**Accepting the Machine: A Response by Liliane Lijn to Three Questions from** *Arts*

#### **Liliane Lijn**

Independent artist, 93 Vale Road, London N4 1TG, UK; liliane@lilianelijn.com

Received: 4 June 2018; Accepted: 6 June 2018; Published: 11 June 2018

**Abstract:** Celebrated techno-art pioneer Liliane Lijn—whose participation in the landmark 1970 London "Kinetics" exhibition at the newly opened Hayward Gallery was but a waypoint in a long and adventurous career, and whose work is represented in the collections of Bern's Kunstmuseum, MoMA, and Tate—has prepared this essay on the evolution of machine art in response to three questions from G.W. Smith and Juliette Bessette of *Arts*.

**Keywords:** art; technology; electric motor; kinetic art

#### **1. The Question of the Electric Motor**

#### *Arts:*

As you know, Ms. Lijn, the thesis of our special issue is that a society which has now found itself afloat in a sea of technology must look back at the work of the techno-artists of the 1950s and '60s with renewed attention, and what we would like to focus on in this conversation is the apparently unlikely subject of the *electric motor*. And we use the ironic term "apparently," because even in the 1950s and '60s, the electric motor was at the heart of our civilization, powering our pumps and elevators and ventilation systems, and at this point in history—2018—we are, in truth, on the verge of the "golden age" of the electric motor, which will do no less than save our planet by replacing the internal combustion engines in hundreds of millions of automobiles! Even more to the point vis-a-vis this conversation, however, is the fact that you are among the earlier members of the second wave of 20th-century artists (Mellor 2005) to have employed the electric motor in their work (Table 1), and apparently the first woman.

We must not forget, furthermore, that it was this second wave of artists who achieved for machine art its own first "golden age," albeit under the banner of kinetic art, culminating in the landmark *Time* and *Life* magazine articles of 1966 (*Time* 1966; Fincher 1966). Could you, therefore, Ms. Lijn, honor our readers by painting a picture, within this context, of your own use of electric motors in your historic 1962–65 series of "Poem Machines" (Figure 1)?

#### *LL:*

I should begin by stating that my *Poem Machines* were not the first works in which I used electric motors. From 1960 through 1963, I lived both in New York and in Paris, and, as is the case when one changes habitat, there comes with this constant movement a feeling of temporal discontinuity. I spent much of 1961 and 1962 in New York, and in 1961, I worked on a series of kinetic tableaux that I called *Reflection Tableaux* (1961), in which I used small electric motors to revolve Plexiglas cylinders on which I had injected acrylic lenses. These led to the more complex *Echo-Lights* (1962), for which I devised small projectors in which light passed through a turning lens illuminating acrylic lenses on the surface of thick Perspex blocks, creating reflections that appeared to double and triple themselves. In these early works, I imagined that I was capturing photons, particles of light.


**Table 1.** A provisional chronology of electric motor use by early- to mid-20th-century artists.

Living in Paris from late 1958, I was able to experience a wide range of early kinetic art, as well as optical and pop art. In each area, there were artists who used movement. I did see Duchamp's spinning bicycle wheel and quite a few Calders, although the latter used air currents to induce motion. I don't think I have ever seen a work of Gabo's that uses an electric motor, and at the time, I had only seen illustrations of Tatlin's works and László Moholy-Nagy's wonderful *Light-Space Modulator* in books. I was present at the 1959 opening of Jean Tinguely's "Drawing Machines" at the Iris Clert Gallery, and saw numerous Pol Bury slow-motion works and a number of Takis's exhibitions and events, such as his *Fire Works* sculptures, shown on the square of Saint-Germain-des-Près. Takis's *Fire Works* sculptures did not use electric motors; instead, he used the explosions of the fireworks to spin the tops of his *Signals*. In New York, I saw electric motors used in Robert Rauschenberg's works, and Tinguely's self-destructive *Homage to New York* at MoMA certainly had any number of motors in its complex and very humorous structure. Like other materials, electric motors were available and already used by

artists. I wasn't particularly drawn to their use by what I saw; that is, kinesis for and in itself did not particularly excite me.

**Figure 1.** *Get Rid of Government Time* by Liliane Lijn, 1962; frame modified in 1965. Letraset on painted metal drum, plastic, painted metal, motor, 29.5 cm × 38 cm × 30 cm. Words from a poem by Nazli Nour. Photographs by Richard Wilding (2014) and used by permission. Collection of Stephen Weiss.

I did not come from a particularly technical background. There were a number of artists in my family; aunts and cousins who were painters, my father's cousin Stefan Temerson was a filmmaker and both a writer and a publisher, another cousin was second violinist with the New York Philharmonic orchestra. My father had an import-export business of watches and was later one of the first agents for Japanese transistor radios and the earliest Walkmans, but he was more interested in design and had no idea how they worked.

As I said, my *Poem Machines* were not my first use of electric motors. I had always been fascinated by the movements of reflected light, and in the summer of 1960, on a boat with Takis from Venice to Greece, I was delighted by the droplets of water that formed on the porthole window of our cabin. The luminous drops of water would throw flares of light across the glass of the porthole as the air currents altered their form, new ones being splashed on the glass and then slowly or even quickly spread and erased. I wanted very much to try to create a work that would give the same sensation of luminosity and creation, evanescence, dissolution and renewal. Then, in the autumn, when I returned to New York, I found a way to work with acrylic monomer, a clear viscous liquid plastic that, at first, I splattered across a sheet of Perspex. Then I did the same using clear Perspex cylinders, painting the inside white. I wanted these to turn, to create a visual effect something like the water on the porthole. I think that may well have been the first time I used a small electric motor.

More interesting perhaps was the first time I had to take a motor apart. It was sometime in 1963. Takis and I were sharing the very small maid's room atelier on the sixth floor of a house in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. Takis was in New York and I had the studio to myself. I was preparing works for my first solo exhibition at La Librairie Anglaise on the Rue de Seine, and Takis's assistant Raymondos was helping me. I had designed a small projector with a turning lens to light the works I called *Echo-lights*. Raymondos was helping me make this, but for some reason, on that day he was not in a good mood. The small motor I was using did not work, and he started to take it apart. After a while, thinking that he would break the motor, I complained that he was too rough. This infuriated him, and dropping all the bits down on the workbench, he told me in his inarticulate French that if I didn't like the way he handled things, I could just do it myself. With this, he walked out. I found myself with a motor that was now just a pile of small gears and pins, all the inner workings that I had never really examined before. At first I despaired and cursed my own impatience, but then I started carefully looking at each bit and, as with a puzzle, began to get a sense of pleasure in discovering how each part functioned. Eventually, I put them all together and the motor worked again.

Most of my works in motion were spinning or rotating like planets; wind would have been possibly less reliable. Although in 1970, I designed *Whirling Wind Koan*, a huge outdoor wind-driven conical and slatted sculpture that would also supply a small town with electricity. I think the reason I used motors, as opposed to wind, in the *Poem Machines*, *Poemcons*, and *Liquid Reflections* (Figure 2) was because I needed precise RPMs (rotations per minute).

Most of the first motors I used were bought secondhand. My earliest *Poem Machines*, like *Young Universe* and *Get Rid of Government Time* (1962), rotated extremely fast, so fast that the poems, the words, became blurred vibrations. I found that very exciting. As to the subject of whether they were left running or were viewer-activated when first exhibited in 1963, I am not entirely sure, but I think that for the first show of the *Poem Machines* I had them continuously spinning. As I've said, I was very excited by the energy that emanated from these verbal vibrations. I also remember that Nazli Nour was at first upset that people couldn't read her poems.

However, not all the *Poem Machines* had high-speed motors. There were some that revolved slowly enough to allow the text to be read and some that allowed the viewer to alter the speed. Most of my works at the time were made using secondhand drive systems. I was just beginning to work with motors, and at the time, I was interested in interactions between the work and the viewer. In 1965, I did buy a number of new record turntables and used these for the Poemcons that I began to make at that time. Since these vinyl turntables had four speeds, by moving a small switch left or right, the viewer could change the speed of rotation and observe the effect of this change on the words. I felt I was looking at the sound of the poems, *seeing sound*, as I wrote in my *Poem Machine* manifesto in 1968. Using record-player turntables also seemed conceptually fitting, since they played the sounds that had been physically transcribed on the vinyl surfaces, discs that then spun, sounds encoded in their fine concentric circles.

