WE ARE A MACHINE

WE ARE A MACHINE is a collection of games and activities that explore our collective identity. Are we really all individuals or is that just an illusion to help the societal machine operate properly? What does it mean to be together as one being? By building mechanisms for us to explore our collective identity through creative production maybe we can come to a better understanding of our individuality.

Part One: THIS GAME MAKES ME FEEL LIKE A MACHINE

It would take 10 people one day to write the same amount as it takes 1 person in 10 days. There’s a mountain of books waiting to be written but they’re being held back while we decide who is the real genius. What happens if the book turns out to be a classic? Who will get the attribution of authorship?

This has always been the fatal obstacle with collective creativity. But the answer is simple. Let the machine that is us receive the accolade. This is the seed that corporate capital is born from, but it’s not the only fruit that it might bear. The technology of mechanized social structures as a productive device has been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution but is left almost exclusively for the production of financial profit. By using the same systems of abstraction, individuals may be freed from concerns of originality and authorship and revel in the lofty weightlessness of the collective body. We as the artist(s) will share whatever successes and failures our machine might bring, but only in so far as we might enjoy anyone else’s work, as readers, and the machine will inherit all the sovereignty and rights of the individual, for better or worse. For once in our creative lives, we as the maker will finally be reunited in the complete sense with our soul mates, the audience.

In a workshop that I gave with FutureFarmers at Pasadena City College on March 17, 2008 we implemented an experimental version of this system. The following schematic describes how the system was organized:


The following PDF attachments are the rules that each of the participants of the system were to follow to facilitate interoperability and the text that was produced in process:
writingmachine
seeds
products
Here are some pictures from that event:


Here are some pictures from a re-creation of the event at UCLA D|MA:


Part Two: 16 PEOPLE WRITE TO EACH OTHER BUT THINK THEY ARE WRITING TO A COMPUTER

Custom software that acts like a chat client was sent out to 16 selected participants. When the application is launched the participant is presented with a small collection of words and are asked to respond to the words with the first sentences that come to mind. Behind the scenes the software is busy filtering the response and uploading it to a weblog on the internet, and then retrieving the next response to show to the participant. Messages are filtered by subtracting the 300 most common words used in the English language. This filtered version of the entered text is used only to prompt the next participant while the untreated text is posted to the weblog in the order that it is received.

http://www.vimeo.com/1724934
The results can be seen at:
http://socialrecord.com
A copy of the book can be purchased at:
http://www.lulu.com/content/1465555