 278n62

Loneliness. See Solitude

Love. See Machine love

Lovelace, Ada, 21, 39, 270n111

Lukács, Georg, 268n55

Lyotard, Jean-François, 247, 264n42

Machine, 6, 17–30, 44–45, 95–97, 113–115, 181, 230, 258, 263n38, 264n42, 313n75

Machine aesthetics, 42, 53–54, 57–86, 93, 97, 108–122, 125–126, 129, 138, 157–165, 195, 234, 256, 293n76

“Machine Age” (exhibition), 14, 50, 72, 260n14

Machine art, 6, 9–17, 29–30, 44–45, 50–52, 57, 65, 230, 256–258, 260–261n15

“Machine Art” (exhibition), 12–14, 50–51, 72–73, 77, 80

“The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” (exhibition), 42, 47–54, 58, 60, 66, 73, 77–78, 82, 84, 94, 103, 106, 231, 273n16, 276n48, 278n62, 278n65, 280n75, 282n95, 283n105, 283n106, 284n117, 285n124. See also Hultén, K. G. Pontus

Machine imaginaire, 142–145, 148, 302–303n63, 303n71

Machine love, 30–36, 55, 58, 61, 62, 77, 79, 253, 256, 267n83, 268n91, 268n92, 280n82, 282n92

“Les Machines célibataires.” See “Bachelor Machines”

Machine vision, 126–132, 136, 159, 161, 298n12, 299n16, 299n23, 304n76. See also Operational images

Machinomorphism, 35. See also Mechanomorphism

Maciunas, George, 291n56

Mack, Heinz, 233, 283n106

Maire, Julien, 138–140, 153–157

Makrolab, 234–240, 245, 325n48, 325n52

Malevich, Kazimir, 65, 74, 141, 190–191, 194, 203–205, 207, 209, 240, 274n29

“Man Machine and Motion” (exhibition), 50, 101, 207

Manovich, Lev, 132–133, 299–300n30

Manzoni, Piero, 320n150

Marey, Étienne-Jules, 70, 184, 194–195, 297n3, 301n48

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 11, 42, 53, 55–57, 60, 72–73, 82, 207, 255, 274n29, 275n42, 279–280n74

Marker, Chris, 141, 302n56

Marks, Laura, 287n3

Marshall, Jennifer Jane, 71

Martín, Daria, 1–2, 4, 6

Marx, Karl, 19, 22–24, 195, 263n36, 264n53, 286n129, 321n9

Massumi, Brian, 180, 196–197, 199, 201–203, 313n73, 313n75

Maturana, Humberto, 19–20, 145, 227, 242

McHale, John, 101, 225, 226

McLuhan, Marshall, 33–34, 210, 229

McShine, Kynaston L., 53, 288n20

Mechanomorphism, 22, 23, 35, 49, 60, 68, 71–72, 84, 92, 113, 186, 194–195, 217, 234, 280n82, 310n46. See also Anthropomorphism

Mega-machine, 18–19, 61, 209, 230, 261n16, 264n45, 265n71

Menzel, Adolph, 55

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 170, 318n132

Mersch, Dieter, 266n73, 322n21

Merzbow, 258

Metzger, Gustav, 256–258, 272n12

Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 51, 65, 186–187, 189

Mikami, Seiko, 39, 44, 85, 120–123, 128, 169–170, 210–214, 219, 224, 240, 245–247, 297n108, 305n79, 309n32, 317n127, 318n133, 319n137, 326n66, 327n67, 327n68

Mimesis, 31, 44, 89, 160, 170, 173, 186, 217, 239, 272n136. See also Anthropomorphism; Mechanomorphism

Mitchell, W. J. T., 126, 298n8

Moholy-Nagy, László, 80, 82, 90, 100, 107, 136, 233, 275n34, 284n117, 285n118, 285n120, 285n122, 290n42, 290n44, 290n47, 306n97

Moles, Abraham, 143

Molnar, Vera, 142, 144–145, 148, 249, 302n63, 303n64, 303n65, 303n71

Mondrian, Piet, 141

Monet, Claude, 54

Morellet, François, 141–142, 145, 249, 282n96

Morin, Edgar, 235, 324n41

Morton, Timothy, 69, 228

Mosolov, Aleksandr, 281n86

Mumford, Lewis, 19–20, 33, 61, 261n16, 265n71, 276n44, 302n61

Munster, Anna, 170

Münsterberg, Hugo, 24, 65, 184–185, 277

Museum of Modern Art, New York, 12, 47–53, 74, 79, 94, 103, 115, 256, 278n65, 284n109, 285n124, 288n20