I am not sure whether there was a mystique about motorized art in the 1960s. On the whole, I would say kinetic art was distrusted by curators and art dealers, with only a very few enterprising

gallerists, such as Denise René and Howard Wise, taking the bold and risky step of exhibiting art that was motorized. Movement implied change and disruption of the way things had been and were; demanded attention and care or maintenance. There was certainly a distinction between artists who created static works that depended on the movement of the viewer to create certain optical effects and artists who used mechanical means to introduce motion. The works of the former were usually spoken of as "op art" as opposed to the latter, "kinetic art." I don't think the term "machine art" was used, except perhaps by E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) in the US. I may be very wrong here, because I am not adept at cataloguing groups and movements. I have never much liked the "kinetic" moniker.

**Figure 2.** *Liquid Reflections*, one of a 1968 series by Liliane Lijn. Acrylic drum containing water, turntable and projector lamp, acrylic balls. Photo used by permission.

#### **2. An Unconsummated Marriage?**

#### *Arts:*

With thanks, Ms. Lijn, for this marvelous recreation of the artistic milieu of the 1960s, we hope now, with your continued help, to penetrate even more deeply into the 20th-century use of the motor for artistic purposes—and we will begin with Alexander Calder. With a degree in mechanical engineering, Calder was the first to create, in the early 1930s, an entire series of motorized sculptures—but he more or less abruptly broke off these experiments to pursue the wind-driven mobile. The noted techno-art historian Jack Burnham has explained this remarkable turnabout by reference to the *determinism* of the

machine (Burnham 1968)—that it must repeat, over and over, its series of movements—and thus the appeal to Calder of random wind currents; and indeed, when we look at the artists of your generation who began once again to employ the electric motor, we can see various stratagems for "softening" the relentless aspect of the machine. Tinguely, for example, built his motorized pieces from worn, discarded parts, and so there is no shortage of random movement; the more typical approach, as with Joël Stein, has been to depend on various optical effects; and even with your own work of the early 1960s, can we not say that the poetry aspect is to some extent a way of ameliorating the Sisyphean aspect of the machine? And if we accept this hypothesis—that machine artists have tended to focus, so to speak, on ways of "dressing up" the machine, or making it more "entertaining"—must we not also accept the corollary, that there has, as of yet, been no kinetic sculptor who has established a major reputation by building upon the native energy and precision and organization of the machine? Or, in other words, must we not accept the fact that the celebrated marriage between art and machine, said to have occurred at some point in the 20th century, has in truth never been consummated?

#### *LL:*

There is no point in "dressing up the machine." The machine may be "deterministic," but it is also a tool and not necessarily an end in itself. I can cite examples from different aspects of my own work to describe the way I have used or played with machines—not always motors—and, of course, here one would have to define the machine. I prefer to think of it in its largest and most open definition, as per Wikipedia: "A *machine* uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an intended action" (Wikipedia 2018).

My *Poem Machines* (1962) were named "machines" as a provocation of the elite glass tower of poetry. Machines were dirty, noisy, and related to both industry and manual work, in contrast to the intellectual. Machines were thought of in opposition to the organic, natural, emotional context of poetry. I like machines and value the innovative thought and creativity that has gone into inventing and making them. It is almost unnecessary to agree with Marcel Duchamp that a turbine is an object of beauty. It is often the precision of the machine that creates its beauty; it is an absolute dictate of function with no frills. Even tools made for injection-molding toothpaste caps can be beautiful objects. Well before using motors, I collected odd bits of machinery thinking I would use these in my work. But when I made *Poem Machines* (1962), I was not interested in beauty, I was interested in energy, the power latent in words.

Another aspect of a work of mine that I mentioned earlier, *Echo-Lights* (1962), used motors, in projectors that I designed and made, to rotate lenses. In that way, I enabled the reflections of tiny lens-shaped plastic drops that I had formed on seven- to nine-centimeter-thick blocks of Perspex to appear to split and double or triple themselves. The motor, like one's heart, was important in the creation of the work but was not the aim or focus of attention. In *Liquid Reflections* (1967–1968), made some years later in 1967, the machine or mechanism—motorized turntable, transformer, spotlight—is concealed beneath the water containing a Perspex disc or thin drum, which sits upon it and is rotated and lit by it. One might say that the machine gives the work its life, but in this work, it sets in motion a combination of natural forces, centrifugal and centripetal, with the important addition of angular momentum due to a slight altering of the level of the disc, and finally unplanned changes wrought by atmospheric pressure. These varied forces, some due to the motorized rotation of the disc and others nonmechanical, cause the two clear Perspex balls to slide at random across the surface of the turning disc in slowly changing patterns. There is also a small amount of water inside the disc that condenses into lens-like droplets, creating patterns of points of reflected light and shadows, a lunar landscape magnified inside the clear balls as they glide across the surface of the disc.

In the 1980s, I began to create works that represented female archetypes or goddesses. Apparitions of feminine power and inner energy, *Woman of War* (1986) and *Lady of the Wild Things* (1983) (Figure 3), are pure machine art come alive. They perform a six-minute drama that includes movement, sound, and light. They are interactive and automated. They both contain and are themselves machines. However, they do not appear to be machines; one could even say they do not appear "deterministic" or even repetitive, no more than a piece of theater or a film watched over and over might seem. They do not appear to be machines, because of their complexity and because I have given my human voice to the *Woman of War*. The *Lady of the Wild Things* listens to that voice and transforms the sound into light, 250 LEDs flickering in red and green through a feathery pair of wings made of steel and PVC fibers, responding to the volume and pitch of my recorded voice.

There are further surprises, a sense of unpredictability that, combined with complexity, transforms the machine into something more organic. In making these larger-than-life figures, I wanted to combine animal, plant, mineral, and machine, drawing together our mythic past with an imagined future.

**Figure 3.** *Conjunction of Opposites: Lady of the Wild Things and Woman of War* by Liliane Lijn, 1983–86. Mixed media, 400 cm × 800 cm × 400 cm. Photo used by permission.

#### **3. Looking to the Future**

#### *Arts:*

And now, in closing, let us look to the future, in respect to which we will find no shortage of young artists who will tell us that the classical machine is passé and that we should now be focused on computer art, virtual art, database art, and so on. There is, however, a strong argument to be made for the idea that art must continue its engagement with said machine: first, there can be no doubt that the computer is itself a machine, and no less deterministic in its own way than, say, a steam locomotive—and so if art has not yet consummated its relationship with the classical machine, what hope can there be at present for a truly thoroughgoing computer art? And second, there is a quite powerful symbiotic relationship between the computer and the classical machine, as per the automated factory, the robot, and so on; i.e., there will be more, rather than fewer, machines in our future—and so an art that has not yet come to terms with even the classical machine will find itself less and less relevant. As an artist who has been engaged with the machine since 1962, what is your response to these arguments? Is it time to lay down our wrenches and screwdrivers—or is there more to be done?

#### *LL:*

It is quite evident that machines are even more thoroughly a part of our environment than ever before: driverless cars, satellites in space, drones, and a couple of new tools for artists, laser-cutting and 3D printing, not to mention the near-future advent of quantum computing. I believe that there are no rules in art, and for that reason, predictions of what may be considered art in the future seem a bit spurious to me. However, I see a strong tendency for collaborative art, whether between artists or across disciplines. Scientists are more interested now in opening their doors to other disciples, artists, composers, philosophers. In the last year, I have been asked to be part of a group called Universe 2.0, initiated by Professor Pierre Binétruy of the Centre for Astro-Particle Physics in Paris, who sadly passed away last April. He believed that the recent detection of gravitational waves had begun a new paradigm in astronomy and human thought, and that this implied too great a change and could only be understood by an openness of thought, thus the necessity for cross-fertilization between disciplines.

