The culmination of such extreme growth, inevitably, was world war. There, machine efficiency was visible in all of its raw violence and horror: small bombs leveled entire city blocks, and millions were shipped, murdered, and burned with the push of a few of buttons. And the atom bomb, of course, was the mother of all efficient machines.
The culmination of such extreme growth, inevitably, was world war. There, machine efficiency was visible in all of its raw violence and horror: small bombs leveled entire city blocks, and millions were shipped, murdered, and burned with the push of a few of buttons. And the atom bomb, of course, was the mother of all efficient machines.
World War II would give a newfound prominence to those who, after Marx, sought to sound the alarm of what technology was doing to humankind. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) is an obvious example within the realm of popular culture, but philosophers and political theorists also found a receptive audience for their critiques: Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command(1948) located the problem of ethics within the effects of mechanization; Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning technology” (1949) pointed to his notion of the “gigantic;” Lewis Mumford’s art and Technics (1952) warned of the dehumanized and depersonalized nature of much of 20th-century life; Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society(1954) called the quest for efficiency antithetical to human freedom; and Herbert Marcuese’s One Dimensional Man (1964) described any man-whether communist or capitalist-as being nothing more than the technology’s evaluation of him.
In general terms, many of these critiques were related: market rationality has replaced the civic or social contract; citizens have turned into entrepreneurs; mathematical calculations are disguised as social norms; or, in the bluntest of terms, “the role of politics is the explain the economic decisions taken by the markets,” The result has been called the “quantified self,” which has transformed “affect into efficiency, emotion into accuracy, and intentions into predictability.” The concern, in the end, is that we risk being discard altogether, since the machine will consider us of limited use, perhaps even an unreliable nuisance. The regime of the machine is incompatible with, and potentially intolerant of, the irregularities, self-will, and recalcitrance of the human spirit. Ursula M. Franklin, a metallurgist, physicist, and Quaker-and heir to Ellul’s technological skepticism-would define technology as a mindset. What does that mind believe in? What does it value? What does it consider to be its responsibilities? To what standards does it hold itself? If “every tool shapes the hand,” then what is this mindset doing to us?
The culmination of such extreme growth, inevitably, was world war. There, machine efficiency was visible in all of its raw violence and horror: small bombs leveled entire city blocks, and millions were shipped, murdered, and burned with the push of a few of buttons. And the atom bomb, of course, was the mother of all efficient machines.
World War II would give a newfound prominence to those who, after Marx, sought to sound the alarm of what technology was doing to humankind. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) is an obvious example within the realm of popular culture, but philosophers and political theorists also found a receptive audience for their critiques: Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command(1948) located the problem of ethics within the effects of mechanization; Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” (1949) pointed to his notion of the “gigantic;” Lewis Mumford’s Art and Technics (1952) warned of the dehumanized and depersonalized nature of much of 20th-century life; Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society(1954) called the quest for efficiency antithetical to human freedom; and Herbert Marcuese’s One Dimensional Man (1964) described any man-whether communist or capitalist-as being nothing more than the technology’s evaluation of him.
In general terms, many of these critiques were related: market rationality has replaced the civic or social contract; citizens have turned into entrepreneurs; mathematical calculations are disguised as social norms; or, in the bluntest of terms, “the role of politics is the explain the economic decisions taken by the markets,” The result has been called the “quantified self,” which has transformed “affect into efficiency, emotion into accuracy, and intentions into predictability.” The concern, in the end, is that we risk being discard altogether, since the machine will consider us of limited use, perhaps even an unreliable nuisance. The regime of the machine is incompatible with, and potentially intolerant of, the irregularities, self-will, and recalcitrance of the human spirit. Ursula M. Franklin, a metallurgist, physicist, and Quaker-and heir to Ellul’s technological skepticism-would define technology as a mindset. What does that mind believe in? What does it value? What does it consider to be its responsibilities? To what standards does it hold itself? If “every tool shapes the hand,” then what is this mindset doing to us?