Musil, Robert, 92

Muybridge, Eadweard, 195, 297n3

Nake, Frieder, 143–144

Naming, 27, 87–89, 128

Nature, 14, 22, 26–27, 32–33, 38, 40, 60–61, 65–66, 70–71, 119–120, 159, 163, 190, 221–225, 227–230, 233, 248–249, 264n42, 264n45, 274n29, 275n34, 281n89, 302n61

Nees, Georg, 143

Network, 1, 8, 38–39, 41, 44, 85, 91, 93, 104, 109, 115–116, 122, 145, 174, 179, 182–183, 187, 202, 209, 213, 221, 224, 234, 236, 240–241, 249–250, 309n33, 324n42

Newman, Barnett, 141

New Objectivity (art movement), 69

New Tendencies (art movement), 103, 257, 303n66, 303n71

New York City, 49, 68, 79

Nezvanova, Netochka, 145

Nicolai, Carsten, 249–252, 319n137

Niederberger, Shusha, 289n30

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 266n82

“9 Evenings” (performance project), 52, 102

Noll, Michael, 143, 294n82, 304n71

Northrop, Jack, 240

Objectivity, 18, 100, 143, 163, 199, 281n89, 282n96

Oldenburg, Claes, 49, 54, 82, 280n75

Operational images, 43, 128–134, 163, 298n15, 299n23, 300n35, 300n36

Operations research, 95, 299n23

Orlan, 39, 171

Ozenfant, Amédée, 272n7

Paik, Nam June, 52–53, 84–85, 136, 140–141, 273n16, 292n60, 296n103

Paladini, Vinicio, 60, 72, 260n7

Panamarenko, 260n6

Pannaggi, Ivo, 60, 72, 260n7

Paolozzi, Eduardo, 101

Parisi, Luciana, 327n73

Pask, Gordon, 85, 103–104, 106, 109, 127, 196, 234, 246, 257

Peljhan, Marko, 224, 234–242, 244, 247, 249–250, 319n137, 324n41, 324n42, 324n43, 324n46, 324–325n47, 325n48, 325n49

Pennebaker, D. A., 283n106

Penny, Simon, 109, 292n61

Pevsner, Antoine, 14, 65, 277n56

Philips (company), 98, 289n37

Photography, 35, 43, 80, 100, 118, 122, 132–133, 136, 141, 150, 152, 156, 160–163, 184, 195–196, 210, 225

Pias, Claus, 26, 34, 114, 289n33, 304n75, 310n38, 312n57

Picabia, Francis, 49, 68–71, 79, 84, 90, 122, 234, 273n16, 278n62, 278–279n66, 279n67, 279n71, 279n73, 280n82, 291n53

Piene, Otto, 15, 101, 107, 224, 230, 232–234, 237, 244, 247, 283n106

Pilot, 207, 213, 226, 253, 274n29, 314–315n93

Popitz, Heinrich, 262n32

Pound, Ezra, 51, 73, 260–261n15, 281n86

Power, Nina, 40–41

Prampolini, Enrico, 11, 15, 60, 72, 260n7

Prieberg, Fred, 272n136

Productivism, 57–58, 65, 107, 239–240, 249, 257, 275n35

Promethean shame, 262n34, 268n92

Prosthetics, 26, 33–34, 38, 41, 122, 171, 176, 179, 182, 185, 194–196, 201–202, 205, 210, 213, 299n16, 318n136, 326n64

Radical Software (journal), 301n51

Radical Software Group, 145

Randolph, Lynn, 271n128

Rathenau, Walter, 92

Raunig, Gerald, 21, 283n36

Rauschenberg, Robert, 49, 79, 82, 102, 304n75

Reck, Hans Ulrich, 37, 269n105, 270n113

Reichardt, Jasia, 52, 94, 256. See also “Cybernetic Serendipity”

Roberts, Lawrence G., 132

Robot, 1, 6, 30, 33, 40, 44, 65, 79, 84, 109, 116–123, 128, 162–163, 171–176, 182–183, 185–186, 196, 202, 209, 219, 221, 248, 250–253, 264n47, 266n73, 268n91, 272n136, 277–278n60, 292n60, 294n79, 294n80, 294n84, 296n103, 299n16, 306n100, 308n14

Robotics. See Robot

Roch, Axel, 295n85

Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 58, 65, 80, 204, 275n35

Rodin, Auguste, 195

Rokeby, David, 6–8, 25, 42, 85, 87–94, 104–106, 113–116, 123–125, 127, 159, 161–163, 246, 286n1, 287n7, 297n1, 297n3, 297n4, 302n61

