Mark Selby
Machines At Play: The Attraction of Automation
Summary
Taking as its starting point the ubiquitous nature of automated technology, this research asks how play may be used in an antagonistic form against the regimentation of machines but, conversely, may also be employed to instrumentalise them. The work undertaken specifically focuses on how play (a quality considered here as intrinsic to human culture and nature following Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens) can expose issues of control, agency and authority within a technological context.
While automated machines have become increasingly complex over time (synchronous to the trickle-down availability of computing devices to the everyday consumer), the understanding of their function and the means through which they produce, represent or declare forms of ‘knowledge’ are today even more opaque. An automated machine—thought of here as being any set of infinitely repeatable, programmed procedures—raises anxiety as to the human condition. Machina ludens, the figure of the playing machine that I propose, takes this model a step further and uses ‘attractive’ effects to produce (what Huizinga terms) “false play” so as to hide the ramification of any social or political design by its engineer. Following Vilém Flusser and Bruno Latour’s notion of the “black box”, how then can an artist open up an automated machine and its script in order to declare this?
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There was an object with a grey dimmer switch.
It hummed, that grey box with its white plastic wheel for a switch. It was larger than the dial of a standard domestic switch, exaggerated like toys are—a cartoon control for a child. I remember that hum, not for its warmth, but for its danger; it was clearly the noise of an electrical imperfection and it felt as though that box might burst into flames at any moment. The box controlled the speed of a train, a model that was my father’s and his father’s before him. Looping around four panels that he had constructed from chipboard and brass screws, it was a modular set up that came out into the living room only when there was enough enthusiasm for the effort (or more often than not, required as a pacifier for boredom). Once up and running, it always disappointed; going only round and round in circles, the lack of decoration and constant breaking down meant its attractive affect was very temporary.
When not being watched, I would remove the four screws on the lid of that grey box, peer in and access the electrical circuit at work. This access to the object’s guts did not offer the clarity I expected. I remember coloured wires and a faint smell of hot dust while distinctly learning nothing of the physical operation in front of me; it revealed instead a desire for transgression, the undoing of an interface so that I could cross the limits of safety and—when the screws were back in—without anyone noticing. I don’t ever remember even disconnecting the electricity. Here then, despite the risk of a verbal and physical scolding, was ’play’; not through the expected model or the thrill of controlling the intended object of the game, but the risky archaeology of a machine that, bit by bit, might push the limits of my knowledge.
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Better With or Without
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A machine capable of rotating 360° and tilting on its vertical axis by ±30° is fixed in the space. Once turned on, the machine rotates to a random position, measuring the distance to the surface it faces before adjusting the zoom and focal length of its lens.
After a random period of time––generated by the computer—it repeats.
The machine is both demonstrating and learning; searching and projecting, testing and being tested. The projected image: the duochrome eye test, a test screen for focal optimisation and spherical correction asks for a subjective response to find a scientific answer. Trial and error.
Better with…
Better without…
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