In order to detect a minute deformation of space-time, on the order of 10−<sup>18</sup> m, that was generated by two colliding black holes nearly 1.3 billion light years away, scientists must use larger and larger arrays of machines and instruments. On my recent visit to the Virgo European Gravitational Observatory in Pisa (Figure 4), the sight of these extraordinary machines, these tools that men and women have made collaboratively to see far into space-time, made me feel that perhaps artists could also pool their individual creativity and imagination to visualize an infinite inner universe.

**Figure 4.** Aerial view of the Virgo European Gravity Observatory near Pisa, Italy. Photo courtesy Wikipedia (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VirgoDetectorAerialView.jpg) under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Burnham, Jack. 1968. *Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century*. New York: George Braziller, p. 234.

Fincher, Jack. 1966. Sculptures in Motion. *Life*, August 12, 40–45.

Mellor, David Alan. 2005. *Liliane Lijn: Works 1959–80*. Warwick: Mead Gallery, University of Warwick.

*Arts* **2018**, *7*, 21

*Time*. 1966. Styles: The Movement Movement. January 28, 66–69. Wikipedia. 2018. Machine. Available online: https:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine (accessed on 7 June 2018).

© 2018 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Essay* **Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine**

#### **Joseph Nechvatal**

Independent Artist, 93, Blvd Raspail, 75006 Paris, France; jnech@thing.net

Received: 28 September 2018; Accepted: 15 October 2018; Published: 18 October 2018

**Abstract:** This paper will examine the importance of Marcel Duchamp's *La Machine Célibataire (The Bachelor Machine)* on Art and Technology in the 20th and 21st centuries.

**Keywords:** art theory; bachelor machine; sexual politics; identity; gender studies; cultural studies; art; machine aesthetics; 20th century art history; generative art; post-conceptual art; Marcel Duchamp

#### **1. Bachelor Machines**

Dada's liberation of mechanamorphic sexual imagery has long been tarnished by the fact that male artists have historically been licensed to explore the rapid repetitions in lust and love, while women, for the most part, have inspired and represented them. Central to this naïvely gendered *démodé* dialogue is Marcel Duchamp's flamboyant and sexually subversive suggestion of onanistic *machine célibataires* (bachelor machines, Figure 1), with which he converted the principle of autoeroticism into one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of art.

**Figure 1.** *The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even)* by Marcel Duchamp, 1915–1923; 2nd version 1991–1992. Oil on lead sheet, lead wire, dust and varnish on broken glass plates, glass plates, aluminum foil, wood, steel, 277.5 cm × 175.9 cm. *Moderna Museet*, Stockholm. © succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris 2014 and used by permission.

In this paper, I view early Duchamp as essentially a provocative dandy: a self-conscious, self-constructed young man who dedicated himself to the resistance of convention by trafficking in elegant indifference and cool ascetic aloofness. Through his attitude of depersonalization, he freed himself of hackneyed artistic good 'taste', and in so doing deconstructed the concept of romantic sexual roles, replacing them with something much more frenetic, technological, phantasmagorical, and impersonal. I will additionally investigate the young bachelor Duchamp's mechanical sex machine, as its resistance to the needs of procreative insemination have moved both Art and Technology well beyond his male gaze towards complex and ambiguous hermaphrodite-like conceptions of bi- and pansexual cyborg bodies and a-sexual artificial life.

Indeed, imaginary pansexual bachelor machines will be theorized here as a philosophical space of transversal viral contamination obsessed with examining conceptual linkages, connectivity, and the intersection of genders. My contention is that cultural identity-politics practitioners and other gender theorists today would do well to put themselves in the fancy pants of algorithmic bisexual artificial lifeforms that ebb and flow between fluid understandings of masculine and feminine and the a-sexual viral (Parikka 2007). Such a sexually ambivalent art theory, based in sex farce, could be valuable to "all those interested in the question of dual-sexuality, whether in the domains of psychoanalysis, gay, or gender studies, the history of medicine or zoology, the history of ideas, or even the history of art" (Brisson 2002, p. xiii).

#### **2. Marcel Duchamp: The Large Glass**

Marcel Duchamp first made reference to the machine célibataire apparatus in 1913, when he wrote notes in preparation for *La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even)*, also known as *Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass)* (1915–1923), now permanently displayed in the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Though well-known, *The Large Glass*, made of two large panes of glass, seems inexhaustible in terms of its larger meaning and thus infinitely mysterious and useful (Henderson 2005). Conceiving it as an eroticized corpulent machine, Duchamp in his notes used such terms to describe its parts: 'sex cylinder', 'desire gear', 'reservoir of love gasoline', and 'general area of desire magneto'. Within the notes, Duchamp also identifies the specific bachelor machine's component parts as a water paddle, scissors, a chocolate grinder, a sledge, and nine malic molds. Technically, he employed a toy cannon to shoot paint-dipped matches at the glass ground of this work to determine the positions of these nine malic molds that were intended to represent nine job types, into which males are molded as men (all middle class or lower): a priest, a delivery man, a gendarme (military police), a cuirassier (cavalry soldier), a police officer, an undertaker, a go-fer sycophant, a busboy, and a railroad stationmaster.

Any prurience aroused by the title is not gratified by looking at either the bride or the bachelors, who are linked together, like a daisy chain of mechanical implements or schematic diagrams. They sit well below the looming bride (who scarcely looks naked and hardly looks female), hovering wasp-like in the upper panel, sealed off by a segmenting metal strip. Duchamp imagined in the lower Bachelor Apparatus section these nine bachelor bootlickers cock-blocked: trapped in a chain of repetitive emotional states that flutter between hope, desire, and fear.

I find this emotional chain (or cycle) prescient, as this fearful-hopeful-yearning state has now become emblematic of Art *writ large*, due to the rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) internet condition of art as spectacle, endlessly flowing in attention-seeking circularity (Debord 1976). Like the net, Duchamp's *Large Glass* as a mental masturbation machine contains the two great mythic spaces so often explored by western imagination: space that is rigid and forbidden—that requires a circular quest and return (for example, the trail of the Argonauts)—and the space of polymorphic confused borders, of strange affiliations, of magical spells, and of symbolic replacements (the labyrinth space of the Minotaur).

While waiting for the bride's gratifying attention, the sexually frustrated bachelors below are enacting an enigmatic fantasy drama of competing passion (or aggression), suggested by the phrase "stripped bare" in the full title of the piece. All the bachelors hope and strive to bed the bride, but fear of vague consequences holds them back in a state of frustration, which introduces the important psychosexual function of the chocolate grinder, that nearly dominates the Bachelor Apparatus zone. This important form was transferred to *The Large Glass* from Duchamp's delicious painting *Chocolate Grinder (No. 1)* (1913). The grinding machine in the Bachelor Apparatus area signifies how the bachelors, frustrated with their inability to mate with the bride machine, may achieve some sweet satisfaction by repeatedly sexually stimulating their own genital apparatus, thus demonstrating a sort of faux dual-sexuality that can be described as the "simultaneous or successive possession of both sexes by a single individual" (Brisson 2002, p. 1).

This feverish theme of onanistic dual-sexual circularity in *The Large Glass* presents us with a model of gender grandeur: a theoretical imaginative bisexual machine that functions independently of "the other", thereby pulling faux dual-sexual passion into a developmental logic of its own, leading to a transcendental infinite. It is here, in the faux dual-sexual self-pleasuring chocolate grinder, where I detect some spiritual implications of the nine male types, who Duchamp has virtualized and sprayed into their discrete zone of remote presence. Their endless faux dual-sexual self-pleasuring (that smoothly shrivels into asexuality or explodes into pansexuality) implies two polymorphic viewpoints: that of asexual and pansexual bachelor machines.

Crucial to the imaginative fantasy powers of a pansexual bachelor machine is the implementation of a theory of the variegated virtual (Shanken 1997). This theory assumes the existence of preposterous and imaginatively configured subjects able to ford human anthropocentric sexual frontiers. Duchamp's use of post-humanist chance in the making of his bachelor machine implies that the artist relinquishes, to a greater or lesser degree, the power to close down the final interpretation of a work, i.e., keeping it open to interpretation (Eco 1989), which facilitates all sort of imaginative and fluid mental processes in the viewer. Thus, for me, a spiritual implication of *The Large Glass* is the denial of sexual determinism in favor of the potency of apparent pansexual fluidity in circularity *ad infinitum*. This means an implicit refutation of the assumption that the 'neutral' body is always white and straight and masculine. Thus, the circular implication of faux dual-sexuality has directed my focus in theorizing and coding post-bachelor hermaphrodite, artificial life, and viral art projects as early as 1992 (Gruson 1993), as well as computer-robotic painting pansexual bachelor machine images (Lewis 2003), with Duchamp's male bachelor machine as starting point.