Rosen, Margit, 109

Rosenblueth, Arturo, 95, 113

Roussel, Raymond, 36, 280n82

Ruiz Gutierrez, Tania, 39

Russolo, Luigi, 60

Rylan, Jessica, 41

Sawday, Jonathan, 264n45

Scha, Remko, 219, 320n151

Schamberg, Morton Livingston, 69

Scheler, Max, 31, 267n83

Schlemmer, Oskar, 65, 169, 186–191, 194–196, 246, 278n62, 311n48, 312n57

Schmidgen, Henning, 20, 201, 263n36, 311n46, 313n75, 314n98

Schmitt, Antoine, 145–146, 149

Schneckenburger, Manfred, 15, 17, 233–234

Schneemann, Carolee, 171

Schoenerwissen, 145

Schöffer, Nicolas, 85, 89, 97–102, 127, 196, 234, 246, 257, 273n16, 283n100, 289n33, 289n37, 290n38, 290n40, 290n41, 290n42, 292n60

Schwitters, Kurt, 65, 68, 82, 256

Scientific management of labor, 24–25, 31, 169, 184–186, 189, 195, 203–204, 210, 310n38, 310n39, 310n42

Seck Langill, Caroline, 296n34

Sekula, Allan, 133

Shannon, Claude, 115, 284n108, 295n85, 320n2

Sheridan, Sonia, 286n1

Simon, John F., 149

Simondon, Gilbert, 228

Skrebowski, Luke, 323n29

Smirnov, Andrey, x

Smithson, Robert, 107, 224, 227, 275n38

Snow, Michael, 298n12

Software. See Computer software

“Software” (exhibition), 52, 94, 98, 107, 273n16, 293n71, 328n79

Software art, 32, 145–149, 293n76

Solimano, Sandra, 296n101

Solitude, 44, 85–86, 91, 108, 122, 253, 258, 286n129

Sonfist, Alan, 224, 228, 272n2

Soul, 23–24, 27, 62, 66–68, 92, 204–205, 208, 217, 248, 315n100

Spengler, Oswald, 72, 277n58

Staehle, Wolfgang, 159, 161

Steichen, Edward, 133

Stelarc, 43, 85, 168–184, 194–210, 215, 217–219, 246, 269n107, 307n7, 308n10, 308n11, 308n14, 309n27, 309n32, 309n33, 312n63, 313n72, 313n74, 313n75, 314n84, 314n92, 315n95, 315n96, 318n134, 319n139, 319n140, 324n46, 326n64

Stepanova, Varvara, 39, 58, 65, 80, 204

Sternfeld, Ary, 196, 202, 219, 313n69

Stibitz, George R., 96, 119

Sublime, 14, 86, 119–120, 159, 237, 275n38, 307n7

Suchman, Lucy, 264

Suprematism, 65, 74, 190–191, 203–204, 240, 249, 277n58

Survival Research Laboratories, 256

SymbioticA, 169

Symbolic (aesthetics), 12, 17, 21, 27, 29, 37, 42, 53, 59, 68–71, 108, 126, 224, 232, 234, 270n111, 291n53, 293n76

Systems aesthetics, 52, 90, 94, 97, 106–108, 227, 230–231, 237, 285n125, 289n33, 292–293n66

Szeemann, Harald, 37, 53

Tarabukin, Nikolai, 277n58

Tarkovsky, Andrei, 249

Tatlin, Vladimir, 9–11, 14–16, 50–51, 61–68, 82, 102, 107, 204, 240, 259n1, 259n4, 260n6, 276n48, 277n58, 279n74, 284n116, 285n118

Tatlinism, 9–11, 65, 259–260n6, 277n58

Taylorism, 23, 169, 184–185, 204, 277n58

Terrier, Liliane, 286n1

Tesla, Nikola, 240

“This Is Tomorrow” (exhibition), 50, 101, 256

Tinguely, Jean, 23, 32, 49, 51, 53, 73–84, 90, 94, 98, 101, 122, 135, 195, 233, 256, 273n16, 281n90, 282n91, 282n92, 282n96, 283n100, 283n104, 283n105, 283n106, 284n111, 284n115, 288n21, 292n60, 293n76, 301n50