Artistsists have had a lot to say about all of this. Tools and technology, of course, have always played a role in determining what artists do and how they think, be it from the types of chisels used to cut stone and the advances in ways pigments are made to how the digital space of the Internet has transformed what it means to make an image or an object in the first place. In the context of industrialization, attitudes and approaches have varied: the Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19th century fought against the machine and sought to rescue traditional techniques, but then Modernism took over, consumed with an appetite for speed and progress, and driven to “make it new!” William Morris saw art as being socially useful, while James McNeill Whistler saw it as being essentially useless, made for its own sake. The Futurists loved the machine, and the Surrealists hated it. With Coffee Mill (1911), Marcel Duchamp realized that to represent a machine meant diagramming its mechanism: “it’s not one moment, it’s all the possibilities of the grinding machine.” By the middle of the 20th century, Jackson Pollock showed how distant art could be from the mechanical, while Andy Warhol proved how close it really is.
By the 1960s, as the machine was becoming less and less about steel and more and more about networks, machines becoming mechanisms-the first generation of conceptual artists began questioning the need for art to involve objects at all, and pushed away from materiality and toward systems, rules, and behaviors. It echoed a broader shift in emphasis from hardware to software: “it’s going to be raining tomorrow” is software, the artist Les Levine explained. “Images themselves are hardware. Information about those images is software.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several landmark exhibitions marked and historicized the ways the machine had been incorporated into works of art and into how artists thought about their works of art. In New York, the Museum of Modern Art’s The machine, as seen at the end of the mechanical age, curated by K. G. Pontus Hulten, echoed both the optimism and the pessimism about our relationship to machines over the course of the 20th century, with works by artists such as Lyonel Feininer, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Fernand Leger (on the “pro” side) and Rube Goldberg, Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, and Paul Klee (on the “con”). More nuanced were works that contained some of the many contradictions that characterize a modern relationship to the machine, by artists such as Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Bruno Munari, or Jean Tinguely, whose happily inefficient Rotozaza(1967), for example, was far more than a simple parody of a useless machine, but a suggestion that machine technology be taken out from under the ideological mandate of productivity and redirected to something less rational – perhaps more poetic-yet still mechanical. In the exhibition catalogue, Hulten called Rotozaza an “instead-of-war machine.”
The exhibition ended with works produced in collaboration with Experiments in Art and technology (E.A.T.), an organization that paired artists with engineers. 22 Across town at the Brooklyn Museum, E.A.T. put on a concurrent exhibition, Some More Beginnings, which sought to distance itself from MoMA's gears, wheels, and industrial machines and instead addressed a future filled with new types of (much thinner) machines-circuits, processors, and something called "software." In August 1968, a few short months before the two exhibitions in New York, the ICA London opened Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, curated by Jasia Reichardt.23 If computers could be programmed to run themselves, then images could exist with no human author, out of human control, and so the ICA exhibition featured mostly computer-generated images that had been programmed by scientists and engineers, since most artists still didn't own or have access to computers. In 1970, back in New York, the Jewish Museum opened Software, an exhibition that also brought together artists and scientists, once again refusing to make any distinction between the two. Works by Hans Haacke, David Antin, and Agnes Denes were shown alongside prototypes by the Urban Systems Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of technology. The guest curator, Jack Burnham, described the show's theme as "information processing systems and their devices," and introduced (to the art world, at least) the notion of software as referring to plans, rules, and procedures-not machines but their programs, not bodies but their behaviors.
By the early 1970s, armed with a computer's cybernetic circuits, the machine moved past mechanical objecthood and took on the abstract properties of a fully responsive nervous system. And now that artists were working with engineers and had gained access to their knowledge and equipment, figures such as Rauschenberg, Whitman, Yvonne Rainer, and John Cage, among many others, began participating in determining how machines might shape our future.
[ "Technology is a form of tool making (body extensions). Technology is not art-not invention. It is a simultaneous hope and hoax. It does not concern itself with the undefined, the inexplicable: it deals with the affirmation of its own making. Technology is what we do to the Black Panthers and the Vietnamese under the guise of advancement in a materialistic theology." ]
Each of these exhibitions took place during a moment of extraordinary political upheaval and protest, and yet remained almost entirely apolitical. They made no mention of the many war machines the US government was using to kill thousands of civilians in Vietnam at the very time they were on view. Even the newest or most contemporary works on view were often nothing more than interactive robotic sculptures-playful and entertaining gadgets by artists/inventors or the artist/engineer duos assembled by E.A.T. None sank their teeth into the much dirtier ways machines enabled and enforced mechanisms of injustice, exploitation, racism, and violence. In fact, in the concluding section of his catalogue essay for the MOMA show, Hultén stated that "technology is nothing but a tool, it is neutral." I couldn't disagree more.
