File:Rekveld Joost Dialogues with Machines 2024.pdf

Dialogues with Machines 2024.pdf

by Joost Rekveld

"This dissertation constitutes the written part of the artistic research project Dialogues With Machines. In Joost Rekveld's 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. The texts in this dissertation are attempts to uncover possible sources of the agency of machines. In the long essay 'Liberate the Machines !', a theoretical and historical context is given to the making of Rekveld's 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. It also narrates Rekveld's personal experience of a dialogue with machines in the process of producing this film and in devising the analogue computing tools that were used for making it. These two strands come together in a view on the interaction between humans and computing machines and the role of media-archaeology in investigating this relation, interpreted as an example of the mutual construction of humans and their technology. Under the title 'Seven Devices', Rekveld wrote seven media-archaeological essays. Topics are discussed from the history of electronic analogue computing, animated automata, cybernetics and self-organisation, each constituting a different approach to reflect on the agency of machines."

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