Other mechanisms

"'OTHER MECHANISMS' points to a present moment when machines don't look much like machines. Many aren't even called machines. Heavy and greasy machinery is absent from the smooth surfaces of digital interfaces and the weightlessness of cloud computing. . . . . . Machines are part of the air we breathe, overseeing our lives and our bodies, from the way we communicate and consume to the way we trade and travel. Some are made of metal, but many others are made of rules or algorithms, which are infinitely more fluid and flexible. Some are objects or devices, but others are systems and infrastructures--a machine can be a thing as well as a method for organizing things. Objects yield to infrastructure. Work turns to management. Machines become mechanisms. The works in this exhibition reflect on what it could mean to contest the regime of the machine. They compromise its tools, misuse its technologies, reroute its engineering, complicate its measurements. These other mechanisms add detours or dead ends to circulation routes, or insert delinquent trajectories that create distortions over time. They are made of knots, blanks, and incompatible settings. They demand more from their 'users,' forgoing protocols of convenience and immediate intelligibility. They reinsert the awkwardness of the human body, with all of its irregularities and inefficiencies. . . . Art can't stop the machine--nothing can. The question is not whether or not to embrace the machine--it's too late for that--but how to complicate it by testing existing systems with impossible tools and elaborate protocols that misalign outputs from their inputs--