Ghosts in the Machine

The history of human evolution is the history of our relationship with machines. From the invention of the wheel to state-of-the-art smartphones, the few millennia of technological development in the world's recent history have been driven by advances in scientific discovery applied to everyday life. Art has embraced these changes — often preceded them —, exploring the relationship between people, machines, the surrounding universe and our vision of reality, and finding fresh stimuli and inspiration in our relationship with technology.

"The more impalpable and invisible, user-friendly and communicative the machines around us become, the more pressing is the need to reinvestigate the prehistory of our digital era. Examining how the image of the machine evolved in the twentieth century—especially after the fifties, when the mechanical paradigm began to be replaced by a digital one— is ever more critical. Amid the clanking of rusty engines, the twists and turns of pumps and pipes, or the first fantasies of integrated circuits, computers, and post-human machinery, might we find a key to unlocking the myths behind our smartphones and our society of images?"

These words by Massimiliano Gioni form the premise of Ghosts in the Machine, a recent exhibition at the New Museum, curated by Gioni with Gary Carrion-Murayari.

The exhibition has not been imagined as a systematic and chronological journey through the history of art but rather as a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities, a mass of reconstructed works and machines, research objects, paintings, scientific diagrams, projections and even some, albeit fragmentary, philological reproductions of the most significant past exhibition projects on the subject, from eras when clarifying the relationship between people and technology was at least as pressing as it is today.

From a selection of Op-Art and Arte Programmata works, featuring among others Getulio Alviani and Gianni Colombo; to Jacob Mohr's machines, designed to influence human thought; the imaginary eclipses of João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva; Jeff Koons's electrical appliances on an altar; the endless cause-and-effect reactions by Peter Fischli & David Weiss; and the studies to reproduce Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even — with his legendary bachelor machines —, Ghosts in the Machine is a mix of visions as abstract as they are concrete and alters our perception of the future — and the present.

This measured and coherent exhibition, as clear as a mathematical equation, does have its moments of spectacle, such as the reproduction of the machine that executes the condemned man by inscribing his crimes on his body, conjured up by Frank Kafka in his In the Penal Colony, and Stan VanDerBeek's Movie-Drome temple of the moving picture, a hemispherical room in which to immerse yourself in a never-ending repertoire of all that is human knowledge — the "Google images" of the 1960s. Another prophecy on the digital world comes from Richard Hamilton's Man, Machine and Motion: a maze of images in which visitors are invited to immerse themselves and lose their awareness.

Ghosts in the Machine is also a machine built by accumulation. A rich anthology of texts — presented as scans from the original editions — in the catalogue provides the theoretical means to find the reasons and consequences of a new, potential relationship with technology. Maria Cristina Didero