Jean Tinguely's writing machines

(above) Jean Tinguely's "Meta-Matic No. 6" (1959) making random curve lines that gradually form a pattern that resembles a huge finger print of the thumb.

(below) This is a machine that keeps repeating the same pattern like someone signing continuously; Tim Lewis' "Auto-Dali Prosthetic" made 2000)



Met once again Jean Tinguely's works early January at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt's "Kunstmaschinen, Maschinenkunst" (roughly, "art-machine/machine-art). (There's always something exciting going on every time I visited Schirn. Also on was a show "Turner-Hugo-Moreau" which has one of the best display notes I've seen.)

The "machine' exhibition also featured works by more than a dozen of other artists such as Damien Hirst, Olafur Eliasson, Angela Bulloch, Rebecca Horn, Lia, and so on.

So much I'm obsessed with "writing machines," for me it is not so much the individual works that matter, but more the exhibition's general persuasion to the public. The introductory synopsis (curatorial statement) contends that even when machines are involved to do a lot of the job, it's the artist's ideas that make the machines work.

While being sympathetic with this intention (which would probably have worked with the Writing Machine Collective exhibition that I completed), the rhetoric reminds me of many mainstream US movies such as "Artificial Intelligence" (and many many -- emphasized), in which the narrative arguement is to state -- at the end of a whole film's showing off of science and technology -- that it is humanness that rules... If there's a more superior robot, it is one that has started to shed its machine quality and begin to feel and act humanly. I often feel frustrated with this kind of reductionist compromise. I am not anti-human (though I'm critical of of humanist rhetoric), but I think the courage to fully embrace machines and allow our hypothetical thinking to touch the limits of our imagination for the capability of machines is one form of moral courage. What What I am wondering is: do we always need to rush to settle back on the grand finale of human superiority in such a great hurry? Can we slow down, take more time to engage viewers/audience/visitors with the paths of automatic process and its components, the complexity of the evovlment, as well as the amazement it generates?

This leads to another level of discussion -- the role and meaning of "automatism" in arts. In the machine-arts/art-machines I saw in the exhibition, there is a distinction to draw between machines that work with the logic of mechanical repetition and reproduction of the same act in huge quantities, and those that follow a range of randomness with constraint, producing more or less unpredictable steps within a certain range of set patterns.

Many of the works shown in the exhibition were from the 1950s and 1960s, before computing art became a prominent category. These "machines' are about mechnics. "Assembly line," the metaphor for factory works, is the material form of a few works. Another session of the exhibition shows computer code-based programmed works. The first half is informative: the idea of randomness, "art at the push of a button" and other features we now attach to computer programmed works are now in place. For the second half, highlighting interactivity, the works are actually rather simple for those who write codes to generate graphics on the computer. Something is missing for me -- the kind of complexity I expect the computer would bring. It is surely the problem with the selection of works. The computing session does not really demonstrate the leap or the qualitative distinction between mechanical machines and digital (computing) machines.