Machinology

Jasia Reichardt gave a talk of media archaeological proportions; of machines and art where machines infiltrate not only the imagination of artists as objects, but the sexual desires of consumer societies, machines are as much imagined as they are real — they inhabit border zones of the modernist imagination. Whereas I enjoyed a lot her picture arsenal — for example the ones from Grandville’s L´Autre monde (1844) — the talk was not as consistent as I hoped. In addition, to the very good question of how would she reconsider her 1971 Computer in Art her answer was quite disappointing. She seemed to get lured into modernist themes concerning profound vs. superficial by pointing out how easy making art with computers nowadays is — everyone can do an image now with them; where suddenly, to my surprise, computer art seemed to be all about image/visual based arts. What happened to code art, sounds, complex understandings of uses and reuses of software and hardware?