Week 22: Machine Project

Hi Everyone,

This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.

This week we’ll be talking with Mark Allen from Machine Project in LA.

http://www.machineproject.com/

Is Plausible Artworlds about machines? Though weird sounding, that may well be the right question to ask. There has been a lot of writing recently about machines — drawing on Marx’s unconventional Fragment on Machines and Deleuze & Guattari’s more orgiastic speculations on (desiring) machines — suggesting that machines are neither mere prostheses of our bodies (unlike tools) nor mere engines of alienation, but rather factors of communication, creating unthought-of connections and couplings. In other words, machines like artworlds, machines like us do not extend or replace artworlds and bodies but make new arrangements… well, plausible.

Machine Project is a non-profit presentation and educational space investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, food, and whatever else humans like to do. The Project occupies a storefront space in Echo Park and more broadly operates as a loose confederacy of artists producing shows at locations ranging from the Santa Monica beach to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Though the diversity and scale of a city like LA gives Machine Project a virtually inexhaustible energy source, our broader cultural moment seems ripe with the desire to build machines, work together and create new and hybrid forms of culture. This suggests there is a need to rebuild and retool, from the ground up and in a grassroots way, an infrastructure for spaces and communities that allow people to come together around a life of ideas. Machine Project has always been about encouraging people – machines like us, or even drastically unlike us – to make culture for themselves and encourage them to want to experience it together.