machine subjectivity, 2010

one-channel video projection, 15 min, color, sound
 
 
This video reflects the search for a language, both visually and acoustically, apt to reflect a non-instrumentalizing relationship between subject and objects using images from different hand looms in Germany and Turkey, the video triggers ideas about the production of subjectivity and self-empowerment, demonstrated here in the working ethos of home weavers and their entrepreneurial risk that is based on improvisation.
 
The work is influenced by a reading of Félix Guattari’s theory of machine as proto-subjectivity. Guattari proposes that a new conceptualization of the machine as proto-subjective gives way to relationships that differ from the usual conditions of power and instrumentalization. Machines, for Guattari, can serve as interfaces between subjects and objects and as such have the potential for a revolution in intelligence, sensitivity and creativity, adding to a new sociability. Looking at the auto-poetic core of machines, we enter a non-discursive space: the space of rhythms--the economy of the image and the imaginary. It is a pathic understanding.
 
The still images in the video projection show generations of weaving machines,  machines that become stages, develop floccus, are subject to flux, interplay and chance inside their solid framework. The changing of images follows a rhythm that creates connections between the mechanic parts independently from their mechanic functions.
 
Spoken excerpts from Antonio Negri and Félix Guattari on social progress and existential re-appropriation are referenced in an ongoing conversation between two voices, while a third voice reports from her visit to the textile museum of Helmbrechts, center of the home weavers in the South of Germany.