Machines of meaning and values: An art machine

 

Machines magnify, augment, accelerate, complexify. Machines are not simply interfaces of human interaction or facilitators of preexisting communicational flows. Apart from making communication possible, they enable flows, desires, investments. Machines automate production. From industrial capitalism to informational capitalism the overwhelming proliferation of machines facilitated economic development and provided the lifeblood of a system that depends on magnification, augmentation, acceleration and complexification. More so, if one thinks of the machine as the objectification of general social knowledge as Marx did, then the machine in its pre-actualized form exists as a social possibility, as a machine-to-be. One can speak then of a social machine which is a desiring machine, a potential machinic figuration of the thing-to-be. The social machine is a machine of values and meaning.     

The metaphor of the machine as an apparatus of production that modifies and augments perceived reality is used in order to refer to a particular type of a social machine of meaning, the ‘contemporary art machine’. Within social machines objects and subjects make themselves visible, designate through their physicality and communicability trajectories to potential directions.