#### **3. Marcel Duchamp: The Bride**

The cold impersonality of technology and the heat of dual (or dueling) sex is a curious alliance. Prior to *The Large Glass*, Duchamp produced a few cherished images depicting mechanized sexuality. Among them the drawing *Vierge, No. 1 (Virgin No. 1)* (1912), and the paintings *Le Passage de la Vierge à la Mariée (The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride*) (1912) and *La Mariée (The Bride)* (1912, Figure 2). Intriguingly, he painted both of these the year he proclaimed the end of painting, the same year he visited an aeronautical exhibition with Fernand Léger as they were admiring an elegant airplane propeller. Particularly in the wonderful *Bride*, who appears as the bride in *The Large Glass*, the elaborateness of her repeatedly pumping machine gear suggests an excess of sexual bliss attainable through circular, auto-sexual, and faux bisexual autonomy. Such body politics contains an admixture of romantic ideals and auto-mechanical sensations, where the psyche may become lost in a throbbing spiral of labyrinthine extensions, duplications, and repetitions. Although arrived at by chance (twenty-five notes randomly picked from a hat), Duchamp's first musical endeavor, the 1913 *Musical Erratum: La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même* (for piano) (Duchamp 2008) makes the same circular point by stubbornly repeating only two up-and-down notes for the first 43 s. Listening to these masturbatory repetitions in *Musical Erratum* while contemplating the pumping mechanics of *The Bride* introduces a trance element into Duchamp's aesthetic and casts his bachelor machine into the dizzying

activities of the impersonal but ingenious dandy (Huysmans 1973). However, I also think of this pumping trance-state as Duchamp's definitive desire when he is in an uninhibited bachelor machine mode: a detached, depersonalized, and mystical state of being (Stace 1960).

**Figure 2.** *La Mariée (The Bride)* by Marcel Duchamp, 1912. Oil on canvas, 89.5 cm × 55.6 cm. *Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950*. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp and used by permission.

It is curiously true that this depersonalized dizzying circularity is comparable to how algorithms now run automatically behind the technological scene (Johnston 2008). Thrusting away in cellular automaton artificial life is something so astoundingly pregnant with auto-bachelor machine circularity that it excites and stimulates creativity, as I discovered with my cellular automaton-based *Computer Virus Project 2.0* (2002) (Nechvatal 2011, p. 252), a resultant series of pansexual paintings created in the early-2000s (Lewis 2003).

In art, the patriarchal construction of woman as other and the female body as object, though contested (Betterton 1996), is deeply rooted in the supposed duality (opposites) of the (two) sexes. Most feminist theory questions this patriarchal construction of sex and gender, suggesting that sex is expressed through a continuum, rather than as an opposing couplet based on heterosexist male/female polarities (Butler 2004). Accordingly, within dual-sexual hermaphroditic auto-bachelor machines, containments designed for womanhood/manhood are subverted by the mutable image of pansexuality. Gender here is theorized as an act of becoming. Consequently, art fails to sustain sex oppression in culture by ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other.

Going a step further, hermaphroditic-sexual bachelor machines are a provocation not only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality, but also to homosexual constructions of identity. I discovered this while working on my hermaphroditic painting series for the New York City exhibitions *ec-satyricOn* (2000), *vOluptuary: an algorithic hermaphornology* (2002), and *Real Time* (2004). For all three shows I melded images of the sex organs of both sexes into a chimera field of virtuality that went under viral attacks scripted in C++ as artificial life. The results yielded many quixotic transformations, where all sort of pan-sex orders arose (Nechvatal 2011, p. 246). But as digital bachelor machines are immaterial pure information spaces, it is neither surprising nor coincidental that the immense

perspective of algorithmic auto-bisexual bachelor machines requires a questioning of the legitimacy of common sexual organ arrangements and familiar forgone conclusions concerning theoretical issues around sexual politics, gender studies, and the farther-reaching heterogeneous philosophical critique of the cultural mechanisms of representation (Foucault 1970) that have preceded it.

Of course, Duchamp set the stage by countering bourgeois ideals of masculinity. Duchamp considered himself to be counter-type, *un artiste désœuvré* (an idle artist), after he temporarily abandoned the production of traditional art objects. While the 19th century dandy was a masculine figure, his masculinity had a lot in common with artificial and constructed femininity. Indeed, in late-19th century French culture, the dandy was often considered decadent and effeminate in a vague way that verged on the homosexual. Regardless, the travestying heterosexual Duchamp staged himself in bisexual dandy drag as Rrose Sélavy for a series of *femme fatale* photos done in 1921 by Man Ray. When read out loud pronouncing both "r"s, Rrose Sélavy can sound like *Eros, c'est la vie* (Eros is life). In an artwork called *Belle Haleine. Eau de voilette* (Beautiful Breath: Veil Water) (1921), Duchamp first incorporated his Sélavy drag portrait on the label of a perfume bottle, effecting a bisexual metamorphosis into a cross-dressed alter ego seemingly lost in the scent of gender-masked maneuvers. But what are some earlier dandy-era precedents of self-transcending pansexual bachelor machines *avant la lettre*?

#### **4. Raymond Roussel and Auguste Rodin**

Along with Guillaume Appollinaire, Francis Picabia, and Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia, Duchamp attended a 1912 performance of *Impressions d'Afrique (Impressions of Africa)*, a wacky play by Raymond Roussel based on his 1910 book of the same name (Roussel 2001), which was written according to formal constraints based on homonymic puns. This play was a revelatory intellectual experience for Duchamp, to the extent that he would credit it with helping inspire *The Large Glass* (Henderson 2005). Clearly, its punning delirium pushed Duchamp's bachelor machine idea towards celebrating exhaustive circularity and its effects of intransigent obliqueness and mechanical dizziness. For this reason, Duchamp's faux dual-sexual self-pleasuring grinding machine is always a potentially transgressive proposition, as regards to bourgeois ideals concerning the difference between the sexes.

Salient to this circular connection is Michel Foucault's analysis of Roussel's invention of dreamy language machines, which produced texts through repetitions and combination-permutations. Foucault explains how a machine-like logic provides Roussel's writing with a seemingly endless variety of textual combinations, flowing in grinding circular form. Roussel's technique of endless grinding lent itself to the creation of unforeseen, automatic, and spontaneous invention, which gives the reader a feeling of being pulled into an onanistic eternity. By grinding and grinding, and through his use of labyrinthine extensions, doublings, and duplications, Roussel transmits to the reader the sense of an altered, circular, and exalted state of mind (Foucault 1986). Foucault's revealing analysis of Roussel's final deliriousness book, *Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of My Books)* (Roussel 2005), contains and repeats all the mental-machines Roussel had formerly put into motion, and by doing so, evidencing the master-grinding-machine that produced his text-machines. Here I grasped the stylistic mood of grinding gamesmanship associated with Duchamp's bachelor machine—an extravagant, intricately hermetic, elaborate, and mechanical-morphism that is conceptually consistent with Duchamp's exuberant and preposterous faux dual-sexual desires. Like Duchamp's dazzling bachelor machine, Roussel's themes and procedures involved isolated and frustrated stereotypes that were reflected in his writing method, with its inextricable play of double images, repetitions, and impediments, all of which created a feeling of an altered, exalted, and orgasmic state of mind.

But I discovered another self-stimulating onanistic bachelor machine precedent in Auguste Rodin's well known sculpture *Le Monument à Balzac (The Monument to Balzac)* (1898, Figure 3). Duchamp's bachelor machine, like all bodies, is inscribed with the values and beliefs of the culture from which it emerged. As evidenced in Rodin's *Balzac, second nude study F* (1886, Figure 4), the sculptor

secretly formed an autoerotic bachelor machine model of artistic self-stimulation. The finished work that stands on boulevard Raspail (also at the Rodin Museum, at MoMA, and elsewhere) replicates the pose of the *Balzac, second nude study F* to a tee, with the cloak covering the busy bulge. The backward lean in this study is the definitive posture of the Balzac monument.