Tissue Culture & Art, 314n92

Tomas, David, 163, 273n19, 307n103

Tomme, Niels van, 299n16

Tudor, David, 102, 296n101

Turing, Alan M., 19–21, 25, 30, 35, 37, 95, 262–263n35, 270n113

Turner, William, 54, 273n19

Turrell, James, 227

Tuschling, Anna, 327n73

Uecker, Günther, 101, 223, 283n106

Ulrichs, Tim, 315n96

Umanskij, Konstantin, 9, 11, 51

Uncanny, 89, 96–97, 119–120, 122, 134, 297n107

Universal Machine, 20, 37, 95, 262n34, 270n113, 303n63

Varela, Francisco, 19–20, 242

Vasarely, Victor, 107, 182n92

Vasulka, Steina, 39, 136, 140

Vasulka, Woody, 136, 140

Vaucanson, Jacques, 47, 54, 117, 217

Verhaeren, Emile, 274n22

Vertov, Dziga, 41, 62, 64, 156, 163, 298n12, 299n16

Victory over the Sun (opera), 190, 274n29, 278n62

Vision machine. See Machine vision

Vostell, Wolf, 141, 256

Waldhauer, Fred, 102

Wallace, Isabelle Loring, 217, 320n147

Walter, W. Grey, 296n103

Warnke, Martin (computer scientist), 303n69

Watanabe, Minoru, 195

Weaving, 39–40

Weibel, Peter, 110

Weintraub, Linda, 227, 229

Weiser, Herwig, 3–6, 44, 158–159, 258

White, Norman, 294n80, 296n103

Whitehead, Alfred North, 102

Wiener, Ingrid, 39

Wiener, Norbert, 25–27, 94–96, 101, 113, 119

Wiener, Oswald, 37, 169, 203, 205–206, 209, 213, 269n105, 269n106, 269n107, 270n111, 270n112, 270n113, 297n107, 315n96, 324n38

Wiener Gruppe, 205

Willats, Stephen, 103

Winkler, Hartmut, 287n5

Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 213, 318n134, 318n136

Worthington, Arthur, 307n104

Yamaneko, Hayao, 141

Zero (artist group), 101, 232–233, 283n106, 323n34

Zinoview, Peter, 294n84

Žižek, Slavoj, 318n133

“Die Zwanziger Jahre” (exhibition), 261n22, 276n44

Plate 1 László Moholy-Nagy, Sketch of a Score for a Mechanized Eccentric (1922–1925), collage. Courtesy of Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

Plate 2 David Rokeby, The Giver of Names (since 1990), installation view. Photo David Rokeby. Copyright © the artist.

Plate 3 David Rokeby, Seen (2002), installation view. Photo by David Rokeby. Copyright © the artist.

Plate 4 Julien Maire, Exploding Camera (2007), installation view. Copyright © the artist.

Plate 5 Julien Maire, Exploding Camera (2007), sequence of screenshots. Copyright © the artist.

Plate 6 Jim Campbell, Church on Fifth Avenue (2001), installation view. Copyright © the artist.

Plate 7 Julien Maire, Memory Cone (2009), installation view. Copyright © the artist.

Plate 8 Julien Maire, Memory Cone (2009), projection detail. Copyright © the artist.

Plate 9 Herwig Weiser, Lucid Phantom Messenger (2010). Copyright © the artist.

Plate 10 David Tomas, Behind the Eye Lies the Hand of William Henry Fox Talbot (1984), installation view. Photo by Alex Neumann. Copyright © the artist.

Plate 11 El Lissitzky, New One (Neuer), from the series Victory over the Sun (Sieg über die Sonne), Kestner Mappe, sheet 10 (1923). Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Museum Folkwang Essen—ARTOTHEK.

Plate 12 El Lissitzky, Globetrotter (in Time) (Globetrotter (in der Zeit)), from the series Victory over the Sun (Sieg über die Sonne), Kestner Mappe, sheet 5 (1923). Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Museum Folkwang Essen—ARTOTHEK.

Plate 13 Seiko Mikami, Molecular Informatics—Morphogenic Substance via Eye Tracking, Ver. 2 (1996). Coproduced with Canon ARTLAB. Photo by Jan Sprij. Courtesy of V2_Organisation, Rotterdam.

Plate 14 Marko Peljhan, Projekt Atol/PACT Systems, Makrolab markIIex, Campalto Operations (2003), installation view, Campalto Island, Biennale di Venezia, 2003. Photo by Steve Dietel. Copyright © Projekt Atol/PACT Systems.

Plate 15 Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, Gravicells—Gravity and Resistance (2004), installation view. Commissioned by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), Japan. Photo by Ryuichi Maruo. Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.

Plate 16 Carsten Nicolai and Marko Peljhan, polar m [mirrored] (2010), installation detail (robot). Commissioned by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), Japan. Photo by Ryuichi Maruo. Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.