This research project explores the idea that new things can be learned in interaction with devices outside of us. In my practice as a media-artist, the notion of a 'Dialogue with Machines' refers to a back-and-forth between devising and observing. Implicit in this back-and-forth process is a relative absence of hierarchy between verbal thinking and making, and between the maker and the made, which is why one can learn from it.
Practical work in this research project involved building analogue electronic machines and generating moving images with them. These activities focused on the room full of historical and newly built electronic analogue computers that has been my studio for the past few years. The main artistic outcome of this was the film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59”, a feature-length abstract animated science fiction film that looks at the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits during the Cold War.
In the reflective part of my artistic research, I attempt to uncover possible sources of the agency of machines. In the long essay "Liberate the Machines !", I give theoretical and historical context to the making of my film #59. It also narrates my personal experience of a dialogue with machines in the process of producing this film and the tools that were necessary for making it. These two strands come together in a view on the relation between humans and machines and the role of media-archaeology in investigating this relation.
Under the title "Seven Devices" I wrote seven media-archaeological essays. In them, I discuss topics from the history of electronic analogue computing, animated automata, cybernetics and self-organisation, looking for different approaches to reflect on the agency of machines.