Rodin's objective for this bachelor machine was to depict a ballsy Balzac at the moment of conceiving the idea for a work of art through onanistic imaginative gazing. That Rodin chose to furtively depict Balzac as an onanist is far from ludicrous, as Balzac used masturbation (without climax) to intensify his writing sessions, drinking many cups of coffee, again masturbating just short of orgasm, halting, writing, and repeating, like a well-oiled machine.

**Figure 3.** *Monument to Balzac* by Auguste Rodin, 1898. Bronze, 282 cm × 122.5 cm × 104.2 cm. Photo by the author.

**Figure 4.** *Balzac, second nude study F* by Auguste Rodin, 1886 (detail). Bronze, 93.1 cm × 43.5 cm × 35 cm. *Musée Rodin*, Paris. Photo by the author.

#### *Arts* **2018**, *7*, 67

In his 1954 book, *The Bachelor Machines*, Michel Carrouges points out that all bachelor machines share the signification of such autoerotic circularity (Carrouges 1954). All bachelor machines are mental sex machines, the imaginary workings of which suffices to produce real movements of mind-body. Although curator Harald Szeemann revisited and expanded Carrouges's argument in a 1975 traveling exhibition, also entitled *The Bachelor Machines* (Clair and Szeemann 1975), he left out some historical Modern figures that I would like to add here before moving on to theorize the current complex pansexual bachelor machines of the mind.

#### **5. Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, André Masson and Oskar Schlemmer**

Gender-fluid bachelor machines are already detectable in some of Fernand Léger's earliest artworks. What particularly interests me about Léger is how his imagery enters the oily slipstream of the bisexual cyborg, where distinctions between sex, the body, and robotics blur in the density of speeding political networks (Terranova 2004). We see this in the best painting Léger ever made: his rich, velvety textured, pre-war composition, *La Noce (The Wedding)* (1912, Figure 5), completed the same year Duchamp painted *The Bride*.

**Figure 5.** *La Noce* by Fernand Léger, 1912. Oil on canvas, 206 cm × 257 cm. *Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris Musée National d'art Modern*, Paris. Donation of M. Alfred Flechtheim in 1937. Used by permission.

*The Wedding* is so jam-packed with crunchy cubist incident that it is difficult to decipher at first glance. It has a nonchalant, silky, falling feel to it. Like a fine, nuanced, and balanced wine, this painting exhibits the bachelor machine intensity without metallic heaviness. It draws the eye to the full rhythmic structure of the kaleidoscopic space where smaller, interlocking elements lure the gaze into deeply opulent repetitions of machine-like (and implicitly sexual) exploits. The painting's male and female couple fuse into gyrating repeats in a complex and cryptic way, lending the work a vivacious and sleek visual texture that is delightfully seductive. The couple and surrounding multitude procreate into a repetitive orgy-machine, pulling the mind into an infinite mechanical pan-logic that is almost transcendental. Their post-flesh machine unanimity is set flowing in jerks and spasms across the surface of the canvas.

Léger has imposed on gender here a vibrating restlessness of Rousselian proportions. Again we fall into a labyrinthine of repeats, extensions, and stutter doublings. In *The Wedding,* Léger paints the idea of gendered flesh undergoing a cascade of annihilation. Yet the composition's flickering staccato repetitions create the impression of a rolling bacchanalia, where human forms also transcend that annihilated fleshiness and extend themselves through motorized re-embodiment into a kind of pan-transubstantiation. With *The Wedding*, Léger seems to suggest that the glory of artificial life is to be found in the technological apparatus of mixed bodies, tumbling into a field of circuits (Weibel 1990). Likewise, in his painting *Le Cirque Medrano (The Medrano Circus)* (1918), exuberant performing figures are put through Léger's mechanical meat grinder and expelled into the hyperreal dominion of entertainment simulacrum.

Léger, though not himself a Dadaist, would, like the Dadaists, make much of the machine; unlike them, however, he would make little of sex farce. He did not mock sex as machinic the way Francis Picabia did during his machinist period, when he too blended a machine aesthetic with representations of the human-machine body, as in *Parade amoureuse (Love Parade)* (1917). Still, both artists paint the interface between sex and the machine.

Undoubtedly, when in his Dada tecnomorphic period, Picabia illuminated such spatialized sexual paradigms by mixing implied human bodies with mechanical schematics. Again, like in Léger's *The Wedding* and Duchamp's mental-mechanical sex machine, the sexual body is endowed with ecstatic transcendent capabilities through the endless repetitions of oiled machinery. So it is not surprising that Picabia, like Léger, was also a member of the *Section d'Or* (Golden Section) group that was associated with Marcel Duchamp and his brothers.

Like Duchamp and Picabia, Léger also distributed and blurred disparate body parts and mechanical elements in his paintings, in what looks to be a turbulent and haphazard fashion, challenging the 'humanist' conceptions of 'man', similar to Duchamp's man-mechanical approach. This is most evident in Léger's paintings of the mustachioed *Le mécanicien (The Mechanic)* (1918) and the *L'Homme à la pipe (Man with Pipe)* (1920), with their tin man-like volumes. In these two proto-robotic *tour de forces*, Léger clearly sets up Picabia-like tensions between the human narrative and the mechanical spectacle that points in the direction of neuro-computing wetware, bio-robotics, and all of the AI-charged automatization humming away in the space between the mechanic, the digital, and the organic. This humming is why these Modernist bachelor machines sing to us as a mythic oracle.

But the other great construct of tipsy bachelor machine automatization, and I think Léger's paramount work, features Kiki de Montparnasse. Léger co-directed her, with American film director Dudley Murphy, in their nourish flicker-film chef-d'oeuvre, *Ballet mécanique (Mechanical Ballet)* (1924, Figure 6), where Kiki is cast fluctuating between figuration and abstraction. *Mechanical Ballet* is a Dada masterpiece of early-experimental film, stringing together a reeling mechanic-mental river of sensations both flashy and frustratingly repetitive. Like Duchamp's bachelor machine, *The Large Glass*, which was declared definitively unfinished the year before the film was made, *Mechanical Ballet* is a bid at eliminating our sense of linier time. Through the construction of its repeats, the film gives me the fantastic feeling of prolongation into an erotic eternity.

*Mechanical Ballet*, much of it shot by Man Ray, smartly transmits an altered, exalted, and orgasmic state of mind that is perfectly complimented by George Antheil's noise music soundtrack: his 30 min long *Ballet mécanique (Mechanical Ballet)* (1924). This pummeling composition recalls the beginning of Duchamp's *Musical Erratum* for piano, and was originally conceived of as the musical accompaniment to the film, but due to length differences, eventually the filmmakers and composer chose to let their creations evolve separately (although the film credits always included Antheil). Nevertheless, Antheil's *Mechanical Ballet* premiered as concert music in Paris in 1926 and is majestic in and of itself. But when included in the film, as it now is, everything is permutated with a pulsating and flickering energy of go/stop/go/stop/go/stop/go—depicting a hyperactive current of techno machine forces on the body. The film, with an insistent flicker, is flush with discontinuous, fragmented,

and kaleidoscopic sensations that remind me of *The Wedding*. The screen pulsates with the hot energies of modern life and its dull repetitions.

*Mechanical Ballet* is a stunning spasmodic display of stutter-and-flicker-and-looped concentration, where relationships between the protoplasmic body and mechanical repeats invite meditation on the self-prosthesis of pansexual bachelor machines. In this flickering metamorphic ballet, the human body is at the center of traditional narrative subjectivity and again undone by a visual noise it cannot contain.

**Figure 6.** *Le Ballet mécanique* by Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, 1924 (two stills showing Kiki de Montparnasse). 19'50" 35 mm black & white film acquired 1997, inventory number AM 1997-F1388. *Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art modern*, Paris. © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Service de la documentation photographique du MNAM/Dist. RMN-GP Â© Adagp, Paris, 2017 and used by permission.

