Machine Art in the Twentieth Century

331 Pages·2016·12.304 MB·English

by  Andreas Broeckmann

© 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
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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 I 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)
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
10 987654321
Contents
Series Foreword vii
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue: First Encounters 1
1 Introduction: The Phantom of "Machine Art" 9
2 Toward the Art and Aesthetics of the Machine 47
3 Algorithm Machine 87
4 Image Machine 123
5 Body Machine 167
6 Ecology Machine 221
Epilogue: Fantasies of Destruction 255
Notes 259
Bibliography 331
Index 367
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 com­
puted, 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.
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!
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.
Three further scenes from Daria Martin'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 encoun­
ters with the technical apparatuses into elemental events. They have been filmed in spaces
2 Prologue
Figure 0.1
Maurizio Bolognini, Sealed Computers (Computer sigillati) (since 1992), installation view, Atelier de la
Lanterne, Nice, France, 1997. Copyright © the artist.
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 spe­
cies. In the exhibition, the film is looped so that the sequence of scenes, each a few minutes
long, repeats endlessly. Martin'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 appar­
ent indifference of the machines?
First Encounters 3
Figure 0.2
Daria Martin, Soft Materials (2004), 16 mm film, 10 minutes 30 seconds, film still (female dancer with
blimp). Copyright © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London.
Let's move on. Huddled on a large wooden platform which has been built into an exhibi­
tion 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 materi­
als. 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.
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
4 Prologue
Figure 0.3
Daria Martin, Soft Materials (2004), 16 mm film, 10 minutes 30 seconds, film still (male dancer with
pipes). Copyright © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London.
up, after which the different materials are separated for reuse. From such postindustrial mate­
rials, 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 con­
trols 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 Martin'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 Martin's laboratories can easily be
mistaken for living or sentient entities that interact with their human visitors, Weiser con­
fronts 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
First Encounters 5
>
4
.4
1
Figure 0.4
Herwig Weiser, zgodlocator (2000), installation view, Trinitatiskirche, Cologne. Copyright © the artist.
6 Prologue
Figure 0.5
Herwig Weiser, zgodlocator (2000), detail. Copyright © the artist.
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 par­
ticular 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 ques­
tion 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 pos­
sible 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 Martin'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
First Encounters 7
Figure 0.6
David Rokeby, n-clta(n)t (2001), installation view, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts.
Photo by Don Lee, Banff Center. Copyright © the artist.
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.
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 resyn­
chronize and gradually return to the unisonic chant, oblivious to any human presence, or
8 Prologue
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 sepa­
ration between their sphere and the sphere of human interlocutors. The programmed com­
munication 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.