To be fair, Hultén did include a warning. In his introductory essay, he wrote that "there is no doubt that if we are not to become the victims of what we ourselves produce, we must quickly attain a society based on other values than buying and selling," and stated his hopes that "mechanization will relieve man of all tasks that machines can perform." Hultén recognized that technology, in the context of capitalism, had the power to strip away all human values other than those rewarded by the marketplace. machines are great accelerators, and as such, they will expand and strengthen everything that fuels them. A capitalist economy that values and rewards profit will design mechanisms that accelerate and maximize profit-to such an extent and scale that they are able to minimize the impact and the relevance of other moral, ethical, or aesthetic values that have long been significant to communities or even governments.
While machines had been designed to relieve the human worker, they were not leading to a world where the worker needed to work less. If, say, a machine makes it possible for a factory workforce to produce the exact same amount of goods or products in a 30-hour week rather than in a 40-hour week, the workers would be able to take an extra day off and spend more time doing other leisurely or family-driven activities, without decreasing production levels. In theory, that was the idea: in 1930 the British economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that by 2030 we would be working 15 hours per week. In practice, it didn't turn out that way-a manager would keep the workforce at 40 hours per week, and with the help of the machinery, the factory would produce even more (and yield an even larger profit).
By the mid-1970s, Munari or Tinguely's "useless" machines were no longer a very subversive position for art and culture, so an energetic punk aesthetic and attitude switched to a more nihilistic search-and-destroy approach. The capitalist machine, however, was already morphing into its next phase-one that could absorb even works of art that hoped to break everything.
In 1971 President Nixon decided to end the Bretton Woods Agreement and abandon the gold exchange standard, which opened a space for a new economic paradigm-and one had been slowly brewing in Chicago since the 1950s.
Marginalized by the popularity of Keynesian economics, the economists of the Chicago School (Milton Friedman being the most well-known) had been developing an alternative socioeconomic vision that applied an entrepreneurial model to every space of human activity and relation. By considering everything in economic terms, their system could effectively evaluate all aspects of human life (health, education, culture) using the measurable metrics of the market. To be a "reasonable" or "rational" agent meant to be profit-oriented-rather than justice-oriented or even science-oriented. The Chicago School defined the ideal market as an efficient one, which meant that the system of prices would self-regulate as long as everyone accessed the same information at the same time-and acted rationally. With Homo sapiens redefined as Homo economicus, distinguishing between one's goals and economic interests became impossible. If there was a market for punk, it was perfectly reasonable (and profitable) to break things.
This economic worldview-neoliberalism-was adopted by the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher administrations in the 1980s, leading to a long period of deregulation, and by 1989 it was operating as the central paradigm for a globalized economy. Over the last few decades, an extraordinary number of economists, theorists, politicians, historians, and social activists have been critical of the neoliberal worldview, yet it remains lodged as the dominant model. Unsurprisingly, the critiques have been similar to those voiced after World War II: market rationality has replaced the civic or social contract; citizens have turned into entrepreneurs; mathematical calculations are disguised as social norms; and "to modernize, today, simply means to neoliberalize." French mathematician and philosopher Gilles Châtelet, in no uncertain terms, predicted that "from now on, the spacetime of the city will be a matter of the econometric management of the stock of skills per cubic meter per second" and described us as "thermostat-citizens" whose behavior only fluctuates according to whatever is most useful. The media theorist Franco "Bifo" Berardi calls this shift the collapse of the soul, because the soul-that nonrational and noneconomic part of the human spirit-is given no incentive to thrive and not much reason to exist at all. Instead, people are reduced to "packets of time" that a market can group and recombine according to its needs.
People are now the product, the data set, that is traded by machines. We are reduced to bits of human preferences (behavioral patterns, "friends," "likes") that are algorithmically exchanged to generate capital. For some, this is an exciting Second machine Age, where machines can fulfill a whole new set of tasks, 35 but for others, this is a Heideggerian New Gigantic, where machines exploit life instead of labor, where people are no longer the basis for measurement but are the media that is quantified, moved around, readjusted, and ultimately discarded.