Made the same year as *Mechanical Ballet*, and relevant to auto-sexual bachelor machines, is the speeding, automatic, ritualistic, and revelatory mode of iconographic mark-making André Masson devised for *Automatic Drawing* (1924, Figure 7). In this jittery automatic drawing, a conflict or antagonism is set up between the 'feminine' litheness of curves and the 'male' hard angles. Up against the supple curves of a centered naked woman, aggressive lines cut through her like a knife. Slow looking reveals that the image calls to mind not only *Mechanical Ballet*, but Marcel Duchamp's *Nu descendant un escalier n*◦ *2 (Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2)* (1912). Beyond that, there is at work an automatic artistic method, which plays in the area of chaotic control/non-control, aiming towards constructing a capricious alliance that associates discourses of mechanic grinding with organic sexuality, an association that opens up both notions to mental connections that enlarge them. Here the coming cyborg woman of Fritz Lang's *Metropolis* (1927, Figure 8) and Donna Haraway (Haraway 1991) are already undone by overwhelming complex disturbances they cannot contain. That immersion into visual noisy disturbance (Nechvatal 2011) is essential to theorizing pansexual bachelor machines.

Masson's likewise intense *Dessin automatique (Automatic Drawing)* (1924–1925, Figure 9) strikes hard as an example of the divinatory practice of finding subconscious desires within vague cues. It is a neurotic network of bachelor machine lines that seem fluid but hectic, and, at times, staccato-like. In what seems to appear gradually is a standing, plugged-in burial casket, surrounded by phantasmagorical figure motifs that may include object parts merged with anatomical fragments typical of bachelor machines. The sum total gives off a feeling of occultist ferment and whimsy that alludes to potential auto-sexual bachelor machines.

**Figure 7.** *Automatic Drawing* by André Masson (1924). Ink on paper. Photo courtesy Galerie Natalie Seroussi and used by permission.

**Figure 8.** *Robot* by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff from Fritz Lang's film *Metropolis*, 1927. Copy created by the Louvre in 1994, painted resin, 190 cm × 74 cm × 59 cm. Cinémathèque française and used by permission.

**Figure 9.** *Automatic Drawing* by André Masson (1924–1925). Ink on colored paper. Photo courtesy Galerie Natalie Seroussi and used by permission.

Moreover, Oskar Schlemmer's paintings, drawings, choreography, and costume/set design flamboyantly depict the mechanic post-flesh. The coming asexual bachelor machine is most obvious when Schlemmer inserts his dancers into svelte geometric-based outfits and puts them to work, repeating spectacular sequenced motions machine-like in their repetitions (Figure 10). Again, we have entered the sexually ambivalent android realm.

**Figure 10.** *Danse des batons* by Oskar Schlemmer, 1928. © 2016 Oskar Schlemmer, Photo Archive C. Raman Schlemmer and used by permission.

Schlemmer theorized a serene, classical, and monumental approach to the human form based on the tensions between anthropological narratives and mechanical simulacrums, a tension typical of our period's electronic contours. His personal-impersonal amalgamate may have even predicted the spectacle of moral aridity we have come to expect within certain technological elites today. Schlemmer's flair for an asexual robotic approach in the automated figure embodies the theorized notion of aesthetic synthesis, which is intended to symbolize social synthesis within a benevolent emerging techno-society. As such, he attempted to depict the human form as pansexually spiritual through an abstract geometric

consistency of form, in service of a social totality. This idea led Schlemmer to create a proto-robotic pansexual art by virtue of a relocation of body/machine/consciousness, typical of the telematic embrace (Ascott 2003). Following this theoretical thread, as can be seen in his *Tanz Figurinen* sketchbook, Schlemmer points the mind towards churning pansexual bachelor machines: that is, cyborg sequencing merged with dematerialized flesh.

This is most obvious in Schlemmer's *Les signes de l'Homme (Dématérialisation) (Signs of Man (Dematerialization))* (1924/1986, Figure 11), where he raises the hyperreal issue of virtual dematerialization as interface between the human body and an abstracting, universalizing machinery. This is also obvious in his extremely delicately drawn lithograph *Figurenplan (Figure Plan)* (1919), which offers up an index of his costumes within a grid scenario. As with his choreography of repetitive simple motions, it is a telltale hint at what American Minimalism will successfully create in the 1970s with *Einstein on the Beach*, a four act opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. The opera features task-based, quasi-robotic choreography by Lucinda Childs, where dancers' bodies seem already spliced into a cybernetic-technomorphic circuit. This spliced sense is enhanced through the use of stiff repetition and a dismemberment of traditional narrative subjectivity. Here, the notion of the human body receives a strange, almost ecstatic, capability through trance-like, pansexual bachelor machine repetitions. In the brilliant costume *Le Ballet triadique, Figure de fil de fer, Série noire (The Triadic Ballet, Wire Figure, Black Series)* (1922)—made for his masterwork *The Triadic Ballet*—Schlemmer seems interested in moving robotic-like trans-crystalline bodies in space towards the formational effects of pansexual bachelor machines. He does so by constructing a space of imaginative accommodation for an intensely connected and immersed circulate (Nechvatal 2009), suggestive of biomorphic machines as an artistic source of self-transcendence.

**Figure 11.** *Les signes de l'Homme (Dématérialisation)* by Oskar Schlemmer, 1924/1986. © 2016 Oskar Schlemmer, Photo Archive C. Raman Schlemmer and used by permission.

#### **6. Pansexual Bachelor Machines and Oögenesis**

The conceptual pansexual bachelor machine theory I am sketching out while dropping historical precedents is re-configurative and trans-figurative in intention. Based on the capacity of connected electronic media's immeasurable intermixture, it nudges the current cultural context away from a biologically determinist reading of femininity and masculinity. The point is that within pansexual bachelor machines, all sexual signs are subject to boundless semiosis. This is to say that these signs are translatable into other signs of other sex arrangements, in order for art to articulate new sexual combinations.

Certainly, the male Modernist bachelor machine propositions mentioned above—sleek, coolly impersonal, and sexually confused—point towards needs to expand on the range of current slippery situations between fleshy embodiment and connective circumvention. By mixing abstracted bodies with mad mechanical repeating geometrics, Modernist bachelor machines suggest to me a pansexual robotic sensibility that at least temporarily refutes the sour feeling that we are living in an epoch of identity click-bait art fueled by predatory virtual capital. At least it challenges the imagination of many current cultural producers whose work has been looking dismally identity-reductive, parochial, and ethnocentric.

Privileging pangender conceptual machines suggests that we cannot be satisfied with identity-based vanity culture as art lauded by chatting memes that repeat and repeat themselves in search of bigger and bigger audiences. Clearly theorizing pansexual bachelor machines as a form of virtual art (Popper 2007) cracks open representational boundaries between human beings and other human beings and their digital machines. These leaky boundaries—or schematas—are the reason that ideas of phantasmagorical bachelor machines (or butch machines, if you like) are interesting *as art* today. The creation of mad mental sex machines has to do with an abiding conviction that cold code may be brought to a-life through the correct application of art and programming. While learning is a property almost exclusively ascribed to self-conscious living systems, AI-based a-life computer programs can now learn from past experiences and improve their operative functions to the point of surpassing human capabilities. Such post-human transcendence raises both aesthetic and ethical concerns for Art and Technology.

Much art, whether machine art or media art, has become almost indistinguishable from popular cultural commodities. Freaky a-life pansexual bachelor machines stand out as a reasonable alternative, a comparatively unpopular art approach that values farcical camp humor, transcendental metaphysics, conceptual construction, and clandestine mysticism over common human-centric assumptions for art as entertainment. The concept of a self-churning pangender machine suggests ways to think of life outside of the normal longwinded explanations and closer to Speculative Realism's anti-anthropomorphic transcendental materialism (Meillassoux 2008).

That is why, from beginning to end, I have appreciated avant-garde interests in an artistic-philosophical spirituality of bachelor machines (Clair and Szeemann 1975). The idea of mad a-life pansexual bachelor machines points art away from the humanist niceties of a human-centric world and towards non-humanist modes of pangender expression that is both flamboyantly poetic and technologically terse, evoking an aesthetic that is simultaneously alchemical, cosmic, ancient, and uncannily new as artificial life.

Undoubtedly, past art theories have been unequivocal in their urge towards closure, embellished with a sort of self-significance, and, often, fallacious universalism, which I wish to avoid. If what I have said about pansexual bachelor machine theory sounds metaphysical (or a parody of metaphysics), it is so only in so far as it is early pre-memory—which takes us to oögenesis.

Oögenesis is a moment of bisexual or a-sexual development of the pre-fertilized human egg cell where both female and male potentiality exists simultaneously. It is the place and time prior to the differentiation of the ovum into a cell capable to further develop and divide as fertilized by the male seed. This moment of sexual potentiality exemplifies the transcending pansexual bachelor machine concept brilliantly, and it suggests the truth that in life somethings can be both one thing and its opposite at the same time. Two opposites can exist simultaneously and not cancel each other out.

Such peacefully sustained conflict is the agent of transformation that can engage art ideas in a play of contradictory excess (Bataille 1985), encouraging pleasurable critical creativity (Drucker 1996). That is why I myself have made post-conceptual generative art based on an a-life viral model as connected to the subject of the hermaphrodite (Lewis 2003). After establishing a coded viral project in

1992 (Gruson 1993), I became interested, around the year 2000, in oögenesis (Nechvatal 2009, p. 66), a hermaphroditic-like pre-bifurcation moment in human development.

Pansexual bachelor machine theory investigates, through the imaginative powers of art, ways in which our sense of one-gendered self has a fluidity that defies spatial containment. As such, it opens gendered thought up to new spaces of malleable and combinatory sites, hence a perpetual multiplication of significance. Meaning in art (and in life) then advances by seeing more clearly into its own underlying assumptions of superfluity, by facing up to the radical implications of those oögenesis assumptions, and by purging itself from conventional ways of thinking by making no recourse to imagined exterior principles or *a priori* assumptions.

What is important in auto (or pan) sexual bachelor machines is their intentional enigma. They need to be obscure to the degree that their gender codes cannot be easily discerned (and politically used). This oögenesis obscurity (and mystery) is increasingly desirable in a world that has become progressively data-mined, identity-mapped, and sex preference quantified, in a straight-forward matter-of-fact way.

To be sure, each era has its own redundancies and compliances, so the chaotic excess of oögenesis bachelor machines works well with today's connected cravings for unlimited information and access. Which is as it should be: the definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the fields of seduction and social distribution. With pansexual bachelor machines hovering above common distinctions, conceptual transmission is already the endpoint. Fitting to today's reality of globalization-digitization, the non-linearity of pansexual oögenesis bachelor machines propose a space of visual hyper-thought where the encountering of contradictory realities is bound only by the next thought and driven by the last.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** The author would like to thank Jane Prophet, Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, Genesis P.-Orridge, Association pour l'Étude de Marcel Duchamp, Bill Seaman, Bradley Eros, L. Brandon Krall, Elena Filipovic, Juan Antonio Ramírez, and Divine for their additional inspiration during the writing of this essay. He also acknowledges the sagacious encouragement of Hrag Vartanian's *Hyperallergic* and especially thanks Yves Fall and Françoise Gaillard for graciously lending their bungalow on the Mediterranean Sea where the final writing ensued in August 2018.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflicts of interest.

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© 2018 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Essay* **The Mechanical Art of Laughter**

#### **Anaïs Rolez**

Art College of Nantes, 2, allée Frida Kahlo, 44000 Nantes, France; anais.rolez@beauxartsnantes.fr Received: 6 December 2018; Accepted: 19 December 2018; Published: 21 December 2018

**Abstract:** Our aesthetic experiences are today conditioned by machines, which operate at multiple levels: at the moment of conception of a work, at the moment of conservation and distribution of the work, and at the moment of its contemplation. For art today, it is no longer a theoretical question of asking whether the machine can act with freedom in the sense of a game that remains as of yet open-ended—or if humans themselves can still so act in a world entirely conditioned by technology—because the brute fact is that machines are becoming ever more autonomous, and humans ever more dependent upon them. For some artists, therefore, the ideas of autonomy and sacralization are best addressed, not in the posing of serious questions, but rather through the subversive activity of enticing the machine to reveal its comic nature—and wherein we discover, with Bergson, the essentially rigid and mechanical nature of the humorous.

**Keywords:** Henri Bergson; Collectif Obvious; comedy; Simone Giertz; humor; laughter; machine art; Niklas Roy; Sunspring; Jean Tinguely

#### **1. The Omnipresent Machine**

If one were to be allowed a somewhat impressionistic description of the role of the machine in modern culture, one might begin by noting that it is nearly everywhere, and especially in the production of sound and image, as with photography, cinema, video (considered as a distinct art), and television. The means of cultural production and distribution have long since been rationalized and made autonomous: images are produced, reproduced, and diffused through numerous mechanical, electronic, and algorithmic procedures. Images are in turn becoming less representation than artificially produced simulation. A relay of automated reproduction is set off: from literature to theatre to cinema to television, and back again to the printed page in the form of reviews, take offs, and send ups. At the center of it all is the machine in its role of institutionalized automatism, and operating at several levels: at the moment of preparation of a work, at the moment of conservation and distribution of the work, and at the moment of its contemplation. These devices can be understood as organs, as extensions of our senses, and human perception as a system, using models taken from cybernetics, and conceived of on the basis of computations, actions, and feedback loops.

Since the mid-20th century, in short, the automatic processing of information has brought about a major shift in the nature of the work of art; but even before then, the purely mechanical machine had become inseparable from our own aesthetic experiences, as with the sensation of speed and the rapid change of scenery when traveling by train, automobile, or airplane. Likewise, when considering the intimate emotional spaces in which the machine acts upon us, our current awe at witnessing, for example, the precision of the surgical robot (Ancarani 2012) is simply an addition to the emotions we have long felt in the presence of certain historically impressive machines. The machine has now given us the tools, furthermore, to experience phenomena inaccessible with our basic human senses. For instance, the phenomena of the behavior of certain materials in the experiments of the artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand (Domnitch and Gelfand 2018) would be completely unknown to us without the technology that allows us to see at such a level; technology is similarly essential in the sonification of electromagnetic activity (Kubisch 2003) or tidal flow (Eacott 2008); and the machines of Felix Luque-Sanchez even allow us to experience a sense of the infinite (Luque-Sanchez 2015). In a world composed of information, machines translate, transpose, code, decode, and transcode phenomenon on our behalf. Indeed, we can enter a universe in which everything is calculated—reference points, forces, illumination, structures, textures, behaviors—and where, lacking mass and without up or down, we can even pass through walls: a so-called 'virtual reality'.

#### **2. The Subversive Machine**

In October 2018, a series of murky but also compelling portraits in a style reminiscent of the 18th century—but generated almost entirely by computer—were offered for sale at Christie's by the Paris collective Obvious (Fautrel et al. 2018). The portraits were produced using the GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) technique developed by AI researcher Ian Goodfellow and his team of engineers at the University of Montreal, with human intervention limited to selecting in the first place the large set of existing portraits fed into the system and used by it as examples of the expected output. This marked the first offering of AI-generated art at a major auction house, and with the lead such work selling for \$432,500—this a piece entitled *Portrait of Edmond Belamy*, which was signed in the lower right corner with the equation guiding the entire process, as if by an artist with the charming name of *ming maxd Ex[log(D(x))] + Ez[log(1* − *(D(G(z)))]* (Elgammal 2018; Schneider 2018).

The work of this Paris collective has as one of its precedents the late 1950s *Méta-matics* of Jean Tinguely. These were painting machines, to be sure, but the paintings produced were an unpredictable result of the co-action between the device itself (with characteristically imprecise drive belts), the audience member's choice of colored marker, and the amount of time the sheet of paper was left exposed to the machine's scribblings. The source of whatever creativity that could be said to be involved was thus not obvious, and this was in fact where the real interest in the *Méta-matics* resided. While each drawing, moreover, was unique, they were not presented as legitimate works of art inasmuch as this would have undercut one of Tinquely's principle goals with the exercise: in 1959, Tachism was at the forefront of the Parisian art scene, and Tinguely wished to mock the subjective excesses and overly serious discourse of these artists. There was, as well, an implicit denunciation of over-consumption and commercialism:

The drawing machine needed to be cool, funny. The child playing with it had no problem at all, whether it was a work of art or not. And when it began to move, I really liked it, it built up to a certain speed where everything became ridiculous. It became burlesque.1

The Obvious collective, in turn, seems to be mocking the feeding frenzy which characterizes not only the speculative art market but also the community of technophiles; and there is also an inherently subversive quality in the hint that objects produced by artificial intelligence can take on some of the attributes of the ready-made.

In other words, we can trace here the evolution, over a period of sixty years (or more than one hundred years if we go back to Duchamp's 1913 *Bicycle Wheel*), of what must now be seen as an alternate artistic strategy—this in contrast to those previously mentioned artists who have embraced the possibilities provided by the machine—for dealing with the brute fact that machines are becoming ever more autonomous, and humans ever more dependent upon them: rather than posing theoretical questions as to whether the machine can act with freedom in the sense of a game that remains as of yet open-ended, or whether humans themselves can still so act in a world entirely conditioned by technology, there is an obvious potency in enticing the machine to reveal its subversive and/or comic nature.

Such an approach can even be placed in the service of a certain cynicism, as with the *Cloaca* series of ten works, dating from 1992, by Wim Delvoye (Regine 2018): huge, assembly line-like machines

<sup>1</sup> Tinguely as quoted in *Tinguely et le Mystère de la roue manquante* (Keller 1992). Thomas Thümena (2012) has not hesitated to point out the shabby quality of Tinguely's first kinetic and meta-matic reliefs and their associated joking, gag-like character.

which digested a carefully prepared mixture of ingredients in order to produce quite real-seeming feces (up to 80 kg of fecal material produced daily) as an example of technological development always more 'driven' (or, if you prefer, 'pushed'). The output of these systems was actually vacuum packed and sold to the public as a further commentary on our modern industrial economy, and with both scientists and chefs employed as consultants in order to optimize the overall process.

Artists have not lost their sense of humor. Far from falling in line behind a tendency towards monumentalization and stylization that one finds among the worshipers of science and technology, there is to be found a derision with respect to the monumental and its associated aesthetic claims. The machines of these artists continue to probe subjects which, though not serious, are very profound.

#### **3. Towards a Practice of Mechanical Subversion**

Some of these works seem to come straight out of Jacques Carelman's *Catalogue of Unfindable Objects* (Carelman 1997). Such is certainly the case with the work of Simone Giertz, who presents on *YouTube* and elsewhere (Giertz 2017) her nutty, do-it-yourself robotic creations. A prime example is the robot that serves breakfast (Giertz 2015). Very approximate both in form (it seems to be held together with tape) and action (the cereal is poured beside the bowl instead of in it, as is the milk), the articulated arm moves in a way that is seemingly deliberate (it identifies the objects to be manipulated, and makes appropriate gripping and tilting motions), but ultimately abrupt and clumsy (the spoon is not dipped quite low enough to actually reach into the bowl and so arrives empty, and only in the general vicinity of the mouth of the inventor, who must therefore stretch her head awkwardly to the side to meet it). The humor of the situation—a technically advanced object which is in fact pathetically inept—is further heightened by the apparent aplomb of its inventor, who continues throughout to read a book without glancing up from it. A similar stoicism is exploited in the video of a makeup machine that scribbles lipstick all over her face; and again, we must be reminded, albeit now it in robotic form, of the machines conceived of in the last century by Jean Tinguely.

In the same vein, *My little piece of privacy* by Niklas Roy (Roy 2010) centers on a curtain installed in a storefront window, and meant to prevent the occasional sidewalk passerby from looking in. It is much too small for the job, however—reminding one of the tiny handkerchiefs behind which exotic dancers pretend to hide their dainties—and so must be robotically shuttled back and forth along its curtain rod (this in fact accomplished with a quite sophisticated system consisting of a surveillance camera, computer, and servo drive mechanism) in order to attempt to continuously block the view of said occasional pedestrians as they pass in front of the window. The behavior of the curtain, in turn, evokes a reaction from them, who notice that its movement follows theirs. The interaction sometimes becomes playful, with the goal of the game being to move faster than the curtain, or to find strategies which will trip it up. Once again, there is a disparity: on the one hand, between a task calling for subtlety and discretion, and, on the other, the mechanical system to which it has been assigned. The curtain thus sometimes ends up being jerked back and forth in a frantic and hilarious manner—and we are thus reminded of the crucial connection that Bergson has made between mechanical rigidity and the comic [italics mine]:

Consequently, it is not his sudden change of attitude that raises a laugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change—his clumsiness, in fact. Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy, as a result, in fact, of rigidity or of momentum, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else. That is the reason of the man's fall, and also of the people's laughter.2

<sup>2</sup> From Henri Bergson's *Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic*, which was first published in French in 1900; the English translation here is from the 1911 Macmillan edition (Bergson 1911).

Or in summary, "the mechanical plastered onto the living", to use Bergson's phrase, is the true source of laughter.

The literary realm, likewise, has its examples of algorithmic subversion, and these are clearly Oulipian in spirit. Such is the case with the email novel *Rien n'est sans dire* (Nothing is without saying) by Jean-Pierre Balpe (Balpe 2001), and the 'Pipotron' by the collective Cyber!Campus (Cyber!Campus 1997), an automatic generator of random sentences, hollow phrases, and other gibberish which, at the end of a long day, one might use to plump up the introduction or conclusion of a serious report. Comic and ironic at the same time, the Pipotron produces results not unlike those of a certain all-knowing politician; and here again, the humor stems from the rigid and wooden quality of phrases that do fit into the discourse. More recently, director Oscar Sharp has given us his *Sunspring* (Sharp 2016), a short science-fiction film whose dialogue was automatically generated by an AI program of the type originally designed to predict, for example, what word one is attempting to type when sending a text message—but trained instead on the scripts of dozens of science fiction films. A movie so generated will of necessity remain utterly directionless and incoherent, and without depth and meaning; but the viewer is nonetheless surprised by some improbable effects. In the first place, one is shocked to discover the extent to which properly formatted but ultimately nonsensical language can arouse in us an anticipation of meaning; but one is also shocked to realize that we have become almost accustomed to such language via the formulaic speech of advertising and politics. Indeed, we are all but startled to discover that our own understanding has perhaps been in an automatic mode as well. In keeping with our theme, furthermore, this surprise ultimately turns into laughter—i.e., the *dipositif* <sup>3</sup> stands exposed—at the beautifully constructed gibberish we have been taking so seriously.

#### **4. Postscript: Unproductive Expenditure and the Free Laugh**

In his *The Notion of Expenditure* (Bataille 1933), Georges Bataille reminds us of the importance to society of what he calls "unproductive expenditure", and hence it is with the comic machines we have been examining here.

From their derision are born unstable images apt to trigger reflections on the meaning of existence. These so-called "useless" machines do not produce anything except laughter, dreams, and even dread. They are machines of theatrics, machines for communication. Yet they do not willingly admit their madness: as with any robot working in a world where order is disorder, they obey.

Decidedly unlike humans in their form and appearance, yet extremely close in their attitudes, paradoxes, complicity, and the humor they provoke, these mechanical works are sufficiently like us so that in a moment of recognition, the regard of each spectator can be turned back on itself. In this, they allow us to go beyond the appearance of the indivisible and the permanent in favor of a mobile, heterogeneous multiplicity of the identities we give to them.

These games thus allow for the appropriation of a symbolic space where the work of art is, in part, unencumbered by the weight of social constructs. In this sense, the artist builds a space of experimentation where the experiment feeds fictions, and these fictions in turn feed reality.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Ancarani, Yuri. 2012. *Da Vinci*. Regione Toscanna Film Commission. Available online: http://yuriancarani.com/ works/da-vinci/ (accessed on 17 June 2018).

<sup>3</sup> This, of course, is Foucault's term for the entire apparatus of control, articulated by him finally in his 1977 interview "The Confession of the Flesh" (Foucault 1980), but implicit in much of his social criticism.

*Arts* **2019**, *8*, 2


Thümena, Thomas. 2012. *Tinguely*. Zürich: Frenetic Film.

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